They're real ... but they're not real sinister ... and they're not chemtrails caused by flying Pigwidgeons, either.
The parts of the atmosphere where the jets cruise -- the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere -- have been changed by AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) like everything else. According to many studies and observations, this part of the atmosphere has become
colder, which has also been picked up by the "skeptics" keen on "debunking" AGW.
So it should surprise no one that in the mid 1990s, people who were paying attention to the weather noticed that jet contrails (short for
vapor condensation trails -- the verbose term for them) were becoming more prominently visible. The non-sinister explanation is that when warm vapor hits extremely cold, dry air, at low ambient pressure, the droplets turn into ice crystals -- snow -- right away. The colder and more rarified the air, the faster it happens, and the better-formed the snowflake. The addition of burned fossil (jet) fuel can impart its own visual "fingerprint".
As with the idea of world-wide aerosol spraying, there is no cadre of certified Peers to Review this explanation, so the "skeptics" could just as easily jump on it, but I'm confident that it satisfies the criteria for theorizing set forth by those same Peers. The idea can be tested, it's based on previous, simple, and well-known observations, and invokes no deliberate human tampering with the weather -- and errors in results are attributed to the theory and/or the theorist, not the phenomenon! (I.e., I could be wrong. It has certainly happened before!)
And, also, I do not claim the idea as specifically "mine". That water vapor can quickly and dramatically freeze into ice at low temperatures and pressures is not a new discovery.
On the other hand, while I disagree with them, I prefer to go easy on the conspiratists. Their explanations may indeed be wrong, but their observations have been accurate. Many meteorological phenomena
have been different in the past decade, some of them dramatically. When you have millions of pairs of eyes on an unknown phenomenen, you do tend to get a few good observations. And bad explanations are easily replaced with better ones.
We also can't dismiss that the idea appears to have been started by
Edward Teller, one of the developers of The Bomb (yes, THAT Bomb). He wrote a paper proposing atmospheric spraying to reverse AGW "even before Algore
(sic) invented it", in the words of the Freepers. Paul Krutzen, a scientist whose work was instrumental in establishing that halogenated gases (such as CFCs) were destructive to the ozone layer, recently also proposed shooting sulfur into the stratosphere, though only half-seriously. (The other half, incidentally, wasn't the irony that has become mandatory these days, but an expression of his growing alarm over AGW.)
Living in a culture where everyone MUST have an explanation, the more cynical, the better, leads to sometimes wild ideas. But as many a hipster sage has pointed out, paranoids live longer.
Should you be afraid? Yes, to a degree, since AGW will be potentially disastrous. But you can save the tinfoil for the next "global warming skeptics" conference.
--p!
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