'Chemtrails' not real, say atmospheric science experts | Hacker News Reader

'Chemtrails' not real, say atmospheric science experts

sciencedaily.com

31 pointsaburan2869 comments

The idea of chemtrails is appealing to so many people because it's a way to express outrage toward the elites or upper echelons in society.

The theories are always a bit vaporous (like the chemtrails themselves), but I think it's stemming from an honest, genuine sense of frustration that one is being cheated or manipulated by a system that doesn't represent them. Chemtrails give a head to this boogeyman.

Those theorists are quite irrational, but what I find most ridiculous about a lot of them is not the theories themselves, but the idea that they have the ability to actually fight back.

Sensationalists like Alex Jones assert crazy ideas such as the government tainting our tap water to perform mass mind control and yet at the same time spread this message that they can resist against the upcoming "New World Order." With chemtrails specifically, on YouTube, you'll find videos of people spraying vinegar bottles outside when they see airplane contrails outside, believing it to be some sort of deterrent against their effects. If I believed that the government was capable of shit like super-effective mind control and all that other shit, I'd pretty much believe there's no hope for the world and recline to live the rest of my life in a bunker somewhere.

This. If the government is really that omnipresent and controlling in our lives, are they really going to let some blogger who knows the Truth run amok and post it everywhere?

Yes siree, this government is capable of faking the Moon landing, concealing the existence of aliens / lizard people, and executing 9/11 to invade Iraq, but they are powerless against some random dickhead with a laptop who spotted the holes in the Official Story that this omnipotent cabal just couldn't cover up. Riiight.

Not this. "The government" is just groups of people. Some groups, such as the NSA, certainly do have the ability to be close to omniscient (or as much as it matters here). Their motto is "Total Information Awareness" for crying out loud!

Didn't you ever read Brave New World? You don't publicly kill the Truth-knowing bloggers. You drown them out with by a million distractions. See also: Mao's Hundred Flowers campaign.

I'm not going to argue every stupid conspiracy theory that anyone can name...but I don't need to. There are plenty of actual conspiracy facts that should be sufficient to convince anybody that this kind of shit actually happens. COINTELPRO, Operation Mockingbird and MK Ultra to name a few.

The modern "skeptic" gets it all wrong - they don't question anything and come to conclusions way too quickly. That's because they're not actually skeptics, they're just afraid of getting out of their mental comfort zone.

I have to clarify: them knowing and proliferating the 'truth' is one thing, whereas the idea that they can actually do something about it is what I'm really getting at. They paint a pessimistic picture of the world that's at odds with the idea that somehow they can band together somehow and fix it.

The counter argument, of course, is that by 'removing' / silencing said conspiracist it would be proof they were right all along.

Yeah, the interesting thing about conspiracy is that they're almost always self inconsistent: they believe in government/ elite having "super power", and yet also incompetent enough to cause fuck up that would require the existence of said conspiracy to cover things up.

This is probably a different way of expressing the same thing, but I think what is salient to people is that there isn't anything to be done about these kinds of conspiracies. It unleashes a satisfying chemical cocktail in the brain of outrage, fear, and the sense that something "serious" is going on.

And unless you're being asked to do something trivial like spray the air with vinegar or line your wallet with aluminum foil, generally the conspiracy is not accompanied by any obvious call to action that might bring on feelings of tedium and responsibility. All the entertainment value, none of the responsibility.

I think this is pretty much exactly right. It's also tough to accept that the world is a messy place with a lot of loose ends that will never be tied. Religion used to 'make sense' of the what and why for a lot of people. But when you don't have that, and you don't want to think we are all just the result of a huge amount of luck, conspiracy theory gives you something to believe in.

Much like religion it's also next to impossible to argue against, because you're arguing against belief and not reason. You can show someone a thousand pieces of evidence and they'll say "that's what they want you to believe". But a single piece of 'evidence' in the opposite direction, however spurious, is enough to yield a thousand "I told you so / I was right all along" comments.

With chemtrails, for instance - you can point out the science as much as you like, but as soon a believer reads something like the cloud seeding over Asia [1] or the germ war testing off the UK [2], you might as well give up. Similarly with pretty much any other conspiracy theory.

[1] http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/malaysia-and-indone... [2] http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/apr/21/uk.medicalsc...

In my experience it's just plain ignorance. If you know nothing at all about condensation and combustion chemistry and atmospheric properties, the claim that those white lines in the sky are mind-altering chemicals is just as believable as the claim that it's water created by burning fuel. If the former claim is the first one you encounter, it's easy to just accept it.

I never took the conspiracy seriously but I was decently surprised by the number of contrails visible in the sky on a clear day during my visits to the Northeast of USA. I understand it was probably a due to a combination of climate (my visits all happened to be in Winter) and the sheer density of commercial flights in that airspace, however the observation did make me feel a little empathy for those people who buy into conspiracy theories since the trails can appear very much unnatural and menancing.

Well...powering heavier-than-air flying machines by burning dead dinosaurs is about as unnatural as it gets. Civilization and all that ;)

Edit: someone seems to think that unnatural = wrong? On the Internet - a place that is so un-natural that it doesn't even physically exist? What irony.

Some planes still use leaded fuel which presumably fall closest to the ground in poorer parts of the country because in many cities airports are built where land is cheapest. Certainly not the same as chemtrails but I have wondered what kind of health effects come as a result.

Children living close to the airport serving leaded avgas were found to have a small but tangible increase in blood lead levels. General aviation itself has been on the decline for the past few decades and alternative fuel seems to be finally getting approved at last, so the problem seems to be a well managed one.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230438/

The problem is that these conspiracy theories started to attract believers that there was global geoengineering occurring and some even started to think that this "geo-engineering" was to mitigate climate change. That kind of craziness needed to be debunked along time ago

Interesting point of view. thanks for sharing

Think about the metaphor: an invisible cloud of poison being sprayed from far above us and descending over the entire population to make us sick and control our minds.

There is such a thing but it is dispersed through radio, TV, and the Internet, not airplaines. It's particularly thick during an election year.

The chemtrail people are nuts. I have some experience with them from my NASA sounding rocket days.

Some sounding rocket missions do release chemicals, including lithium, into the upper atmosphere to study how high-altitude winds behave. That lithium, by the way is a different form than you'll find in psychoactive medications and a very small amount is released anyway.

But many chemtrail people believe that every sounding rocket mission includes chemical releases. Some were very upset about one mission I worked, which had no releasables at all. It was an underflight calibration of the EVE instrument on SDO, so all we were doing was staring at the sun for about 10 minutes. But no, we must have been hiding something, because we were sinister and evil.

Aside:

I often wonder what might happen when someone in one group (the chemtrail people) are recruited into the other group (the rocketeers in this case), to work and help in some way. The other direction might involve a skilled researcher helping the chemtrailers to do actual research.

I realize that it's probably hard to find someone from the first group who could make a contribution to the second group, and be willing to pitch in, but there must be someone.

There was an article in the NYT today about Representative Mike Coffman (R) in Colorado. His district was redistricted from the conservative people who elected him before, to 20% Latino with completely different worldviews. Coffman has since changed his professed views on some issues, he says because he's worked with the new set of people.

Political motivations aside, I think this is generally true. It's hard to demonize someone when you have to (get to?) look them in the eye every day and cooperate on a common goal. And it's easy to demonize a group if you avoid their company.

What's a sounding rocket?

Sounding is an old nautical term meaning "to measure something". You may have heard/read the expression "sound the depths", describing the process of seeing how deep the water under the keel of a sailing vessel is. That's the origin of the term.

Sounding rockets are rockets launched for scientific research purposes. NASA has the most robust Sounding Rocket program, but there are others out there.

Your typical NASA sounding rocket has two or three motor stages and can send a ~1000 lb payload to an altitude of about 280 miles, with about 10 minutes of time above 62 miles (the official demarcation between 99.99% of Earth's atmosphere and space). These are not orbital missions -- you go up and you come back down in the space of 20 to 30 minutes or so.

Science objectives include things like observing comets, the composition of the interstellar medium, the dynamics of the Sun, trying to find direct evidence of dark matter, understanding the dynamics of the ionosphere, wind currents in the upper levels of the atmosphere, and many more. For only $1 - $6 million USD per mission, a sounding rocket is a relatively cheap way to do some science in space, and the science payoffs have been huge.

"Caldeira said. "I felt it was important to definitively show what real experts in contrails and aerosols think. We might not convince die-hard believers that their beloved secret spraying program is just a paranoid fantasy, but hopefully their friends will accept the facts.""

I doubt they will convince any conspiracy theorists. Often, the opposite occurs, i.e. 'the backfire effect': when they are approached with factual evidence, they end up feeling more strongly about their views than before, despite however wrong they may be.

Usually quoting a combination of other conspiracies that turned out to be true, and the 'first they ignore you, then they laugh at you' cliche, like somehow those things add credence to their story.

Carl Sagan's 'Demon Haunted World' book from the 1990s is a fascinating read on how the world is obsessed with conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.

They recognize that. From the abstract of the linked article:

Our goal is not to sway those already convinced that there is a secret, large-scale spraying program—who often reject counter-evidence as further proof of their theories—but rather to establish a source of objective science that can inform public discourse.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/8/084011

Given the inherent implausibility of a massive global conspiracy that has such obvious effects but no coherent explanation of... anything... it seems to me that it would be more useful to study why and how people come to believe in these things.

The problem is in people's heads, not the sky.

I agree, the problem is in the heads of the people who blindly trust everything they are told. Why is it so outrageous to assume that chemtrails might be a covert experiment to manipulate climate (or has some other purpose)? I'm not saying that it is, but is it outrageous to doubt official narratives? Since when is that scientific?

Doubt is reasonable, there's no problem here. Unquestioned belief in "common sense" and what authority figures say is not. A lot of people have a lot to gain by leading the public to believe certain things. Isn't it too naive to assume that you are always being told the truth, when some stakes are so high?

Why is it so outrageous to assume that chemtrails might be a covert experiment to manipulate climate (or has some other purpose)? I'm not saying that it is, but is it outrageous to doubt official narratives?

If it were a single national airline, or even a subset of airlines, then maybe there would be cause for concern. But, a global conspiracy involving airlines, private airplanes, multiple governments, and tens of thousands of employees? That is patently ridiculous. Has anything on that scale ever been kept secret for long?

Manhattan project[0]

It may fail your 'for so long test' - could you define how 'so long ' is?

0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

I first heard of chemtrails in the 1990s, so 20 years.

As your link points out, "By 1943, it was clear that the Soviet Union was attempting to penetrate the project". That was a year after the project started. http://www.mphpa.org/history/espionage lists "eight major spies who revealed secrets of the Manhattan Project." It wasn't a secret from the Soviets for very long.

John W. Raper published an article about Los Alamos in the Cleveland Press in 1944: 'Forbidden City - Uncle Sam’s Mystery Town Directed by “2nd Einstein”'. http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/09/20/worst-manhattan-pr... . That was two years after the project started.

It was an open secret in D.C. It did, after all, require a huge number of people and money. As http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/29/narratives-of-manh... points out, the mystique of secrecy around the project is different than the actual secrecy. Quoting it:

> "In the 1940s there was something of a small industry of articles, books, and clichés regarding how secret the atomic bomb was kept. Of course, the irony is… it wasn’t really kept all that well, if you consider “keeping the secret” to involve “not letting the Soviet Union know pretty much everything about the atomic bomb.” (Which was, according to General Groves, one of the goals.)"

So, the Manhattan project was secret for about two years, under its own operational goals of what "secrecy" meant.

It was public to the world by 1945, after the bombs were first used, so no more than a few years of secrecy under that standard.

The Soviet atomic bomb was in 1949, so still less than 10 years.

Manhattan project was circumscribed to one country on one place and didn't involved a worldwide collaboration between almost all the airlines

Wikipedia disagrees in the second sentence of the link.

I don't care about these theories because there's nothing much I can do about them. However, I see plenty of so-called "skeptics" that don't question anything and they're always ready to just swallow the official story without even putting much thought into it.

Anyway - who said it has to be "all airlines"? Does it have to be 1 vs all? Couldn't it just be some percentage?

In Operation Mockingbird [1], the CIA found that infiltrating just 25% of media outlets was enough to sway public opinion. That's the type of operation that is obviously still ongoing too.

The extent of NSA surveillance was known to thousands, if not tens of thousands of people before Edward Snowden clued the general public in.

It's not outrageous to take the idea seriously. It is outrageous to believe it stridently without doing any research. If one reads about contrails, one finds a simple explanation for them which matches all observation. Reading the history, one will discover that, for example, they were a real problem for Allied bombers attacking Germany, which sort of implies that they aren't voluntary.

No major flight paths over me - the variation in number of planes flying daily is interesting - no contrails == blue sky. Some days 10+ planes before noon - then cloudy. Doesn't matter what time of year or day of week. Just my observations.

Contrails don't always form. It depends on the temperature and humidity at altitude. It's entirely reasonable that there would be a correlation between contrails and weather, since contrails formation is heavily dependent on weather.

Perhaps it is outrageous believing in a conspiracy where almost all the airlines in the world are part of it without having a single leak

Sorry replied to wrong comment.

How about the possibility that these scientists would rather believe such a conspiracy does not exist? After all, we have a lot of people ignoring the severity of global warming for the very reason that it's heavy burden to bear to live with one's eyes opened to the true extent of reality. Scientists are not necessarily self-aware, even though that is our ideal or definition of a true scientist.

This book explores the topic of why people believe weird things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_People_Believe_Weird_Thing...

"The survey results show that 76 of the 77 participating scientists said they had not encountered evidence of a secret spraying program"

Hang on...

Yes, really curious what the 77th one said.

I quickly arrived at the conclusion chemtrails had to be bullshit when I first heard of it in the 90s. But it's amusing bullshit nonetheless.

Probably just a crank. Scientists can believe in crazy conspiracies too.

The upvote triangle is proof that the Illuminati exist!

> "We wanted to establish a scientific record on the topic of secret atmospheric spraying programs for the benefit of those in the public who haven't made up their minds," said Steven Davis of UC Irvine. "The experts we surveyed resoundingly rejected contrail photographs and test results as evidence of a large-scale atmospheric conspiracy."

Not that I disagree with their expert opinions, but this is not a scientific record. This is not a hypothesis with reproducible experiments that prove or disprove the hypothesis. This is the aggregate opinion of many highly-educated people.

To be fair to them, a scientific record is in many ways just the aggregate of the agreements of the practitioners of [insert experimental / theoretical discipline here] who agree that a particular set of data and theories seem to be well-formed. So, scientific record is an aggregate opinion, backed by data. Sometimes the data are experiments, but these experiments require peer validation, or else any old crackpot wcould have their theories accepted. Other times the scientific consensus is less-well-backed by experiement (String theory anyone?) sometimes correctly, sometimes not. This is how induction works!

I see an awful lot of derision of "conspiracy theorists" but very little actual discussion about the known factors that play in this conversation. First of all, lets state the fact that the very term conspiracy theorist was part of a post public non-acceptance of the Warren report program by the CIA to silence and ridicule the reports critics by labelling them. Then lets understand that this same technique is being used today but they have higly evolved their propoganda.

I'm one of HNs resident "conspiracy theorists", but I also highly value logical and rational thinking and evidence/citations in thos theories. The people I talk to don't think that every line in the sky is a chemtrail, rather, they are concerned and geoengineering and its unforseen side effect consequences, and dont trust those in power to be either competent or non malicious.

To then lump all the people concerned about this and to only specifically discredit chemtrails but not talk about that bigger picture is fine, but what isnt is for everyone to start ridiculing conspiracy theorists as if they are all one crazy irrational monolithic group. Great discrediting technique, but not good for intellectual discussion focused on finding truth or educating people.

I especially dont like all the people taking this chance to wax one or two sentences poetic about just how irrational theorists are, suddenly shifting and not even referencing the subject matter presented. (on a similar note, I think Hanlons razor, often invoked by those doing the ridiculing, is actually a logical fallacy on its face).

Now, to play a little devils advocate, heres a youtube link that is interesting. Notice how he doesnt say this is happening, just that he is interested in this tech. Please ignore the sensational title and the horrible videos attached by association.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfH5_BiaP8Y

I'm surprised to see this article in 2016. I thought chemtrails were debunked decades ago.

YouTube videos make it true and it is a topic of discussion among people in small towns. The proof is all bogus, doesn't matter; They believe that the flights are in a grid, so I show them with apps that what they are actually watching are documented commercial flights of people travelling overhead. There just happens to be many such flights. There is no convincing against the will, at this point someone will need to invent a conspiracy that created the chemtrail conspiracy for it to be believed. Such a waste of time, try to avoid.

There has been a resurgence. General rejection of science and rational thought. Strong cross-over with those who Believe that Wifi causes cancer, vaccines cause autism, GM food will... do something bad, it's all a conspiracy.

Complete rubbish of course, it's the blue aliens from Gliese 667C who control the cabal. And HN of course.

They were never debunked because they were never really "bunked" to begin with. It has always been an extreme fringe theory with zero real support. I have no idea why they found it worthwhile to correct.

There are people that still believe the Earth is flat. You will never, ever, change the minds of these believers.

The Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe.

'The survey results show that 76 of the 77 participating scientists said they had not encountered evidence of a secret spraying program'

I just want to know what the 77th said!

Am I the only one to detect some sleight of hand at work here? How can "the experts" "resoundingly reject" the existence of a secret program? Surely, by definition, they would know nothing about its existence if it is SECRET?!?

As you can see, it is the widespread governmental secretiveness that provides the fertile ground for such "theories".

> 76 of the 77 participating scientists said they had not encountered evidence of a secret spraying program,

Have they been looking for evidence? If not this study is pretty worthless.

> The survey results show that 76 of the 77 participating scientists said they had not encountered evidence of a secret spraying program, and agree that the alleged evidence cited by the individuals who believe that atmospheric spraying is occurring could be explained through other factors, such as typical airplane contrail formation and poor data sampling.

Whatever so called chemtrails are, pretty much anybody honest would have to admit that this really isn't any kind of new science or information that really proves anything one way or the other.

What about the 77th guy? I'd love to hear what he had to say...!

"76 out of 77 scientists had not encountered evidence"? Lol. What's that one guys evidence? I want to hear about that. I bet the researchers were like... REALLY dude!? C'mon! Props to them for still sticking to their data.

Deleted comment

They're not necessarily the same people.

But, but, water is a dangerous chemical, which has been used for societal control forever!

Reply with a self addressed envelope to receive your free tinfoil trilby.

Indeed sir, I'm glad you share the wider concern. There has long been established (and denied by the establishment) that there is an undeniable link between consumption of this 'dangerous chemical' and death in humans. Conspiracy if there ever was one!

The numerous cockpit Chemtrail toggle switches are worth stockpiling for when you come across crackpots.

In other news, 76 of 77 atmospheric science experts continue to receive access to government grants and facilities by touting the company line.

Give this a listen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1eVTy0bBCg&t=115

Its a NASA scientist Dr. Douglas Rowland at the minimum admitting geo-engineering and that there are different types of "chemtrails" and that they have dumped lithium into the atmosphere.

No, he is not admitting geoengineering or chemtrails being what you think chemtrails are

better to read Snopes on the issue http://www.snopes.com/nasa-lithium-chemtrails-conspiracy/

Maybe of interest as well is this talk by Kristen Meghan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_P5KWSXZF4

Down vote me into oblivion but at least give these talks an opportunity before doing so.

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