NOTE: like with the essay Saturday about isotasy/glacial rebound being a myth, I don’t think the chemtrails idea has any merit whatsoever. Dr. Tim Ball points out more bad science – chemtrails, which are really just contrails, and which has a cult-like following much like some of the worst theories of global warming zealots – Anthony
“It occurred to me….” To avoid political correctness and say what they really think people say, let me play Devil’s Advocate.
Guest essay by Dr. Tim Ball
One minute people say government does too much, the next they demand action to resolve problems. Environmentalists demand government stop global warming, but oppose remedial actions like spreading iron filings on the oceans to increase uptake of CO2 or spraying chemicals into the atmosphere to create clouds to block sunlight and reduce global temperatures. Both actions are wrong because they constitute geo-engineering – governments playing God. The real problem is neither governments nor opponents know what is happening, but think they do, so demand action. Doing nothing is better if you don’t understand, contrary to the false claim of the precautionary principle. Environmental issues are a war and as Aeschylus said “In war truth is the first casualty”.
Figure 1 shows the different atmospheric layers each defined by temperature changes that reflect different chemistry.
The critical boundary is the Tropopause between the Troposphere, where 99% of the weather occurs, and the Stratosphere. It’s a very distinct boundary marking different density of gases and a change in temperature from a decrease with altitude to an increase. There are few gases thinly spread in the Stratosphere.
Figure 1 shows the Tropopause at 17 km. Actually, this varies considerably from Equator to Poles, mostly because of temperature. Seasonal temperatures also create differences. Variation at the Equator is 17 km (winter) to 19 km (summer). At the Poles it is 7km (winter) to 10 km (summer). Seasonal range is greater at the Poles because of greater seasonal temperature range.
Naturally, it is far more complicated. Understanding of some Troposphere dynamics are very recent. The Tropopause is not continuous, being broken by wind circulation patterns as Figure 2 shows.
PFJ =Polar Front Jet; STJ = SubTropical Jet
Twenty years ago my graduate class in Applied Climatology involved a briefing as a commercial pilot flying from Winnipeg to Vancouver. I realized most flights were partly in the lower Stratosphere. Since then these flights have increased because of better aircraft pressurization and more efficient engines in colder temperatures at higher altitudes.
I learned of changing flight patterns when flying search and rescue in northern and Arctic Canada. Flights increased significantly because of the end of the Cold War. with more flights over greater distances and different routes. The amount of traffic has increased significantly, especially the number of flights to Asia, most of which fly out of North America using “great circle” routes that brings them over western North America and Alaska or over the Pole.
Great circle routes take Asian bound aircraft across the general westerly flow of the upper level winds. This means condensation trails and high level clouds, especially Cirrus and contrails in the lower stratosphere are being dispersed in the same direction. Temperatures at these altitudes mean most of the gases condense directly to ice crystals. This makes them very visible, but also slow to dissipate.
A Contrail is exhaust from an aircraft engine cooling very rapidly below the dew point temperature and condensing into a visible trail of microscopic droplets. Through binoculars you can see the gap between the jet engine and the beginning of the trail. Earlier I mentioned that the gas constituency of the lower Stratosphere, where these planes fly, is different being much thinner and colder than in the upper Troposphere. Aircraft exhaust is a much higher percentage of total gas in the Stratosphere. This creates very different contrails, rates of dissipation and other factors. I mentioned that there are clouds in the lower Stratosphere called Noctilucent clouds. Here are some pictures of these clouds from Wikipedia:
Compare those images with these of Cirrus clouds also retrieved from Wikipedia.
Many confuse noctilucent clouds with chemtrails or contrails. Many confuse lower stratosphere contrails with chemtrails. It’s probably because most they want to see chemtrails. I’ve received many photos as evidence of chemtrails that are contrails, high cirrus or noctilucent events.
Noctilucent cloud occurrences are reportedly increasing. Is it possible the increase is because noctilucent clouds “ …are most commonly observed in the summer months at latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the equator.” These are the latitudes at which most flight increases have occurred. It is likely the increase in reported chemtrails are actually contrails from lower stratosphere flights.
There may be issues with flights in the stratosphere but nobody is really looking, possibly because the obvious solution is politically unattractive. Fuel consumption increases at lower altitudes. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn’t include the lower Stratosphere in their models. From the 2007 Science report:
“Due to the computational cost associated with the requirement of a well-resolved stratosphere, the models employed for the current assessment do not generally include the QBO.”
The QBO is linked with El Nino/La Nina. They, as well as ozone and clouds in the Stratosphere, are significant factors in Tropospheric weather. Some claim Stratospheric changes explain global temperatures better than IPCC and other models. Lu et al wrote:
All the observed, analytical and theoretical results presented lead to a convincing conclusion that both the CRE (cosmic-ray driven electron-induced-reaction) mechanism and the CFC-warming mechanism not only provide new fundamental understandings of the O3 hole and global climate change but have superior predictive capabilities, compared with the conventional models.
We need answers from science, free from politics. People need to sort out what actions and issues governments should be taking, but we can only do that if we understand the issues. Since we don’t, it is better to do nothing.
We must avoid the irresponsibility of the precautionary principle.
Related articles
- Chemtrails versus Contrails: Do Conspiracy Theories Make Sense? (cliffmass.blogspot.com)
- Weather control conspiracy theories: scientifically unjustifiable (washingtonpost.com)
I’m not convinced aviation exhaust plumes result in completely harmless condensation trails. They are effectively chemical trials from burning fuel and these chemicals and particles are introduced into a reaction sensitive area of the atmosphere. Just how much effect I don’t know but….
“The impact of aviation on the atmosphere is under way through the complex of interconnected processes. In present, there are no any standard limitations for the concentrations of gaseous and particulate pollutants emitted by aircraft engines at cruise altitudes. Nevertheless, it is believed that emissions of different gaseous species and aerosols by aviation engines are of reverence (relevance even) to the impact of aviation on atmospheric chemistry, ozone depletion, and climate ”
“Numerous model investigations showed that gaseous species, mainly NOx, HOx, COx, SOx, organics, emitted from aircraft engine as well as combustion and newly formed in the exhaust plume aerosols may influence significantly the total ozone concentration, cloudiness, Earth’s radiation budget, and climate.”
“The elements of NOx and HOx groups participate in the catalytic cycles of ozone destruction and the abundance of the species HNO2, HNO3, and NO2 as well as H2O can results in a broadening of the polar stratospheric cloud formation areas due to appearance of additional HNO3 and H2O in Polar Regions.”
“Soot particles are believed to be the most important aviation aerosols impacting contrail and cirrus cloud formation.”
“A number of modeling studies have demonstrated that the emission of sulfur oxides (SO2, SO3) and, especially, of sulfate aerosol particles can considerably affect the surface area of the sulfate stratospheric aerosol layer. Moreover, the emission of sulfate aerosol particles into the stratosphere caused by the fleet of supersonic high-speed civil transport aircraft, known as HSCTs, can result in ozone depletion.”
“The important precursors of volatile aerosol particles are CIs, (Chemi-ions) which form in the combustor during the combustion of hydrocarbon fuel with air via radical-radical and ion-molecular reactions . CIs may induce the nucleation of volatile aerosols and promote the growth of aerosols via ion-assisted coagulation. Another possible mechanism of CIs influence on volatile and nonvolatile (with soot core) particle formation is connected with ion-soot interaction. CIs may attach to soot particles, induce the charge, and as a consequence enhance the water uptake by soot particles”
http://ftp.rta.nato.int/public/PubFullText/RTO/EN/RTO-EN-AVT-150/EN-AVT-150-15.pdf
Anyway there are a lot of them up there!
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/09/18/see-what-more-than-6000-planes-flying-worldwide-at-one-time-looks-like/
Ray C says:
September 5, 2013 at 1:21 pm
“A number of modeling studies have demonstrated that the emission of sulfur oxides (SO2, SO3) and, especially, of sulfate aerosol particles can considerably affect the surface area of the sulfate stratospheric aerosol layer. Moreover, the emission of sulfate aerosol particles into the stratosphere caused by the fleet of supersonic high-speed civil transport aircraft, known as HSCTs, can result in ozone depletion.”
Interesting. Models have demonstrated…and what is this fleet of supersonic high-speed civil transport aircraft? This is old and mentions the 1999 IPCC report on aviation which was what triggered my general skepticism of AGW. There have been no supersonic transports for 10 years and I find it suspicious that 14 SSTs received so much criticism while the 30,000 odd supersonic military planes built during the same time received non at all. Thats sloppy. At the same time Concorde was the only plane that could fly supersonic without reheat, thereby burning a lot less fuel than anything else trying to do the same thing, including the Russian SST.
“On the other hand, a constant increase in the frequency of aircraft flights gives grounds to predict an increase in the mass concentration of aviation soot aerosols exactly at a height of 10 km in northern latitudes. At the specified index of soot emission 0.04 g/kg, in the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, the annual maximum increase in the mass concentration of soot particles can reach 0.6 ng/m3”
How is this possible if the atmosphere constantly turns over and mixes. Even the 1999 IPCC report admitted it was hard to differenciate emssions from aviation and other sources because the atmosphere is well mixed. Which leads to the next question. If somehow soot can be deposited at altitude and it stays there then what is the point of chemtrails because how is this ‘spraying’ going to reach the ground?
Also, Is it coincidental that this is written in Russia and only western aircraft are mentioned?
Deep thoughts by Elmer,
I say chemtrails you say contrails, whatever you call them, there is something going on up there and I’m pretty sure jets are doing it.
http://m4gw.com/i-say-chemtrails-you-say-contrails/
Stephen Skinner says:
September 5, 2013 at 2:24 pm
Thank you for the education, I’m no expert, obviously!!
It struck me reading the paper that the burning of fuel by aviation in general emits many chemicals and particles which otherwise would not be there, irrespective of speed and type. This seems to indicate an ongoing injection, from thousands of flights per day, of material that must interact with climatic processes. I did say I couldn’t quantify the effect.
I can only guess that the soot concentration might increase due to the wind speed in jet stream air flow acting like a river carrying sediment, as it does with other aerosol species,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009JD012360/abstract
releasing it when, as you say, the atmospheric circulation mixes.
“ If somehow soot can be deposited at altitude and it stays there then what is the point of chemtrails because how is this ‘spraying’ going to reach the ground?”
Soot from the combustion of fuel happens and jets fly at altitude where strong jet stream winds prevail, so yes it can be deposited at altitude and stay there long enough to interact with other chemicals and aerosols and radiation but in the end it goes the same way as most aerosols. As for chemtrails and ‘spraying’, I’m not saying it’s intentional just a consequence.
My post was to highlight the fact that combustion did not just result in water and carbon dioxide by-products but which produced other chemicals too which have the potential to interact with climatic processes and which can consequently influence the formation of aerosols and their growth to cloud condensation nuclei status.
I think we can do the maths about the pollution caused in the lower atmosphere, and petrol driven cars and vehicles must create pollution as well as surface uncontrolled coal fires. Planes well if they inject fuel they can cause pollution too. But military aircraft use a different fuel and it is too expensive for commercial airlines.
If contrails are really chemtrails deliberately laced with chemicals to somehow control or effect people, then what makes the “them” who put them there immune from their effects?
Gunga Din says:
> If contrails are really chemtrails deliberately laced with chemicals to somehow control or effect people, then what makes the “them” who put them there immune from their effects?
“They” are already “under influence” and are enjoying it. Now we can all pile in for free!
“””””…..richard verney says:
September 4, 2013 at 3:41 am
george e. smith says:
September 3, 2013 at 9:58 pm
//////////////////
No naturally produced hydro carbon is pure in the sense that it only results in a combination of CO, CO2 and H2O upon burning.
To give you some insight into the specification of jet fuels, have a look at this http://www.exxonmobil.com/AviationGlobal/Files/WorldJetFuelSpecifications2005.pdf
If you look at the specification tests, you will get an impression of what chemicals are released upon burning. Of course, not everything is tested, merely items which may be of concern to the user……”””””
Well I don’t doubt what you say for a minute. BUT
The whole idea of putting a fuel into an internal combustion engine, and incinerating it, is simply to heat the engine working fluid (air), and just incidently adding additional exhaust mass to the stream.
And since carrying such fuel up with you is expensive, it is normal to employ combustion processes that are quite chemically efficient in producing heat energy from the chemical stored energy. Full combustion of Hydrogen, and carbon, are the most cost effective ways of doing that.
So yes I am sure a million varieties of atoms or molecules can be found in the air stream behind a high performance aero-plane engine; but if it isn’t mostly (like 97%) H2O or CO2, I would like to sell that airline’s stock short. Maybe you can build in additional molecular energy, such as with acetylene for fuel for example.
Ray C says:
September 5, 2013 at 4:43 pm
Stephen Skinner says:
September 5, 2013 at 2:24 pm
Thank you for the education, I’m no expert, obviously!!
OK. I take your point and I don’t disagree that there are other chemicals emitted besides water vapor. I also don’t disagree that pollution or human activity can affect the weather as this is well documented with things like rain following the Friday commute or snow downwind of cities etc. The trouble with some of the conclusions that are drawn is that they are without scale or proportion. In this case it means all attention is focused on a transport t that consumes 2% to 3% of all the worlds oil and is made out to be the biggest problem. What kind of maths is that? And as george e. smith points out above the engines have to produce energy in the most efficient way so there is only so much other additives that can be added. The number of registered airliners in the world is still below 20,000. Meanwhile the number road vehicles has passed 1,000,000,000,000! So why focus on aviation? What are the additives in unleaded petrol and diesel?
_Jim say from previous thread:
September 3, 2013 at 8:15 am
michaelwiseguy says September 2, 2013 at 6:38 pm
“I changed the meme from “****trail” to “Geo-Engineering” in the blogosphere …
Yeah, we know. Still carrying no weight (BTW, how’s the wx down there in Mom’s cellar?)”
The home I bought in 2009 taking advantage of the housing bubble bust and paid cash for, a 2006 2,000sf luxury home under air is paid off and no mortgage. How are you?
Question; Why do US fighter jets leave smoke trails to their location and Russian jets don’t? That doesn’t look too stealthy to me and gives away their location. Not a very bright defense strategy if you ask me.
File:Mig-29s intercepeted by F-15s – DF-ST-90-05759.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mig-29s_intercepeted_by_F-15s_-_DF-ST-90-05759.jpg
Undeniable evidence of chemtrails in the lower troposphere. The Guvmints dunit.
The tic tac toe contrail I saw that made me question my normal skepticism of everything… was made with a military jet that looked like an old phantom jet. Prob had nothing to do with the weather. More likely creating cloud cover to hide troop movements etc. It produced a nice silvery haze.
Stephen Skinner says:
September 5, 2013 at 12:18 pm
Myrrh says:
September 4, 2013 at 7:02 pm
http://www.globalresearch.ca/atmospheric-geoengineering-weather-manipulation-contrails-and-chemtrails
The term Chemtrail is pejorative and the various examples in the above link or the other links do not make a good case for contrails that are persistent being nefarious.
Shrug, I gave a link in my first post to what the British government had done in this sorry history of the industrial/military’s psychopathic complex .., the history of this can also be traced by the patents taken out.
We can see for ourselves through the auspices of blogs such a these how easy it has been to corrupt all the once great science institutes and universities now producing AGW scaremongering to order, and goverments have fallen into line with scams. Wishful thinking does not change the fact that those in positions of power do not actually give a d*mn about the rest of us, if you are content to continually find excuses for them by regurgitating their “conspiracy” meme, that it up to you, but the information is out there..
http://chemtrails.cc/2011/07/02/new-world-order-chemtrails-olgacom-connection-explained/
“In the past, contrails dissipated quickly, and didn’t turn into a persistent blanket of haze. How many days have you watched clear skies turned solid gray by chemtrails?”
To suggest as some do that the high altitude persistent contrails are some kind of plot or whatever is absurd. There are just too many people who either fly the planes, who maintain planes, who are passengers, who load the planes, who fuel the planes, who direct the planes, who manage the planes, who just watch the planes for someone not to notice something a bit more tangible than what amounts to a gut feeling.
The ones I have seen are not high altitude, not in any civilian plane routes and not crop spraying.
I used to be a plane spotter when I was a kid and although that may not be a great thing to admit I was pretty good at it, but then so were all the others I met doing the same thing. So I have seen persistent vapor trails and intermittent all along the way. I’ve seen airliners holding over Bournemouth on their way into Heathrow when all the other stacks were full. They left race track vapor trails in the sky that persisted. We all had air-band radios and knew what each plane was, at what height and what they were wanting to do. Others had air-band that could listen to Military so not much was missed and it was fairly competitive to know it all. Among the many sights was seeing air to air refueling with the tankers holding over head and holding perfect position describing a race track while the vapor trail would be dragged out by the air mass leaving a kind of corkscrew shape vapor trail.
After 9/11 it was disappointing hearing the conspiracy rubbish said about the aircraft from people who have no clue about aviation or are self publicists or delusional. And so it is with this subject. So I’ve deliberately been watching the sky and planes for decades and been fortunate enough to have flown in many also. With the ‘evidence’ that is supposedly going to open my eyes I haven’t seen anything that is not known or new or in any way convincing.
I came across this video but still there are those who say it’s fake.
Out of interest I looked up Project Cumulus and do you honestly think that cloud seeding 3 days before a heavy down burst is related? And the seeding wasn’t even in the same area.
I’ve looked up the ExxonMobil fuel specification and it provides no chemical compositions, so stop waving that around like it proves anything. However, I am aware of the composition of jet fuels. They are predominantly blends of alkanes (straight-chain hydrocarbons) with small percentages of alkenes, aromatics, and olefins, all of them carbon-hydrogen compounds. They burn to CO2 (and a little CO, can’t be helped) and H2O. Some other stuff comes along for the ride, but get over it. We get NOx from lightning, SO2 and SO3 from volcanic emissions, and soot (once called carbon black, and now nicknambed Black Carbon, as though it were a pirate captain) from forest fires. Odd metals? Just think of how much vaporized meteorite you must have inhaled in your lifetime. Strictly out of this world.
Look, you can go crazy by looking at a dustball with a microscope. All this phobia and paranoia about contrails and “chemtrails” comes down to suppositious speculation by those who have no education on the actual subject matter and therefore are reduced to “it could be…” arguments, when they have no idea of what could be, or be not.
(Don’t get me started on aerofuel dumping by jet airliners near airports. I live under a flight approach/departure path and there have been some days when it reeks of kerosene. But there’s no conspiracy, just environmental obtuseness.)