Shucking Oysters: Contrary Trails
By Alex Allen
Have you looked up at the sky lately? What do you see? It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s another plane, and another plane and another plane. The trails appear like giant zippers and spread out ominously. And then one can only hear the planes, as the sky is suddenly thick with cloud. I have been witnessing this for years, even more so, since I moved to Hornby over 25 years ago. People used to talk about it a lot. What happened to the conversation? What happened to so many conversations?
I’ll speak from personal experience. Every time I tell someone to look up, they do and then look back at me with a blank face. And then? I share witnessing 13 planes flying back and forth above us, farting out cloud plumes, filling the sky with trellis-like crisscross lines. “Look,” I plead, “that’s just not normal.” Instead, I am looked at as “just not normal.”
Chemtrails, contrails, call them what you will. It’s confusing. Why one day, you see planes flying above and the trails dissipate immediately and then the next day, same clear kind of day, a bunch of planes fly above and emit trails of cloud condensation that last for days? Contrails, which are essentially just water vapour ice crystals, can only form at about 28,000 feet and at just the right humidity. Chemical trails, on the other hand, are dispersed from transport planes at around 10,000 and 12,000 feet. If a plane is flying at this elevation, there should be no contrails or any visible sign of water vapour. I’m not a scientist, but I do dabble in research. Go to the Planefinder site, enter Comox, BC and then zoom out and click on the planes that fly over our airspace that are modifying the weather. The culprits? Air Alaska predominately, followed by Air China, and even Fedex.
It is not some conspiracy. It is true substances are released into the atmosphere from time to time for cloud seeding and experiments on controlling solar radiation. Both Russia and China have partnered on solar geoengineering or, the more palatable term, “solar radiation management” (SRM) for years. In fact, the Chinese government has been spending billions of dollars manipulating the weather for both agricultural and political reasons. They seeded clouds ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to reduce smog and rain ahead of the competition. Key political meetings held in the Chinese capital are notorious for enjoying beautiful clear skies, thanks to weather modification. At its 100th Chinese Communist Party celebration, weather authorities launched rockets carrying silver iodine into the sky for two-hours, resulting in artificial rain and less pollution.
And while other countries have also invested in cloud seeding, including the US, China’s enthusiasm for the technology has created some alarm, particularly in neighbouring India, where agriculture is heavily dependent on the monsoon, which has already been disrupted as a result of climate change.
Just this April, the Coastal Atmospheric Aerosol Research and Engagement project announced it is using specially built sprayers to shoot trillions of sea salt particles into the sky to increase the reflective capacity of marine clouds. The experiment, off the coast of Alameda, California, will run through the end of May. This follows the abrupt end of a Harvard University experiment last month that planned to inject reflective aerosols into the stratosphere near Sweden before it was cancelled after encountering opposition from Indigenous and environmental groups.
Several private individuals have started launching stratosphere-bound balloons without any given notice or prior announcement. Today in the US, anyone who wants to shoot aerosols into the sky simply needs to fill out a one-page form 10 days beforehand. In 2023, Make Sunsets, a venture-backed geoengineering startup, conducted two unauthorized launches that released sulfur dioxide in Mexico, which resulted in the Mexican government stating it would ban solar geoengineering.
Almost all weather modification research is done with computer modelling, so no one knows exactly what might happen if it were done on a planetary scale. Studies show geoengineering not only weakens the ozone layer, alters precipitation patterns and affects agriculture, it also affects ecosystems, marine life and air quality.
What seems more alarming is that sulfur dioxide pollution, for instance, is known to have serious health and environmental risks and is one of the six air pollutants regulated around the world. In the atmosphere, sulfur dioxide can combine with water vapour to form sulfuric acid, a major component of acid rain. Is “artificial rain” the new “acid rain”?
“History has shown us that when we insert ourselves into modification of nature, there are always very serious unintended consequences,” said Greg Goldsmith, associate dean for research and development at Chapman University, who studies the implications of climate change on plant structure and function. “And therefore, it would be prudent to listen to what history has shown and look for consequences.”
We are all aware of climate change, biodiversity extinction, pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, and so on, yet we are simply unable to grasp how devastating their combined effects would be. These are more conversations that we should be having.
Playing god with the weather is not the answer. The side effects are many. As David Coulson wrote in Silent Earth, ‘it seems pretty clear that it is a bad idea but, like many human technologies that could have consequences for all of us, it is hard to regulate.”
In the meantime, as the Friendly Giant reminded us, “look up, look way up.”
