CONTRAILS ARE NOT CHEMTRAILS

Some dumbass Republican public celebrations of their moron ignorance have to be responded to - this Son of an Actual Scientist can’t let this one pass undamaged.

Tennessee continues to demonstrate what ten generations of Southern “fooling around,” combined with massive doses of Fundamentalist Boogaloo, can create in the way of Publick Ignorance, with a proposed law banning “chemtrails.” (They really are this fucking stupid)

The proposed law forbids "intentional injection, release, or dispersion" of chemicals into the air. It doesn't explicitly mention chemtrails, which conspiracy theorists believe are poisons spread by planes. Instead it broadly prohibits "affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight".

Accoding to the BBC report on this phenomenon, “Several witnesses who testified before the Tennessee legislature cited debunked conspiracy theories or speculated about secret government geoengineering programmes, according to Scott Banbury, conservation director of the state's branch of the Sierra Club, an environmental organisation. Their claims were troubling, he said.

"As a serious environmental organisation, if what was in the bill was actually going on we would be calling for a stop to it," he said. "It's not happening."

“In recent decades speculation about chemtrails has risen as the number of airline flights—and thus the number of contrails—has surged. In the debate over the Tennessee bill, lawmakers and witnesses cited a range of both reliable and debunked facts about geoengineering and weather modification, and at least one witness said she believed the White House was engaged in climate experiments but could not provide definitive proof.

“Although several lawmakers mentioned chemtrails while the bill was being discussed, during Monday's session Mr Fritts focused on cloud seeding. "Everything that goes up must come down, and those chemicals that we knowingly and willingly inject into the atmosphere simply to control the weather or the climate are affecting our health," he said. In a joking response, John Ray Clemmons, a Democrat from Nashville, introduced an amendment that would protect fictional beasts."This amendment would make sure that we are protecting yetis, or Sasquatch or Bigfoot, from whatever this conspiracy is that we're passing in this legislation," he said during debate.”

Let us be clear: there is no such thing as a “chemtrail.” What these mentally-challenged morons see are CONTRAILS, which used to be a common sight over the United States in the 1950s, when Curtis LeMay ordered his Strategic Air Command crews to find the “contrail layer” (i.e., the altitude where the temperature and the amount of water in the atmosphere would generate contrails as an airplane moved through the various molecules) so that Americans could look up and see the Air Force keeping the world safe from the non-existent Soviet bombers that would attack us and could only be defeated by having America’s children hide under their school desks.

Here is what contrails are (from Wikipedia):

Contrails (short for "condensation trails") or vapor trails are line-shaped clouds produced by aircraft engine exhaust or changes in air pressure, typically at aircraft cruising altitudes several miles above the Earth's surface. They are composed primarily of water, in the form of ice crystals. The combination of water vapor in aircraft engine exhaust and the low ambient temperatures at high altitudes causes the trails' formation. Impurities in the engine exhaust from the fuel, including sulfur compounds (0.05% by weight in jet fuel) provide some of the particles that serve as cloud condensation nuclei for water droplet growth in the exhaust. If water droplets form, they can freeze to form ice particles that compose a contrail. Their formation can also be triggered by changes in air pressure in wingtip vortices, or in the air over the entire wing surface.]

Depending on the temperature and humidity at the altitude where the contrails form, they may be visible for only a few seconds or minutes, or may persist for hours and spread to be several miles wide, eventually resembling natural cirrus or altocumulus clouds. Persistent contrails are of particular interest to scientists because they increase the cloudiness of the atmosphere. The resulting cloud forms are formally described as homomutatus, and may resemble cirrus, cirrocumulus, or cirrostratus, and are sometimes called cirrus aviaticus. Some persistent spreading contrails contribute to climate change.

Engine exhaust is predominantly made up of water and carbon dioxide, the combustion products of hydrocarbon fuels. At high altitudes as this water vapor emerges into a cold environment, the localized increase in water vapor can raise the relative humidity of the air past saturation point. The vapor then condenses into tiny water droplets which freeze if the temperature is low enough. These millions of tiny water droplets and/or ice crystals form the contrails. The time taken for the vapor to cool enough to condense accounts for the contrail forming some distance behind the aircraft. Exhaust contrails usually form at high altitudes; usually above 8,000 m (26,000 ft), where the air temperature is below −36.5 °C (−34 °F).

And THAT is the truth. Actual facts. Why do these people always want to go back to being Bronze Age sheepfuckers?

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