not sure here -- public officials do get threats and that is serious. Yet the timing and emphasis of this article causes some questions.. Is this at all related to the ongoing negotiations at the World Meteorological Organization over access to data? Wading through the volumes such as WMO-No 15 "Basic Documents" 2021, it seems like the West is trying to reset data access to align with its own military interests, and less the "unique cooperation" founded shortly after World War II and renewed in the 1990s.
If a public case is made that "scientists receive threats" while at the negotiating table, US-allies retract previous data sharing agreements.. Is this progress in an age of Climate Change? worse, could it cover some Oil and Gas industry activity in more secrecy for all sides? not fake
You are positing that the UN weather agency is manufacturing abusive tweets towards meteorologist, who they ostensibly represent, to give western countries an excuse to refuse sharing weather data with countries they don't like?
...That doesn't make any sense. Among other things, the article doesn't mention tweets are coming from specific countries, in fact the context seems more local.
> Is this at all related to the ongoing negotiations at the World Meteorological Organization over access to data?
To me, questioning if it is "related" implies intent, and "trying" implies an active subversive effort.
But if you really mean this is all just a coincidental situation for the WMO to take advantage of... that still doesn't make any sense, because the tweets aren't from a specific country.
> But there has been a rapid rise recently, coinciding with extreme weather in Spain. A severe drought has shrunk water levels to alarming lows, exacerbated by record-breaking April temperatures.
CNN isn't helping anyone by talking about 'conspiracy theories' and claiming
'....
In Spain’s case, much of the 'trolling' revolves around the rehashing of an old conspiracy theory: so-called “chemtrails.”
'Under many of the agency’s Twitter posts, especially those that refer to more extreme weather, users have posted images of blue skies, crisscrossed with wispy, white trails. They falsely claim the trails contain a cocktail of chemicals to artificially manipulate the weather – keeping rain away and causing climate change.
It’s a theory roundly rejected by scientists'.
One of the reasons CNN is a failed, irresponsible media company '(when it launched as a lightweight cable version of the vapid USA Today tabloid and was nicknamed 'chicken noodle news') is this type of dismissive, sloppy article that dismisses people's concerns.
Anytime I see the phrase 'conpiracy theory' I usually just skim and move on.
It's not hard to understand why people are anxious about global 'weather modification' and annoyed when they are insulted and dismissed as cranks.
This is another of those obscure areas of operations that need a lot more transparency, explanation and openness so we don't freak people out. 5G and chemtrails appear to be two areas that make people extremely anxious, whether legitimately or not.
This reply could have been posted regardless of what the parent actually said, since you didn't respond to any of it. The chemtrails theory refers to many long lasting contrails being chemical agents actively and secretly dispersed, at massive scale over decades, for a variety of nefarious purposes. Cloud seeding refers to the currently rare and often publicised activity of coaxing out rain, using a very different set of chemicals. No amount of the latter developing makes the previous story any more true but people love to tie the two together as it makes for a story of validity in the form "see, people were attacking cloud seeding and it was real, what else is actually real!" when that never actually happened at scale.
It is perfectly normal that people are anxious. I am myself anxious.
But the problem, and what makes those people that the CNN article talk about despicable, is that those anxious people are attacking innocent scientists just because they choose to convince themselves that these scientists are the devil, based on nothing else than crazy logic and convenient extrapolation.
Being anxious is nothing bad, and nobody is being blamed for being anxious.
Being a toxic person that does counter-productive things and put innocent scientists in real danger with their bullying is not ok, and these persons merit to be treated fairly: they are adults, they have responsibility, their actions have consequences. Anxiety is one of the cause, but the fact that all anxious people are not bullying innocent scientists is the proof that there are other causes, including the fact that these people choose hatred instead of reason.
Those cloud seeding programs are expensive and require dedicated hardware.
They are not installed on commercial passenger airlines. If they were, that would mean a huge number of aircraft maintenance workers and ground crew know about it, and are keeping it secret from the public - a conspiracy. Where are the chemicals stored at the airport? Are the fire/safety teams also in on the conspiracy?
If not on commercial passenger airlines, then which ones? Are there fleets of planes which are not on publicly available flight trackers? Or are a lot of those flights lying about their cargo and mission? If so, that's a conspiracy.
Those weather modification programs are not done in clear skies. The video you linked to earlier makes that very explicit. All cloud seeding does it change the timing of where rain falls. It doesn't work without a lot of water already in the air.
For rains to not fall, when it would have without active intervention, means the water had to be forced out before reaching Spain - doing it over Spain would be worthless. So pictures of clear-sky "chemtrails" over Spain can't be weather modification keeping rain out of Spain. Where are these flights based? Where do they travel? What conspiracy keeps us from knowing this about Europe, when we know about China's efforts?
That's why these are called 'conspiracy theories'. They require a large number of people to conspire to keep something secret, and have at best only weak circumstantial evidence to support it. ("People can modify the weather, so the droughts in Spain must be caused by people modifying the weather" needs a few more underpants gnomes worked out.)
Which makes continued flights a form of weather modification right there, just like dumping massive amounts of CO2 in the air is another form of global weather modification.
But notice that those are both side-effects of a much more profitable business.
Who benefits in keeping the rain out of Spain, and how do they keep those activities hidden so well? Oh, right - a global conspiracy.
What is the right solution if people are extremely anxious for strongly illegitimate reasons?
No one believes cloud seeding is a conspiracy, except maybe the people who believe in chemtrails, to whom the commonly understood definition of 'conspiracy theorist' clearly applies. Your comment isn't the slam dunk you think it is.
>I would just like everyone to realize that the only difference between a conspiracy theory and a fact is time.
That implies all conspiracy theories are true, and will eventually be proven so, which is obviously incorrect. Most conspiracy theories will never be proven true because they have no factual basis, and most of the rest will only coincidentally appear to be true because despite what they will tell you conspiracy theorists tend not to actually have hidden insight into the secret workings of the world, they just happen sometimes to be right the way a stopped clock is sometimes right.
I would like you to realize the difference between a conspiracy theory and a fact (an actual conspiracy) is the existence of the specific conspiracy being theorized about, and the last people to trust regarding the likely truth of such theories are the conspiracy theorists themselves. No matter how much time passes, chemtrails are not going to become fact. Neither will Jewish space lasers. There is no vast, dark cabal of elites controlling the weather, and meteorologists are not their propagandists.
There’s a difference between an educated concern based on some evidence and conspiracy theory. Chemtrails are a conspiracy theory by the definition of what conspiracy theory is. Why does it trigger you so much?
Sadly Wikipedia has now lost all credibility, and is not a credible resource for anything even vaguely controversial.
Many people think 'global warming' (or 'climate change' as it now called) is 80% snake oil and that there are many alarmist evangelizing grifters making a fortune and changing the global balance of power in its name.
This is another failed example of 'trust me I'm a scientist' that has lost a large segment of our population.
Honesty and transparency would solve most of this, not just insulting people and accusing them of believing in heretic theories that have been cooked up by a secret cabal of 'non existent' conspirators. Yuo don't win hearts and minds that way.
You discredit the media. You discredit Wikipedia. You discredit the scientists. Then you make up some numbers to support your claim that people are being fooled by a powerful group working in the shadows.
I'm sorry, isn't this starting to sound like a conspiracy theory??
My comments are about the sad state of credible information sources, not the actual topic being discussed. No need to apologize, it's easy to go down the paranoia rabbit hole and label anyone who questions your rigid beliefs.
This discussion goes nowhere if you reject the credibility of anyone you disagree with.
In that case, you also have lost all credibility. And you can say I've no credibility either.
> This is another failed example of 'trust me I'm a scientist'
No, it isn't. There's a large amount of engineering to do to make these work. How are the chemicals deployed? Who designed the deployment mechanism? Who makes the chemicals? How and where are they stored? Who transports them to the airports? Who is in charge of safety should things go wrong? If one of these flights crashes, how is evidence destroyed so it stays secret? Where are these flights based? Who are the flight crew? Why do airlines and cargo flight operators do this work? Is it more profitable than flying passengers and cargo? Or are there secret orders requiring them to work?
Somehow all of these operations must be kept secret.
"Trust me I'm a scientist" answers precisely none of these questions, any more than "trust me I'm Batman" does.
Where are the credible information sources which show theis required infrastructure exists? Because all I hear is "trust me, scientists can do it." Which carries no credibility.
> Many people think 'global warming' (or 'climate change' as it now called) is 80% snake oil and that there are many alarmist evangelizing grifters making a fortune and changing the global balance of power in its name.
Who cares at all what “many people think”? How is that even a relevant consideration when deciding what and how to report?
The job of media should not be to coddle people or be a “safe space” that validates their nutty notions, it should be to report the truth. Convey uncertainty when it exists, but don’t invent false balance just to make viewers feel better about themselves. The truth is climate change is real and chemtrails are not.
Mainstream press never really looks at the deeper causes of why these conspiracies exist in the first place.
Looking at it dialectically, at least one possibility seems quite simple.
Thesis: The government wants to make laws that attack workers, to make them pay for stopping climate change (that was primarily caused by corporations and their wealthy owners.)
Antithesis: Workers don't want to be attacked.
Synthesis: Some workers deny the existence of what the government says they want to make them pay for.
Conspiracy of meteorologists suppported by the government to scare workers by the weather… do you seriously consider this a possibility? How about Ockham’s razor and much simpler explanation that the weather is actually changing?
He didn't say the weather isnt changing, he said the proposed solutions misplace the blame and spread the burdon of solutions disproportionatly from the source of the problem.
I do not really understand that “misplacing of the blame”. It’s an ordinary Joe who buys a car and a fuel for it. It is an ordinary Joe who hunts for cheap airline tickets and buys all those tiny things that are shipped overseas. The same Joe votes for politicians that deregulate and offer tax reductions and binges Netflix instead of reading some good books. Ignorance is a choice of majority of population. Ten billionaires cannot spoil the climate by overconsumption. Ten million Joes can easily do that and capitalism just found the way to help them.
Your lines drawn are odd to me. Billionaires are regular Joes but with a lot more influence and buying power. Instead of the plane ticket for a week vacation, it’s a rocket program to get one ride to space.
A single rocket launch is easily the equivalent of 10 average Americans yearly co2 production. There are hundreds (thousands?) of people employed to make the things go, all of which has its own carbon footprint. There are many rockets launched and engine tests in the development of a rocket program. In 2022 SpaceX launched 180 successful rockets. Without private jets and carbon emissions of other business practices, we are already at a multiplier of over a thousand for a single billionaire. Ten billionaires produce a small towns worth of co2 (again, without private jets and extended effects of their business models)
When we look at the average Joe who can not afford to live close to work or buy an electric vehicle, it gets even harder to try and say, “The problem is created by you and needs to be solved by you.”
The problem is all of ours. You, the reader of this comment and me, the writer, are both part of the problem and solution. People with a lot of influence that control information are huge multipliers in solving or prolonging the problem. That is why huge corporations shifting the blame and disrupting the truth is such an issue.
Weapons of mass destruction? Governments lie. Politicians don't stop lying. Look up a video of British politician Matt Hancock "crying" about covid - it's brazen. I understand why people push back; I don't believe a word that comes out of governments. To what degree (ahem) are the meteorologists at fault? I don't know, but I'm reminded of Neil Ferguson whose models were news here on HN and elsewhere. Scientists get grants just as politicians get lobbied. Trust is hard won, and you don't get it by forcing 15 minute cities on people while private jets are free to fly.
Thesis: Governments want to make laws to stop climate change
Antithesis: Big corporation don't want to lose money, pay people to create disinformation campaign, claiming all is a ruse to get money from the workers and enforce woke lifestyles like veganism onto them.
Synthesis: Some people believe them and attack scientists and politicians who actually try to safe mankind's environment
This analysis is silly because it neglects the fact that the poor are disproportionally reliant on polluting infrastructure that does not have any safe and affordable alternative, while also being those most affected by its dangers. Big corporations have ways to make lots of money from so called 'green technology' and they have the capital to diversify into it and they do, poor people do not.
People want to act like there's a simple solution but anyone whose analysed the situation closely enough realizes that climate change is already locked in and renewable technology is not a good enough replacement given the power output and resource wastage. There is no way to even reduce energy demand since any reduction from one entity will be made up for by another entity, nobody has any desire for meaningful degrowth. Now that we have AI just watch us spin up nuclear reactor after reactor, drinking the ocean, and leaving every beach bare for the sake of 'progress'.
Society is already collapsing into violence and BOE is a couple years away if we're lucky. There is a reason I don't bother investing in retirement. It's a tragedy and people are in denial.
The companies I'm talking about do this since more than 50 years, that's why the infrastructure wasn't changed when the costs would have been lower because there was more time This changed would have benefited the poor too.
Now the time is running out and they choices are they suffer now because of higher costs or suffer later from the effects of climate change. They are the victims one way or the other.
Workers in developed countries have benefited from environmental exploitation. We can travel hundreds or miles in comfortable cars, or thousands of miles in a day in planes. We can enjoy bananas and other tropical fruit in northern latitudes in the winter. We can live in relatively large spaces that are heated.
It’s the workers in developing countries who are lying the price. They’re the ones who are being told they can’t exploit their land and live the same lifestyle as their northern counterparts.
There's always a richer class who people can be mad about. The incredibly well-off average Westerners (compared to factory workers in e.g. Bangladesh) then look at the CEOs and super-rich who fly on private planes and vacation on yachts and say "Look at those CEOs, profiteering off exploiting our hard work!" -- it doesn't mean they don't have a case, just look at Bezos and the average Amazon warehouse worker.
> There's always a richer class who people can be mad about.
I mean, not for one class in particular, right? One which happens to be making a whole lot of noise about this issue while not volunteering to make any sacrifices on its own part to fix it?
Henny Penny is Chicken Little. And this really does seem to explain these issues to the point of being a tautology. As an institution loses trust then people stop believing what they say. 'My opinion is no worse than your falsehoods.' There have been a million and one trust-destroying events in the past couple of decades. So seeing ever more people come out with their own explanations, some being somewhat less than well thought out, is hardly some inscrutable phenomena.
The Google ngram for 'conspiracy theory' [2] is also quite telling. It seems to have risen somewhat during the Red Scare years, but then just went to the Moon shortly after November 22, 1963. [3]. And it's difficult to imagine why anybody might not think everything wasn't on the up and up there. I mean it's only been 60 years, and only 3% of the records remain classified.
> The Google ngram for 'conspiracy theory' [2] is also quite telling.
I disagree that it's telling. It could have replaced a previous term. What did people call helicopter parents before there were helicopters?
We know there were conspiracy theorists well before even the First Red Scare - Henry Ford believed in the international Jewish conspiracy theory, as described by the fabricated antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, written ca. 1900.
"conspiracies flourished in the 1820s and 1830s, when modern-day American political parties developed, and the expansion of white male suffrage increased the nation’s voting base. These new parties, which included the Democrats, the National Republicans, the Anti-Masons, and the Whigs, frequently used conspiracy accusations as a political tool to capture new voters—ultimately bringing about a recession and a collapse of public trust in the democratic process."
> Conspiracy theories have been around for a long time, though how long is a matter of debate. As for the concept of conspiracy theory, it might seem reasonable to expect a more exact answer about the moment of its emergence. When do we first find people talking and writing about conspiracy theories? While much of the literature points to the twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper and his famous work The Open Society and Its Enemies (1st edition: 1945), newspaper databases allow us to locate earlier occurrences of “conspiracy theory.” They reveal that the term proliferates in newspapers from the 1870s onward, particularly after the assassination of President Garfield in July 1881. What can this discovery then tell us about the modern-day phenomenon of conspiracy theories?
"First occurrence of CTs related to assassination of Garfield: "One of the conspiracy theories has been exploded," Boston Journal, July 12, 1881."
The article goes into depth on the context behind the word "theory" for this sort of description, at https://archive.org/details/uscinski-conspiracy-theories-and... with examples of "murder theory", "abduction theory", and "fraud theory" before going into details about publications of a conspiracy theory "linking Guiteau to a circle of undiscovered and unidentified associates ... that foreshadows the later shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby—Guiteau himself became the target of an attempt on his life a few days after his trial began in November 1881, speculation once more arose about a conspiracy."
Prior to the 60s, the term was occasionally used but there was no particularly negative connotation by default. Views and arguments would weighed on their own merit instead of this sort of weird and dystopic 'oh my gosh, that's a conspiracy theory - you can't think that' style of thought which pervades in some circles in the West.
The COVID lab leak was probably the best example of this. Lab leaks happen disconcertingly more frequently than most realize [1], even at the highest security biolabs. And COVID emerged not only right next to China's only existing BSL-4 (top biosecurity level) biolab, but one that was actively experimenting with bat derived coronaviruses and how they might be able to be spread to humans. Then the US government decided to declare COVID must have had a natural origin, and a lab leak was an impossible conspiracy theory. This is probably in part because of geopolitics and part because we were also providing funding for said experimentation. In any case, it had little to do with the merits of a lab leak.
But because some people have gained this sort of thoughtless aversion to "conspiracy theory" they refused to even consider such things, but would actually attack others for doing so. Not only was it a conspiracy theory, but a dangerous one that had to be censored from all public discussion and discourse. Even the 'fact checkers' said so! Until one day, the official position changed, most likely due to shifting geopolitical visions, and suddenly the impossible conspiracy theory was the defacto standard position. There was no silver bullet or major revelation, just a shift in the "official position" for opaque rationale, probably related to our perceived future relationship with China, or lack thereof.
In the past this never would have happened because well it was pretty dang obvious that it coming from a lab was by far the most probable scenario. But to some in modern times, going against the "official position" on something is little different than claiming the Earth is flat, and that's a catastrophic decline of critical thinking which greatly benefits the political establishment. For some they have become not only the arbiters of truth, but even of thought itself.
> the term was occasionally used but there was no particularly negative connotation by default.
I think you have completely failed to understand my point, so I will try again.
It does not matter that the current term "conspiracy theory" with its current negative meaning was not common before, to choose one date, 1945 when Popper used "conspiracy theory of society" in The Open Society and Its Enemies.
Just because the modern term did not exist, doesn't mean the underlying human behavior did not exist before then. (Indeed, Popper is describing something already present before 1945.)
Surely there were helicopter parents before there were helicopters.
Surely there were conspiracy theories before the modern phrase "conspiracy theory" was used.
Which is why I pointed to conspiracy theories of the early 1800s to show that your 1960s n-gram date does not mean there was a deep cultural change. It could simply be a newly popular turn of phrase to describe an age-old concept.
> 'oh my gosh, that's a conspiracy theory - you can't think that' style of thought which pervades in some circles in the West.
Right, but we're talking about one specific point - the idea that there's widespread weather control using "chemtrails" to cause a drought in Spain, and a conspiracy to keep that silent, and harassment of meteorologists believed to be members of that conspiracy - and THIS circle - HN commenters.
That you have your own views about other conspiracies and other circles is not something I want to engage in. THIS conspiracy theory about weather control is not tenable.
I am more than willing to believe there was a conspiracy to hide the negative effects of cigarette smoking. The evidence for that conspiracy theory is substantial. There are many other conspiracies that I agree occurred, including the conspiracy to convince Americans that streets are for cars, not people, the conspiracy to keep the illegal bombings of Cambodia quiet, the conspiracy to hide the negative effects of CO2 pollution, and the conspiracy to prevent racial mixing in the US though methods like red-lining.
However, I believe these conspiracy theories because 1) they are within the realm of possibility, and 2) there is good evidence for them.
Quite a contrast from this weather-modification conspiracy theory!
> But to some in modern times, going against the "official position"
Why do you care more about the nameless, unknown "some" concerning an "official position" about some random unspecified conspiracy theory than you care about the named meteorologists who are being harassed by weather control conspiracy theory believers, when that specific conspiracy theory has no basis in reality?
> November 22, 1963. [3]. And it's difficult to imagine why anybody might not think everything wasn't on the up and up there. I mean it's only been 60 years, and only 3% of the records remain classified.
Not bad, but the Jack The Ripper files, from 1888, are still sealed 135 years later. Conspiracy theorists might have a field day with that, but it's done only to protect the identities of informants.
A group of scientists did actually come up with a "chemtrail" like plan to cool the planet... And it is horrific:
> To achieve a 2 °C result, the plan would inject 6.7 teragrams (6.7 billion kg/14.8 billion lb) of sulfur dioxide per year into each pole, calling for an eye-watering total of 13.4 teragrams (29.5 billion lb) of material annually.
The cost would be astronomical (but far more doable than other climate engineering methods) and the environmental cost of raining sulfuric acid over the arctic with an enormous fleet of planes would be unspeakable.
They clearly released the plan to illustrate how impractical climate engineering is, but I wonder if this is a seed for the wider chemtrail theory.
I'm pretty sure 'chemtrail conspiracies' have their origin in the (quite real) large-scale biological & radiological warfare tests the US government conducted in the 1950s and 1960s:
> "The first Large Area Concept experiment, in 1957, involved dispersing microorganisms over a swath from South Dakota to Minnesota; monitoring revealed that some of the particles eventually traveled some 1200 miles away. Further tests covered areas from Ohio to Texas and Michigan to Kansas. In the Army’s words, these experiments 'proved the feasibility of covering large areas of the country with [biological weapons] agents.'"
Well before airplane contrails were ever associated with a plot to alter the climate, it was all about a plot to control people's minds with toxic chemicals etc.
Of course, it is entirely true that a relatively small fleet of drones could disperse enough anthrax/smallpox powder over any large American city to cause mass casualties and initiate a pandemic-scale event, which is why development of such weapons is banned under the terms of the Biological Warfare Convention, although the Soviet Union violated that treaty on a massive scale in the 1970s and 1980s, and Israel and several other states have refused to sign it - and the US government has strongly opposed anything like an inspection / verification system, so...
Almost every 'conspiracy theory' has some seed of truth hidden inside it somewhere.
But the fact that the conspiracy is true or not is irrelevant.
The problem of the "conspiracy theory" is that it is a witch trial: a group of people have absolutely no proof what-so-ever, they just "want to believe they are right".
It does not matter if they end up being right, their logic is toxic for society, and if we are accepting their logic, then it means that tomorrow you can be fired from your job because your boss just had a dream in which you were a thief. Your argument is the same as saying "well, your boss says you are a thief, but thieves exist for real, and, who knows, maybe you are in fact really a thief, so it's fine".
"a group of people have absolutely no proof what-so-ever"
Something not being provable underlies the definition of the term theory, Google this phrase, "is it required for a theory to have proof" to understand.
They have a "theory", no proof. My point is that a healthy society should not rely on "theory" to destroy other people's life, to bully them or to make societal decisions, especially if there are processes that can go further than just theory.
And, yes, it does not matter if they end up being right, the same way it does not matter if a broken clock end up being right: it is still a very very unethical and unfair way of managing a society. I can throw knives from the top of my building, and sometimes I will hit someone that deserve it. According to your logic, it's fine.
On top of that, if you learn they end up being right, it means that someone else came up with the proof, demonstrating that they were utterly useless: their "belief" did not change anything, because the proof would have appeared anyway. All they have done is being counter-productive and delayed the discovery of the proof (and sometimes ruining it totally).
It's a bit like bad cops that "get the bad guy" by breaking the rules and end up with the bad guy being released due to breach of procedure. It's just totally stupid: if they believe there is a problem, they investigate and bring proofs upfront, not start accusing without proofs.
A lot of conspiracy theorists are not like that. They are more like "My neighbor is behaving suspiciously. I have no concrete proof of wrong doing, but maybe I should start bolting my door".
I don't remember anyone behaving like that being called a conspiracy theorist.
I saw a lot of people not behaving like that, spreading misinformation as if it was fact without caring about the consequences of the person they accused, but then pretending that they just "started bolting their door", though.
And the CNN article that started this conversation is certainly not talking about these kind of people (not sure if they even would call such people "conspiracy theorists"), they are talking about people who decide to destroy their neighbor's life just because, in their book, the neighbor deserved it by doing something that they decided was suspicious. In fact, this article talks about people who attacks honest scientists just doing their job who haven't done anything suspicious in the first place.
29.5 billion pounds is about 13.3 million tonnes. Global air cargo is 63 million tonnes, so that's a lot, but not a physically unfeasible amount, even if you have to airlift into the stratosphere. Say 600 flights of a planes with 60 tonnes of payload per day. 300 per day per pole. That's "only" a large-ish airport's worth of flights each (about the same as Paris Orly, or half of JFK or Heathrow), and they'd presumably be fairly short-range so you'd maybe only need a few dozen planes doing Berlin Airlift-style load-fly-reload operations.
If it came to it and it was the only way, it's not that astronomical and would probably cost less than dealing with a single major weather disaster or crop failure.
Maybe it's a terrible idea for other reasons (though I would be surprised if the acidity even really registered next to existing sulphur and CO2 emissions, but then again it's all concentrated in a few places), but the cost isn't a slam-dunk "yeah, no, that's literally impossible" conclusion.
The article (and paper) go into this. Theoretically the lift capacity is not that high, but practically the costs are amplified because existing airframes are inefficient at the job.
Also, the effects are bad enough that the habitability in the aerosol zone for the "1%” of the human population living in there is a concern. That can’t be good for the local wildlife...
If this actually became necessary, I would assume we're already in a world where sea ice has been gone for a decade or more, polar wildlife is a write-off already and humanity is facing regular catastrophic climate events (storms, floods, and fires), mass migrations and famines.
My point isn't that it's an amazing idea, or even a good one, just that it's eminently within the realms of physical and economic possibility. Hell, SAC probably flew a comparable number air miles than that for decades at a time, just circling nuclear weapons near the USSR.
I doubt it's all that unprecedented - the fossil fuel / finance lobby has been attacking basic climate science for decades, even though their own scientists knew about it by 1980:
As the evidence has piled up and the model projections have been proven accurate, their ability to recruit third-party promoters of climate denialism in public has steadily fallen, so they've turned to using social media puppet accounts to orchestrate denialism campaigns. Regardless, the results of the uncontrolled experiment humans are playing with the atmosphere by dumping billions of tons of fossil carbon into it are pretty clear, and model projections from decades ago are tracking current reality fairly closely:
It's too easy to use the "chemtrails" card when in reality it's only just cloud seeding, one of the different weather modification techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding
There are no proof that it was used in Spain, but..
When Saudi Arabia abuses cloud seeding for their needs, it's water that's gonna be missing where the cloud were headed, could be Spain, could be Italy, could also be Egypt, Turkey or Kenya
Given these people's response it seems rising oceans, droughts and extreme weather are not the main dangers of global warming, but instead the hordes of the mentally untethered looking for someone to blame for what they've warned about for years.
Maybe if the media wasn't effectively an appendage of the state and transparently lying on a regular basis, citizens would be a lot less vulnerable to bullshit.
Which media, which state? For decades certain media and certain public officials have been lying about climate change while raking in money from companies with a vested interest in those lies. There is quite a lot of media which drives viewership by insisting that "the media" and "the government" is lying to them. And they're not always wrong, but they're always politically motivated.
A conspiracy theorist might say that this article is designed as clever propaganda to 1. make people blame issues on groups of mentally unstable people and 2. that it's designed to label the out of field as dangerous and insane.
But only a mad conspiracy theorist would think that this is propaganda.
I think we have a scientific legitimacy issue that is still ongoing.
For example, there has been no "mea culpa" around massive problems such as:
The Ozone Hole being discarded initially as erroneous data
The US Historical Climate Network flawed sites permitted to enter the climate record
The mismatch between highly accurate space based temperature sensors, and US HCN
The hiding of warm periods, and the Younger Dryas, convenient dating, hiding the glaciation and deglaciation trends by academic meteorologists for funding/political reasons
Intentionally discounting Solar Radiance and Albedo
Permitting weather sensors (ASOS) on US runways to enter the weather record - how'd you like a weather report manipulated by prop blast or jet wash?
It is the very Cathedral establishment that has approached these issues as "Science the Religion shall not be questioned", instead of science as a process that needs to be continually refined via tight feedback loops. Critics, skeptics, and nay-saying scientists are heretics - prepare them for auto-da-fé
I believe in science as a process, not a religion.
Corporate news like CNN is to blame for this. People don’t trust institutions because institutions constantly lie to us. This makes some people put their skepticism into overdrive and results in dumb things like this.
Climate change is a problem that only vast collective effort can solve. This effort must be coordinated. Only nation-states have the power to do this. Any democratic nation-state that tries to do it will face a political uprising that will replace its government.
I am against despotism, yet I think only despotism has any hope of averting the disaster.
Thus disaster is inevitable. I predict the population of humans on Earth will be half what it is today, 150 years from now.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadIf a public case is made that "scientists receive threats" while at the negotiating table, US-allies retract previous data sharing agreements.. Is this progress in an age of Climate Change? worse, could it cover some Oil and Gas industry activity in more secrecy for all sides? not fake
...That doesn't make any sense. Among other things, the article doesn't mention tweets are coming from specific countries, in fact the context seems more local.
How meta.
what? I said nothing like that. please show everyone where I said anyone manufactured any "tweets"
To me, questioning if it is "related" implies intent, and "trying" implies an active subversive effort.
But if you really mean this is all just a coincidental situation for the WMO to take advantage of... that still doesn't make any sense, because the tweets aren't from a specific country.
Yes, lets blame the messenger :(
https://youtu.be/nwonVY_cNS4
CNN isn't helping anyone by talking about 'conspiracy theories' and claiming
'.... In Spain’s case, much of the 'trolling' revolves around the rehashing of an old conspiracy theory: so-called “chemtrails.”
'Under many of the agency’s Twitter posts, especially those that refer to more extreme weather, users have posted images of blue skies, crisscrossed with wispy, white trails. They falsely claim the trails contain a cocktail of chemicals to artificially manipulate the weather – keeping rain away and causing climate change.
It’s a theory roundly rejected by scientists'.
One of the reasons CNN is a failed, irresponsible media company '(when it launched as a lightweight cable version of the vapid USA Today tabloid and was nicknamed 'chicken noodle news') is this type of dismissive, sloppy article that dismisses people's concerns.
Anytime I see the phrase 'conpiracy theory' I usually just skim and move on.
But that's different to contrails which are what conspiracy theorists point to as their "chemtrails"!
It should be noted that rain seeding is realistically rarely used.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/03/asia/china-weather-modificati...
It's not hard to understand why people are anxious about global 'weather modification' and annoyed when they are insulted and dismissed as cranks.
This is another of those obscure areas of operations that need a lot more transparency, explanation and openness so we don't freak people out. 5G and chemtrails appear to be two areas that make people extremely anxious, whether legitimately or not.
But the problem, and what makes those people that the CNN article talk about despicable, is that those anxious people are attacking innocent scientists just because they choose to convince themselves that these scientists are the devil, based on nothing else than crazy logic and convenient extrapolation.
Being anxious is nothing bad, and nobody is being blamed for being anxious.
Being a toxic person that does counter-productive things and put innocent scientists in real danger with their bullying is not ok, and these persons merit to be treated fairly: they are adults, they have responsibility, their actions have consequences. Anxiety is one of the cause, but the fact that all anxious people are not bullying innocent scientists is the proof that there are other causes, including the fact that these people choose hatred instead of reason.
They are not installed on commercial passenger airlines. If they were, that would mean a huge number of aircraft maintenance workers and ground crew know about it, and are keeping it secret from the public - a conspiracy. Where are the chemicals stored at the airport? Are the fire/safety teams also in on the conspiracy?
If not on commercial passenger airlines, then which ones? Are there fleets of planes which are not on publicly available flight trackers? Or are a lot of those flights lying about their cargo and mission? If so, that's a conspiracy.
Those weather modification programs are not done in clear skies. The video you linked to earlier makes that very explicit. All cloud seeding does it change the timing of where rain falls. It doesn't work without a lot of water already in the air.
For rains to not fall, when it would have without active intervention, means the water had to be forced out before reaching Spain - doing it over Spain would be worthless. So pictures of clear-sky "chemtrails" over Spain can't be weather modification keeping rain out of Spain. Where are these flights based? Where do they travel? What conspiracy keeps us from knowing this about Europe, when we know about China's efforts?
That's why these are called 'conspiracy theories'. They require a large number of people to conspire to keep something secret, and have at best only weak circumstantial evidence to support it. ("People can modify the weather, so the droughts in Spain must be caused by people modifying the weather" needs a few more underpants gnomes worked out.)
Thing is, we know that contrails modify the climate, without a doubt. 9/11's flight shutdown made that analysis possible. "9/11 study: Air traffic affects climate" at https://edition.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.cl... or https://www.nature.com/articles/418601a if you want the publication. It helped reduce the daily range in daytime highs and nighttime lows.
Which makes continued flights a form of weather modification right there, just like dumping massive amounts of CO2 in the air is another form of global weather modification.
But notice that those are both side-effects of a much more profitable business.
Who benefits in keeping the rain out of Spain, and how do they keep those activities hidden so well? Oh, right - a global conspiracy.
What is the right solution if people are extremely anxious for strongly illegitimate reasons?
That implies all conspiracy theories are true, and will eventually be proven so, which is obviously incorrect. Most conspiracy theories will never be proven true because they have no factual basis, and most of the rest will only coincidentally appear to be true because despite what they will tell you conspiracy theorists tend not to actually have hidden insight into the secret workings of the world, they just happen sometimes to be right the way a stopped clock is sometimes right.
I would like you to realize the difference between a conspiracy theory and a fact (an actual conspiracy) is the existence of the specific conspiracy being theorized about, and the last people to trust regarding the likely truth of such theories are the conspiracy theorists themselves. No matter how much time passes, chemtrails are not going to become fact. Neither will Jewish space lasers. There is no vast, dark cabal of elites controlling the weather, and meteorologists are not their propagandists.
Same here.There is basically no honesty left in most media. You'll have read multiple sides on specialized topics. Not worth the time needed anyway.
What are those concerns? That most airlines spray chemicals that keep rain from falling on Spain? There's no reason to believe that's true. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory .
Or concerns that governments aren't doing enough to prevent increased global warming?
Or concerns that there's a conspiracy to promote the false story about global warming?
Or concerns that the government hasn't prepared for events like this, and has no effective response in place?
And how do those concerns justify threatening meterologists?
Many people think 'global warming' (or 'climate change' as it now called) is 80% snake oil and that there are many alarmist evangelizing grifters making a fortune and changing the global balance of power in its name.
This is another failed example of 'trust me I'm a scientist' that has lost a large segment of our population.
Honesty and transparency would solve most of this, not just insulting people and accusing them of believing in heretic theories that have been cooked up by a secret cabal of 'non existent' conspirators. Yuo don't win hearts and minds that way.
You discredit the media. You discredit Wikipedia. You discredit the scientists. Then you make up some numbers to support your claim that people are being fooled by a powerful group working in the shadows.
I'm sorry, isn't this starting to sound like a conspiracy theory??
In that case, you also have lost all credibility. And you can say I've no credibility either.
> This is another failed example of 'trust me I'm a scientist'
No, it isn't. There's a large amount of engineering to do to make these work. How are the chemicals deployed? Who designed the deployment mechanism? Who makes the chemicals? How and where are they stored? Who transports them to the airports? Who is in charge of safety should things go wrong? If one of these flights crashes, how is evidence destroyed so it stays secret? Where are these flights based? Who are the flight crew? Why do airlines and cargo flight operators do this work? Is it more profitable than flying passengers and cargo? Or are there secret orders requiring them to work?
Somehow all of these operations must be kept secret.
"Trust me I'm a scientist" answers precisely none of these questions, any more than "trust me I'm Batman" does.
Where are the credible information sources which show theis required infrastructure exists? Because all I hear is "trust me, scientists can do it." Which carries no credibility.
Who cares at all what “many people think”? How is that even a relevant consideration when deciding what and how to report?
The job of media should not be to coddle people or be a “safe space” that validates their nutty notions, it should be to report the truth. Convey uncertainty when it exists, but don’t invent false balance just to make viewers feel better about themselves. The truth is climate change is real and chemtrails are not.
Looking at it dialectically, at least one possibility seems quite simple.
Thesis: The government wants to make laws that attack workers, to make them pay for stopping climate change (that was primarily caused by corporations and their wealthy owners.)
Antithesis: Workers don't want to be attacked.
Synthesis: Some workers deny the existence of what the government says they want to make them pay for.
A single rocket launch is easily the equivalent of 10 average Americans yearly co2 production. There are hundreds (thousands?) of people employed to make the things go, all of which has its own carbon footprint. There are many rockets launched and engine tests in the development of a rocket program. In 2022 SpaceX launched 180 successful rockets. Without private jets and carbon emissions of other business practices, we are already at a multiplier of over a thousand for a single billionaire. Ten billionaires produce a small towns worth of co2 (again, without private jets and extended effects of their business models)
When we look at the average Joe who can not afford to live close to work or buy an electric vehicle, it gets even harder to try and say, “The problem is created by you and needs to be solved by you.”
The problem is all of ours. You, the reader of this comment and me, the writer, are both part of the problem and solution. People with a lot of influence that control information are huge multipliers in solving or prolonging the problem. That is why huge corporations shifting the blame and disrupting the truth is such an issue.
Antithesis: Big corporation don't want to lose money, pay people to create disinformation campaign, claiming all is a ruse to get money from the workers and enforce woke lifestyles like veganism onto them.
Synthesis: Some people believe them and attack scientists and politicians who actually try to safe mankind's environment
People want to act like there's a simple solution but anyone whose analysed the situation closely enough realizes that climate change is already locked in and renewable technology is not a good enough replacement given the power output and resource wastage. There is no way to even reduce energy demand since any reduction from one entity will be made up for by another entity, nobody has any desire for meaningful degrowth. Now that we have AI just watch us spin up nuclear reactor after reactor, drinking the ocean, and leaving every beach bare for the sake of 'progress'.
Society is already collapsing into violence and BOE is a couple years away if we're lucky. There is a reason I don't bother investing in retirement. It's a tragedy and people are in denial.
The companies I'm talking about do this since more than 50 years, that's why the infrastructure wasn't changed when the costs would have been lower because there was more time This changed would have benefited the poor too.
Now the time is running out and they choices are they suffer now because of higher costs or suffer later from the effects of climate change. They are the victims one way or the other.
Yours is just three disjointed statements without anything supporting them.
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/fighting-climate-chaos/climat...
It’s the workers in developing countries who are lying the price. They’re the ones who are being told they can’t exploit their land and live the same lifestyle as their northern counterparts.
I mean, not for one class in particular, right? One which happens to be making a whole lot of noise about this issue while not volunteering to make any sacrifices on its own part to fix it?
This is because reporting on psychology is boring:
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-drawn-to-c...
* https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/con...
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/096372141771826...
* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/health/psychology-conspir...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny
Henny Penny is Chicken Little. And this really does seem to explain these issues to the point of being a tautology. As an institution loses trust then people stop believing what they say. 'My opinion is no worse than your falsehoods.' There have been a million and one trust-destroying events in the past couple of decades. So seeing ever more people come out with their own explanations, some being somewhat less than well thought out, is hardly some inscrutable phenomena.
The Google ngram for 'conspiracy theory' [2] is also quite telling. It seems to have risen somewhat during the Red Scare years, but then just went to the Moon shortly after November 22, 1963. [3]. And it's difficult to imagine why anybody might not think everything wasn't on the up and up there. I mean it's only been 60 years, and only 3% of the records remain classified.
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[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes
[2] - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy%20t...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kenne...
I disagree that it's telling. It could have replaced a previous term. What did people call helicopter parents before there were helicopters?
We know there were conspiracy theorists well before even the First Red Scare - Henry Ford believed in the international Jewish conspiracy theory, as described by the fabricated antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, written ca. 1900.
Or, from "Conspiracy Theories Abounded in 19th-Century American Politics" at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/conspiracy-theories-a... :
"conspiracies flourished in the 1820s and 1830s, when modern-day American political parties developed, and the expansion of white male suffrage increased the nation’s voting base. These new parties, which included the Democrats, the National Republicans, the Anti-Masons, and the Whigs, frequently used conspiracy accusations as a political tool to capture new voters—ultimately bringing about a recession and a collapse of public trust in the democratic process."
Since you mentioned Kennedy, President Garfield's assassination also resulted in conspiracies, including using the term "conspiracy theory". From https://academic.oup.com/book/25369/chapter-abstract/1924531... :
> Conspiracy theories have been around for a long time, though how long is a matter of debate. As for the concept of conspiracy theory, it might seem reasonable to expect a more exact answer about the moment of its emergence. When do we first find people talking and writing about conspiracy theories? While much of the literature points to the twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper and his famous work The Open Society and Its Enemies (1st edition: 1945), newspaper databases allow us to locate earlier occurrences of “conspiracy theory.” They reveal that the term proliferates in newspapers from the 1870s onward, particularly after the assassination of President Garfield in July 1881. What can this discovery then tell us about the modern-day phenomenon of conspiracy theories?
The full text, available at https://archive.org/details/uscinski-conspiracy-theories-and... , says
"First occurrence of CTs related to assassination of Garfield: "One of the conspiracy theories has been exploded," Boston Journal, July 12, 1881."
The article goes into depth on the context behind the word "theory" for this sort of description, at https://archive.org/details/uscinski-conspiracy-theories-and... with examples of "murder theory", "abduction theory", and "fraud theory" before going into details about publications of a conspiracy theory "linking Guiteau to a circle of undiscovered and unidentified associates ... that foreshadows the later shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby—Guiteau himself became the target of an attempt on his life a few days after his trial began in November 1881, speculation once more arose about a conspiracy."
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The COVID lab leak was probably the best example of this. Lab leaks happen disconcertingly more frequently than most realize [1], even at the highest security biolabs. And COVID emerged not only right next to China's only existing BSL-4 (top biosecurity level) biolab, but one that was actively experimenting with bat derived coronaviruses and how they might be able to be spread to humans. Then the US government decided to declare COVID must have had a natural origin, and a lab leak was an impossible conspiracy theory. This is probably in part because of geopolitics and part because we were also providing funding for said experimentation. In any case, it had little to do with the merits of a lab leak.
But because some people have gained this sort of thoughtless aversion to "conspiracy theory" they refused to even consider such things, but would actually attack others for doing so. Not only was it a conspiracy theory, but a dangerous one that had to be censored from all public discussion and discourse. Even the 'fact checkers' said so! Until one day, the official position changed, most likely due to shifting geopolitical visions, and suddenly the impossible conspiracy theory was the defacto standard position. There was no silver bullet or major revelation, just a shift in the "official position" for opaque rationale, probably related to our perceived future relationship with China, or lack thereof.
In the past this never would have happened because well it was pretty dang obvious that it coming from a lab was by far the most probable scenario. But to some in modern times, going against the "official position" on something is little different than claiming the Earth is flat, and that's a catastrophic decline of critical thinking which greatly benefits the political establishment. For some they have become not only the arbiters of truth, but even of thought itself.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
I think you have completely failed to understand my point, so I will try again.
It does not matter that the current term "conspiracy theory" with its current negative meaning was not common before, to choose one date, 1945 when Popper used "conspiracy theory of society" in The Open Society and Its Enemies.
Just because the modern term did not exist, doesn't mean the underlying human behavior did not exist before then. (Indeed, Popper is describing something already present before 1945.)
Surely there were helicopter parents before there were helicopters.
Surely there were conspiracy theories before the modern phrase "conspiracy theory" was used.
Which is why I pointed to conspiracy theories of the early 1800s to show that your 1960s n-gram date does not mean there was a deep cultural change. It could simply be a newly popular turn of phrase to describe an age-old concept.
> 'oh my gosh, that's a conspiracy theory - you can't think that' style of thought which pervades in some circles in the West.
Right, but we're talking about one specific point - the idea that there's widespread weather control using "chemtrails" to cause a drought in Spain, and a conspiracy to keep that silent, and harassment of meteorologists believed to be members of that conspiracy - and THIS circle - HN commenters.
That you have your own views about other conspiracies and other circles is not something I want to engage in. THIS conspiracy theory about weather control is not tenable.
I am more than willing to believe there was a conspiracy to hide the negative effects of cigarette smoking. The evidence for that conspiracy theory is substantial. There are many other conspiracies that I agree occurred, including the conspiracy to convince Americans that streets are for cars, not people, the conspiracy to keep the illegal bombings of Cambodia quiet, the conspiracy to hide the negative effects of CO2 pollution, and the conspiracy to prevent racial mixing in the US though methods like red-lining.
However, I believe these conspiracy theories because 1) they are within the realm of possibility, and 2) there is good evidence for them.
Quite a contrast from this weather-modification conspiracy theory!
> But to some in modern times, going against the "official position"
Why do you care more about the nameless, unknown "some" concerning an "official position" about some random unspecified conspiracy theory than you care about the named meteorologists who are being harassed by weather control conspiracy theory believers, when that specific conspiracy theory has no basis in reality?
Wouldn't it involve less in the way of mental gymnastics to simply say they don't want to be left holding the bag?
> To achieve a 2 °C result, the plan would inject 6.7 teragrams (6.7 billion kg/14.8 billion lb) of sulfur dioxide per year into each pole, calling for an eye-watering total of 13.4 teragrams (29.5 billion lb) of material annually.
https://newatlas.com/environment/sai-polar-refreezing/
The cost would be astronomical (but far more doable than other climate engineering methods) and the environmental cost of raining sulfuric acid over the arctic with an enormous fleet of planes would be unspeakable.
They clearly released the plan to illustrate how impractical climate engineering is, but I wonder if this is a seed for the wider chemtrail theory.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/weapon-...
> "The first Large Area Concept experiment, in 1957, involved dispersing microorganisms over a swath from South Dakota to Minnesota; monitoring revealed that some of the particles eventually traveled some 1200 miles away. Further tests covered areas from Ohio to Texas and Michigan to Kansas. In the Army’s words, these experiments 'proved the feasibility of covering large areas of the country with [biological weapons] agents.'"
Well before airplane contrails were ever associated with a plot to alter the climate, it was all about a plot to control people's minds with toxic chemicals etc.
Of course, it is entirely true that a relatively small fleet of drones could disperse enough anthrax/smallpox powder over any large American city to cause mass casualties and initiate a pandemic-scale event, which is why development of such weapons is banned under the terms of the Biological Warfare Convention, although the Soviet Union violated that treaty on a massive scale in the 1970s and 1980s, and Israel and several other states have refused to sign it - and the US government has strongly opposed anything like an inspection / verification system, so...
Almost every 'conspiracy theory' has some seed of truth hidden inside it somewhere.
The problem of the "conspiracy theory" is that it is a witch trial: a group of people have absolutely no proof what-so-ever, they just "want to believe they are right".
It does not matter if they end up being right, their logic is toxic for society, and if we are accepting their logic, then it means that tomorrow you can be fired from your job because your boss just had a dream in which you were a thief. Your argument is the same as saying "well, your boss says you are a thief, but thieves exist for real, and, who knows, maybe you are in fact really a thief, so it's fine".
Something not being provable underlies the definition of the term theory, Google this phrase, "is it required for a theory to have proof" to understand.
"It does not matter if they end up being right"
This is not a logical stance.
And, yes, it does not matter if they end up being right, the same way it does not matter if a broken clock end up being right: it is still a very very unethical and unfair way of managing a society. I can throw knives from the top of my building, and sometimes I will hit someone that deserve it. According to your logic, it's fine.
On top of that, if you learn they end up being right, it means that someone else came up with the proof, demonstrating that they were utterly useless: their "belief" did not change anything, because the proof would have appeared anyway. All they have done is being counter-productive and delayed the discovery of the proof (and sometimes ruining it totally).
It's a bit like bad cops that "get the bad guy" by breaking the rules and end up with the bad guy being released due to breach of procedure. It's just totally stupid: if they believe there is a problem, they investigate and bring proofs upfront, not start accusing without proofs.
I saw a lot of people not behaving like that, spreading misinformation as if it was fact without caring about the consequences of the person they accused, but then pretending that they just "started bolting their door", though.
And the CNN article that started this conversation is certainly not talking about these kind of people (not sure if they even would call such people "conspiracy theorists"), they are talking about people who decide to destroy their neighbor's life just because, in their book, the neighbor deserved it by doing something that they decided was suspicious. In fact, this article talks about people who attacks honest scientists just doing their job who haven't done anything suspicious in the first place.
I bring it up to illustrate that we are already making consequential choices about the climate.
If it came to it and it was the only way, it's not that astronomical and would probably cost less than dealing with a single major weather disaster or crop failure.
Maybe it's a terrible idea for other reasons (though I would be surprised if the acidity even really registered next to existing sulphur and CO2 emissions, but then again it's all concentrated in a few places), but the cost isn't a slam-dunk "yeah, no, that's literally impossible" conclusion.
Also, the effects are bad enough that the habitability in the aerosol zone for the "1%” of the human population living in there is a concern. That can’t be good for the local wildlife...
My point isn't that it's an amazing idea, or even a good one, just that it's eminently within the realms of physical and economic possibility. Hell, SAC probably flew a comparable number air miles than that for decades at a time, just circling nuclear weapons near the USSR.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
As the evidence has piled up and the model projections have been proven accurate, their ability to recruit third-party promoters of climate denialism in public has steadily fallen, so they've turned to using social media puppet accounts to orchestrate denialism campaigns. Regardless, the results of the uncontrolled experiment humans are playing with the atmosphere by dumping billions of tons of fossil carbon into it are pretty clear, and model projections from decades ago are tracking current reality fairly closely:
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/202001_accuracy/
It's too easy to use the "chemtrails" card when in reality it's only just cloud seeding, one of the different weather modification techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding
There are no proof that it was used in Spain, but..
When Saudi Arabia abuses cloud seeding for their needs, it's water that's gonna be missing where the cloud were headed, could be Spain, could be Italy, could also be Egypt, Turkey or Kenya
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2091101/middle-east
https://www.arabianbusiness.com/culture-society/cloud-seedin...
Same problem in Mexico: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01038-5
Wich causes problems for its neighborhoods, whoever pretend this doesn't have an effect is not a scientist
Butterfly effect, their actions have consequences elsewhere on the planet
The problem is not that the perps are conspiracy theorists it's that they think harassment is a reasonable behaviour.
Climate activists can be just as harassing as their counter parts.
And it's getting worse.
But only a mad conspiracy theorist would think that this is propaganda.
meanwhile cloud seeding continues on by billionaires.
https://www.msnbc.com/mtp-daily/watch/mountain-west-looks-to...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2022/01/20/solar-g...
For example, there has been no "mea culpa" around massive problems such as:
The Ozone Hole being discarded initially as erroneous data
The US Historical Climate Network flawed sites permitted to enter the climate record
The mismatch between highly accurate space based temperature sensors, and US HCN
The hiding of warm periods, and the Younger Dryas, convenient dating, hiding the glaciation and deglaciation trends by academic meteorologists for funding/political reasons
Intentionally discounting Solar Radiance and Albedo
Permitting weather sensors (ASOS) on US runways to enter the weather record - how'd you like a weather report manipulated by prop blast or jet wash?
It is the very Cathedral establishment that has approached these issues as "Science the Religion shall not be questioned", instead of science as a process that needs to be continually refined via tight feedback loops. Critics, skeptics, and nay-saying scientists are heretics - prepare them for auto-da-fé
I believe in science as a process, not a religion.
I am against despotism, yet I think only despotism has any hope of averting the disaster.
Thus disaster is inevitable. I predict the population of humans on Earth will be half what it is today, 150 years from now.