posted on May, 10 2008 @ 06:10 PM
Contrails have been persistent on occasion ever since aircraft have been able to reach and exceed the tropopause. The air simply has to be both cold
and humid. Exhausted steam from the combusted fuel of either piston or turbine motors freezes rapidly at minus forty degrees to minuscule ice crystals
which if the ambient air is saturated are unable to sublime into water vapour and "disappear". In super-saturated conditions contrails accrete more
water out of the air and form pendules - exactly like mammatus - for these trails are simply man-made cirrus clouds.
The stratosphere is stratified into layers of differing humidities which change rather slowly over time and vary not just in layers but also over
distances, which is why trails may appear to stop and restart. It can also move with a high overland speed and may transport a contrail hundreds of
miles from the point where it was created.
Air traffic is more than ten times what it was in the sixties, and humid stratospheric skies turn from blue to white ten times quicker these days.
Persistent trails created collisions in the dangerous final years of WW2 over Germany when the USAF was mounting daylight 1000-bomber raids using
supercharged piston-engined aircraft: the skies turned white then too.
Trails were frequently visible in the cowboy movies of the fifties. It was probably too expensive to reshoot, and post-processing was virtually
unknown at that time.
Today it is true that education has been dumbed-down in science and technology to the point where even erstwhile science graduates are actually unable
to think in scientific terms. It is therefore unsurprising that "chemtrail" theories are being proffered, and anyone with a proper scientific
understanding and knowledge of our atmosphere is compelled to respond with scorn.
These theories are on a par with "Creationism" and "we never went to the Moon" and show no understanding whatsoever of science and no discernible
knowledge of our environment either.
"Proofs" offered fall into two camps. The first I have mentioned (non-science). The second camp is outright deception. Lies. Fraud.
As a retired scientist I am baffled by "chemtrail theory" for it is a gross misuse of a wonderful means of communication. To me it seems that
tragedy has been heaped upon tragedy. Our politics is shot to bits, our oil-based way of life is going down the drain (the solutions were obvious in
the sixties!), our global economic systems are hell-bent on sterilizing the Earth, and to cap it all, any attempt at all to correct it is on the verge
of being drowned out by a rising tide of - complete and utter irrelevance. What an irony.
Will going out with a whimper be any better than going out with a bang? I'm beginning to wonder... maybe a quick death would have been better, eh?