The Unfriendly Skies

By Bill Korbel

As a nation, we love sure love a good conspiracy, don’t we? Was there a second gunman on the grassy knoll?  Are aliens ( the ones from another planet ) being hidden by the government? Did NASA fake the moon landing?  And one that is rather new to me... It has to do with something called “chemtrails” and could have come from an X Files script.

A chemtrail, as I understand it, is the result of high altitude spraying of some sort of potentially dangerous chemical. This program has been undertaken by the government for unknown but possibly nefarious reasons. Others feel it has to do with weather modification. Sometimes people get sick after these trails appear in the sky. It’s very scary stuff. These trails can be seen stretching out from high flying jets, sometimes in thin lines that cross each other making very obvious patterns. At times, they spread out covering the sky. But the truth of the matter is these so called chemtrails are nothing but exhaust condensation trails called contrails, and are a natural product of aircraft operating high in the cold, upper reaches of the troposphere.

Here’s what happens... Every engine that burns a carbon fuel like gasoline, or jet fuel, produces along with heat, carbon dioxide and various pollutants, water--plain old H2O. You can see it dripping from your automobile exhaust pipe. In the cold upper atmosphere, the water vapor produced by the jet engine condenses quickly into microscopic ice crystals which combine to form contrails. It is essentially a man made cirrus cloud that stretches behind the plane. If the air is too dry, the ice crystals quickly disappear. But if the humidity is high enough, the contrail will persist, sometimes forming lines many miles long. If upper winds are just right, they can spread out horizontally and cover large sections of the sky.

But what about the ominous patterns that often show contrails crossing each other?  Some think that is proof of a planned spray pattern.  Actually, this is simply the result of jets flying specific routes. If you look at a high altitude navigation chart you will see just how many paths jets can take. Some go north south. Some east west. Some in between. These are contrails and nothing more. They are a perfectly natural formation that we have seen since WWII when planes first started flying above 25,000 feet. Many people say there are significantly more of these sinister trails now than 20 or 30 years ago and they are right. But they are right primarily because there are a lot more jets flying in the upper atmosphere than back then. So it stands to reason you’d see more of these things.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume someone does spray something 5 to 7 miles up in the air. Where would it reach the surface? It could take days for tiny chemical particles to fall 35,000 feet. All the time, jet stream winds that can exceed 150 mph will carry any spray particle many hundreds if not thousands of miles down wind. Please note that crop dusters spray fields at an altitude of 5 to 10 feet so the spray hits the crops in a useful way.

I know this will not convince any true believers who will consider that despite my 35 year as a meteorologist (which included over 20 years as an Air Force meteorologist and my many years as a pilot) that I really don’t know what I’m talking about or I am part of the conspiracy.  Of course, if it is a conspiracy, it would have to be a world wide one since these trails are seen above every nation on the planet.

If you want to read more, here are some links:

http://contrailscience.com/

http://www.astro.ku.dk/~holger/IDA/notes.html