What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Chemtrails (Sigh)
In this column, I try not to cover topics that any normal person already knows are fake. I don’t bother writing about people who think Elvis is alive or that the Earth is flat, because anyone with two brain cells that can rub together already knows that’s bullshit, and believers are a tiny minority on the fringes of society .
I reviewed “chemtrails” in the “nobody takes it seriously” column, but I was wrong. This week, Tennessee lawmakers passed a state law that prohibits the “intentional introduction, release or spraying by any means of chemicals…substances or apparatus…with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather or intensity of sunlight.” In other words, they banned chemtrails.
Although the law was drafted partly in response to a federal government report released last year on solar geoengineering (essentially the idea of cooling the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space), some lawmakers didn’t understand the memo. Here’s what Tennessee Senator Frank Nicely said in support of the legislation: “This will be my wife’s favorite bill of the year. She’s been worrying about this for, I bet, 10 years… If you look up, one day everything will become clear. The next day they will look like the angels were playing tic-tac-toe. They are everywhere. I have photos on my phone of X’s right above my house. For years they denied doing anything.”
The report, which angered Tennessee lawmakers, explicitly said the study “does not imply any changes in the Biden-Harris administration’s policies or operations.” We don’t even know how or if it will work, so solar geoengineering is not an option. Conspiracy theories about chemtrails are false and stupid. But Tennessee’s decision to outlaw both could be great and/or funny if they follow the letter of the law they wrote.
What are chemtrails?
Believers call the long white trails that jets sometimes leave in the sky “chemtrails.” They believe that chemtrails are the result of the government deliberately spraying biological or chemical agents into the sky to change the weather, control the population, and/or make people sick (the specific details depend on who you ask).
But the trails that Senator Nicely keeps photos of on his phone are actually called ” contrails “, short for “condensation trails”, and no one is denying anything. The traces are the result of water vapor released from aircraft engine exhaust. They’re mostly ice crystals, essentially clouds created by jets, and there’s no evidence they can control people’s behavior. But they can really change the weather. (More on this below.)
Footprints are an interesting element of the conspiracy theory because you can go outside and see them with your own eyes; but sometimes you don’t see them, just like the senator said. So some planes spray chemicals and others don’t? According to authorities, no one is spraying anything. The tracks only form under certain atmospheric conditions, even if it looks like the angels were playing tic-tac-toe.
Is there any evidence that chemtrail conspiracy theories are true?
Chemtrail conspiracy theorists are partly right, but as is usually the case with conspiracy theorists, not in the way they think. The US government is actually trying to control the weather by releasing chemicals into the air from airplanes. This is called cloud seeding, and the chemical silver iodide is harmless to humans. The idea is to prevent drought by making clouds more productive. Cloud seeding has been around since the 1940s. It’s hard to say for sure whether this works (it’s hard to get a control group of clouds), but it’s no secret. Several states, including Utah , Wyoming, and Colorado , have relatively small, government-funded cloud seeding programs. But not in Tennessee, obviously.
The second part of the chemtrail theory is also slightly correct. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognize that the US government has a long and troubling history of covertly spreading chemical and biological agents into the air over the US; They themselves admit it . But the government (officially) stopped biological and chemical weapons programs in the 1960s, and in 2023 the last US chemical weapon, an M55 missile filled with the nerve agent sarin, was destroyed, according to the international watchdog group Organization for Ban. . chemical weapons .
So there are programs to control weather and secretly distribute chemicals, and the US is exploring solar geoengineering, but nothing links jet engine vapor trails to any of these things. However, this does not mean that contrails are harmless; they may be even worse than conspiracy theorists fear.
Are traces harmful?
Another victory for the “broken clocks are right twice a day” conspiracy theorists: Legitimate research shows that contrails are harmful, maybe extremely harmful, but not because they contain population-controlling nanobots.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the specific causes of temperature changes in a system as complex as the planet’s climate, but research has long supported the theory that the jets that create tiny clouds in the sky prevent heat from escaping the planet, leading many climate scientists to this conclusion. consider contrails to be the main factor of global warming.
Contrails may be worse than the effect of burning all that jet fuel. According to the Yale School of the Environment , persistent cloud emissions created by jet aircraft have a “daily impact on atmospheric temperatures that is greater than the impact of accumulated carbon dioxide emissions from all aircraft since the Wright brothers first took to the skies.” a century ago.” To make matters worse, efforts to reduce CO2 emissions by making jet engines more efficient tend to produce more contrails that last longer.
So yes, conspiracy theorists, these streaks in the sky are a serious problem that could lead to the deaths of many people in the future. (Don’t worry, we’re using AI to stop this and it should work just fine .)
Why Tennessee’s Chemtrails Law Might Actually Be Good (But Probably Just Fun)
Tennessee legislators may have designed this law to thwart a federal program that doesn’t exist and to fight a fictional phenomenon, but depending on how it is interpreted and implemented, this law could become the most significant piece of environmental law in the United States. . history – or it could be a clear enough lesson in what happens when you let conspiracy theorists pass laws that Tennessee will no longer vote for stupid people. (I can dream, right?)
To truly ban chemtrails, you would have to ban all airplane flights over Tennessee, which would reduce the overall amount of warming on Earth caused by the trails. But this is just the beginning. Tennessee outlawed the release of anything that “affects temperature, weather, or sunlight intensity” without defining either term , so it can be read as a ban on any pollution—from cars, airplanes, factories, or anywhere else—because that it contributes to global warming (i.e.: affects temperature.)
To be fair, the law states that chemicals must be released for the ” explicit purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or sunlight intensity,” so it probably wouldn’t apply to factories since raising the earth’s temperature is a secondary effect of industry. But sunglasses makers may find themselves in the crosshairs. What are sunglasses if not a device that affects the intensity of sunlight? Maybe sunglasses only affect the intensity of sunlight on a personal level, but the law doesn’t specify what? “affects the intensity of sunlight” means, so it can be read as covering Ray-Ban glasses and beach umbrellas. You could argue that the letter of Tennessee law also prohibits heaters, air conditioners, stoves and ovens, since they all are. devices specifically designed to change temperature. Water is a chemical, and spraying it on people at an amusement park is an attempt to change the temperature, so bye bye coolers.
I could go on, but this is all ridiculous. We know Tennessee is not about to close its airports and become a sunglasses-free, post-industrial state where cooking is banned. The law is unlikely to be enforced in any way, and its only real effect will be to please people like Senator Nicely’s wife that someone is finally doing something about those pesky angels playing tic-tac-toe in sky.