I know nothing of the chemtrail conspiracy mentioned above. But I do know that on many otherwise clear days, the sky is cloudy and ugly because of the lingering jet exhaust. It really pisses me off that the airlines or military or whoever thinks they have the right to do that.
I remember several years ago as a child, the contrails behind jets would make small short-lived lines in the sky. They would disappear in a very small amount of time. Now, the trails coming out of jets seem to not only linger, but grow larger and larger as time goes on. On some days there will be enough of them to cover the entire sky.
Something has changed in them since the '70s. Maybe the fuel they are using now is causing the exhaust to give off some particle that attracts more condensation than it used to.
Whether a contrail forms and then lingers is dependent on the temperature of the air and the humidity. In dry air, the contrail either won’t form or will evaporate relatively quickly. In humid air, the contrail will not evaporate, but will slowly spread out and even seed more cloud formation.
There are more flights now than in the '70s, but even then they would evaporate when the air is dry and linger when it’s humid. I suspect your memory is selective and you’re suffering from confirmation bias.
Maybe the confirmation bias particle? I still see plenty of jets with short contrails. It depends on atmospheric conditions. But since they don’t stick around, they’re harder to notice unless you’re actually looking at them. Which you likely had much more time to do when you were a kid than you do now.
Oh, and it could also be related to any change in location since you were young. . . proximity to airports, flight paths, etc. will define the altitudes of the planes you see at any particular location, and altitude makes a LOT of difference in what a contrail looks or behaves like.
Why, on some days, does it look like a cross-hatch pattern in the sky with milky - almost iridescent - colors, and on others the sky is a blank where you can see jets with nothing coming out of them?
[QUOTE]
It all depends upon the amount of humidity in the air, the temperature, wind speed, and the types of chemicals they’re spraying on the public.
Whoops… Let the cat out of the bag!
Contrails are formed by the same processes that form clouds: The condensation of water vapor into tiny droplets. You might as well blame clouds on a government conspiracy too.
Remember I said contrails are formed by the same process that forms regular clouds? That’s why contrails appear in the air and will, like clouds, linger there.
Why do different planes create different types of contrails? It all depends on the amount of exhaust, the temperature, and the water content of the exhaust gasses.
What can’t be adequately explained?
Maybe you can adequately explain these questions:
[ul]
[li] Where is the chemical stored in commercial airplanes? There would have to be a secret compartment to store a few tons of chemicals and a way to put these chemicals into the exhaust of airplanes. That would mean that the companies who build commercial airlines (Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier, and a few others) have to make special allowances in the design of their aircraft. The tens of thousands of people who design, build, and test the airplanes would have to be involved.[/li]
[li]Who controls the spraying of this chemical? Commercial airline pilots? There’s over 100,000 of them in the U.S. alone, and each one would have to be in on this conspiracy.[/li]
[li]How is this chemical delivered to the airplanes? There must be thousands of trucks out there delivering this chemical, and it has to be stored at commercial airports. It has to be stored at airports, and delivered to the airplanes. How is this done?[/li]
[li]Why would private airlines agree to make space on their planes to be involved in this government plot? Who at the airlines would have to know about it? Certainly all of the executive officers. And, much of the accounting staff. You need to track deliveries, payments, etc.[/li][/ul]
By the time you’re finished, you have tens of millions people who must keep absolutely quite. And, you still cannot explain what chemical would be sprayed at 20,000 feet or why.
The amazing this is that fanatics don’t listen. Anyone who disagrees must be in on the plot. Anyone who questions the data is an insider. To fanatics, this simply makes the conspiracy even bigger and more important. They have to work twice as hard to spread the word.
Take a few meteorology courses and you’ll get your scientific explanation of contrails. Become the expert you always says needs to be questioned.
Or, you can simply say its all part of a big government coverup and feel important because you are smarter than those sheeple who refuse to believe.
And as soon as one (or multiple) theories are shot down, others get dragged in. For a really good time, the chemtrail enthusiast will perform a “Gish gallop”, dumping in a barrel of guesses, personal observations, miscellaneous out-of-context quotes and mysterious photos, in the expectation that no one will have the time or patience to debunk all of them at one sitting.
Here’s a link to a site which painstakingly goes over aircraft photos that have been used in support of the chemtrail conspiracy. Note how in the following comments the chemtrailers ignore the evidence, try to change the subject, and use the typical ploy “the government has lied to us before so nothing you say can change my mind”.
I don’t doubt what you’ve seen, but I strongly doubt your interpretation of it. You saw planes flying overhead in various directions, leaving persistent trails. You’re assuming that the trails were being intentionally turned on and off because you saw them occurring in one area of the sky, starting and stopping at the edges. That’s what I disagree with, because that’s entirely consistent with the way normal contrails form.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear - I looked and saw that H.D. is a long-timer here, and figured he must be open to evidence and reason, but just must have not investigated this “chemtrail” thing too much. I was thinking he’d be open to change his mind once he sees the arguments, which I think is a complimentary thing to say. At least that’s how I meant it.
The conspiracy nutters don’t usually seem to get this distinction, though. It seems to go like this: A person who has never in their life paid attention to anything at all one day looks up at the sky and, for the first time in their life, notices that there’s a cloud-like line behind an airplane. The person then misinterprets their lack of paying attention for the first few decades of their life as meaning that the cloud-like lines were never there before, and that they must be something new. But they can’t find anyone explaining why these things are new, so they must be a secret, and therefore a conspiracy. For an example of similar thinking, see the water sprinkler rainbow conspiracy.
qazwart thanks for the information but there is no reason to be rude! Besides, I never said in my post I thought it was a government conspiracy! (You can look again, if you want). I have no idea how the government would pull off something like that!! Anyway, I actually feel as if the phenomenon is more adequately explained to me now in terms of actual science, which was what I was asking for.
Thanks also to FredGarven, CurtC, troub and Chronos.
I’m gonna dip my toe in here … As a former airline guy I’ve got a few fact tidbits to consider …
The US airlines collectively have ~20x the number of airplanes the US military does.
Most of the US airlines’ flying is over the US. Most military flying, especially these days, is over other countries.
The airlines fly the same routes & schedule every day, with minor variations on weekends.
On days when the conditions are favorable, lots of jets leave lots of persistent contrails. They are virtually all from civilian airplanes; the military simply doesn’t have enough to be more than a tiny fraction of the total.
On days when the conditions are not favorable, the same number of jets fly the same paths through the sky at the same times, leaving few short-lived trails or no trails at all. All the jets are still all up there, you just can’t see but a tiny fraction of them.
And that’s when they do the spraying. If you could see it, it wouldn’t be a secret, now would it? The best part about the chemtrail CT, and why the Gov’t is so pleased, is that the CT popularizers have it exactly backwards.*
*Just kidding, but I like to see CTer’s heads asplode.
A tactic fighter pilots used to use (maybe still do) is to find the altitude at which contrails start forming, and fly right below that. Then, not only do they not leave any trails, but it makes it much harder for an enemy to sneak up on them from above, since they would be leaving contrails and be much easier to spot.
Anyway, I actually feel as if the phenomenon is more adequately explained to me now in terms of actual science, which was what I was asking for. 