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WillowOne's Positions

Chemtrails

My Positions

  1. Commercial aircraft emit condensation trails (contrails), formed when water vapour in the engine exhaust freezes into ice crystals in the cold, humid air at high altitude.
  2. Persistent contrails can linger and spread for hours, depending on the temperature and humidity of the air they form in. Whether a contrail persists or vanishes depends on the atmosphere, not on what the aircraft is carrying.
  3. There is no secret programme of atmospheric spraying.

Rejected Positions

Secret spraying programmes

  • Claim: Aircraft are secretly spraying chemicals ("chemtrails") for population control, weather modification, mind control, or covert geoengineering.
  • Basis: Grid patterns in the sky, trails that linger while others vanish, anecdotes from alleged whistle-blowers, and the existence of real but public geoengineering research.
  • Reason for rejection: No credible evidence. Contrail persistence is well understood meteorologically and has been since the 1940s; photographs of persistent contrails over Europe during the Second World War predate every claimed start date for the programme. The grid patterns are the air corridors. Samples of soil and water presented as evidence have never shown anything inconsistent with normal background levels of aluminium, barium, and strontium, which are common crustal elements. A 2016 survey of 77 atmospheric chemists and geochemists (Shearer et al.) found that 76 saw no evidence of a secret spraying programme, and the one dissenter cited only an unusually high level of atmospheric barium in one remote area. The programme would also require the complicity of every airline, every ground crew, and every pilot, none of whom has ever come forward with anything verifiable.

Contrails never used to persist

  • Claim: In the past, contrails disappeared quickly; persistent ones are new.
  • Basis: Memory.
  • Reason for rejection: Persistent contrails are documented in photographs, films, and scientific papers from the 1940s onwards. What has changed is the volume of air traffic, which makes them more visible, and the existence of the internet, which makes it easier to find others who share a mistaken memory (Confirmation Bias).

Sources

  • Shearer, C., West, M., Caldeira, K., and Davis, S. J., "Quantifying expert consensus against the existence of a secret, large-scale atmospheric spraying program", Environmental Research Letters 11 (2016)
    https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/8/084011
  • Metabunk: Contrail science, a sceptic resource maintained by Mick West, co-author of the above
    https://www.metabunk.org/
  • Ulrich Schumann, "On conditions for contrail formation from aircraft exhausts", Meteorologische Zeitschrift 5 (1996), the standard account of the physics

Also see