The sky is falling?

It’s no secret that Santa Barbara County has a weather modification, or geoengineering, program. The county started cloud seeding in 1948 and has been doing so intermittently throughout the years. The program is described on the county’s public works website, and in November, it was reported that the county will continue seeding the clouds with silver iodide during winter storms for the next five years ($300,000 a year) to promote more rainfall and replenish local watersheds.

 
But what is baffling to Santa Barbara Public Works Deputy Director Tom Fayram is the volume of calls the department has been receiving trying to link their weather modification program to “chemtrails.”

“We have a lot of calls this year,” says Fayram. “More so than years past.”

Google “chemtrails” and you will be led down a frightening rabbit hole where human beings are subjects of top-secret government and geoengineering programs across the world that spray chemical agents, namely aluminum oxide, from jets into the atmosphere in an attempt to manipulate and control the weather with no regard to its negative health effects.

Down in the hole, you find practically anything you want about related conspiracy theories — from video clips, government patents for aerosols to spray metals from aircraft and documents from various regimes in the world hinting at aspirations to one day own the weather. You may even stumble upon how cloud seeding programs, similar to the one in Santa Barbara County, were used as a weapon by the United States during theVietnam War to flood the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

And ultimately, in the viral chemtrail rabbit hole, you will find the word “hoax,” which is an accurate definition, according to government officials and aviation experts, because the idea of chemtrails, they say, defies science and the simple logic of lessons  from junior high school science class.

“Where the connection came with chemtrails and cloud seeding is misinformation that is just perpetuated without any rational thought,” says Fayram.

Contrary to scientific explanation, chemtrails, proponents suggest, are not to be confused with contrails, or condensation trails — white streaks made up of dense water vapors that trail aircraft. Chemtrails, they say, are the billowy chemical-laden trails that do not immediately dissipate but are persistent and spread for hours, creating milky skies that block out the sun. The aluminum oxide, along with the other chemicals such as barium and strontium are allegedly sprayed from planes, possibly to work as agents to control global warming, trickle down through the atmosphere, tainting the water and food supply, which relates to the rise of Alzheimer’s, a decrease in life expectancy and various other human ailments.

 
“I didn’t notice them (chemtrails) until the ’90s,” says Teri Hitt, a Ventura resident who maintains a blog documenting the trails in Ventura County. “I know when I was younger I would walk out the door and there was not criss-crossing lines across the sky that fan out and make the sky milky white. I know that was not the case. Something else has changed. Did the whole atmosphere change and now all contrails do that?”

A concerned local took pictures of what he claims are suspicious trails in the sky over Ojai.

Contrails have always done that, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) fact sheet about aircraft contrails, and yes, independent studies show the atmosphere is changing. If the humidity is high (greater than the need for ice condensation to occur), the contrail will be persistent, and continue to grow by taking water from the surrounding atmosphere, states the EPA fact sheet, which is also endorsed by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration),  NOAA(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration). The contrails can last for hours, it explains, and grow to several kilometers in width and 200 to 400 meters in height.

The nonprofit Santa Barbara-based Novim Group is a scientific think tank whose “mission is to provide clear scientific options to the most urgent problems facing society, to explore and explain the feasibility, probable costs and possible consequences of each course of action.” Conclusive information from the Novim Group’s 18-month earth temperature study (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study), spearheaded by prominent astrophysicist Richard Muller, who had long doubted the science behind global warming, was  presented before Congress last November concluding that the earth’s temperature has risen roughly 1 degree Celsius over the past half-century. (The group also included Saul Perlmutter, who recently won the Nobel prize for physics.) The million-dollar study, funded in part by Bill Gates, Ann and Gordon Getty and even global warming skeptics the Koch Brothers, has been widely regarded by the scientific community as the most complete and accurate information concerning global warming.

“We look at things people are having a great deal of difficulty agreeing on mainly because nobody has done the fundamental science in such a way that it’s irrefutable,” explains Michael Ditmore, Novim executive director, who currently serves on the Director’s Council of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC, Santa Barbara.

The data, studies show, is still inconclusive as to how much aircraft emissions contribute to climate change.

But for some, the claims about global warming are a reason for the public to be wary about geoengineering, as it becomes the logical next step to combating the epidemic.

The viral documentary What in the World Are They Spraying? promulgates the theory that the sky has been made privy to secret government geoengineering projects because there is an increasing amount of aluminum found in water supplies and soil. It also suggests that normal contrails quickly fade and that, since the late ’90s, contrails seem to persist much longer than they used to. Co-producer Michael Murphy has been traveling the country, the world even, propelling the idea that the world’s population is being experimented on by way of chemtrails.

“Geoengineers are proposing spraying 10 to 20 million tons of toxic aluminum in our sky,” says Murphy. “What we see on a regular basis matches what is expressly outlined in geoengineering models. The fallout in terms of contamination in our atmosphere … matches geoengineers’ plans exactly.”

Some consider the science in Murphy’s film to be assumptive and suspect, at best, and it has been debunked by many independent reviewers. But the film has succeeded in confirming skeptics’ beliefs that the sky is becoming a toxic experiment.

 
Stopsprayingcalifornia.com claims that Ventura County was sprayed about 200 times in the past two years. But this isn’t a pesticide watch website. Thousand Oaks resident Dan Dimas runs the site, and when he refers to “spray days” he is referring to the number of times he believes the government has sprayed the population with toxic aerosols from aircraft in order to experiment with combating global warming or to operate top-secret military tests on the population. He has collected more than 1,400 images of these trails, sent to him from county residents.

“People around here are waking up and they want to do something about it,” says Dimas, 55. “Every time there is a spray day, I get at least 10 chemtrail reports from around the county.”

Mike Villegas, Ventura County air executive officer, said that his department gets the occasional chemtrail phone calls.  “We stick with the Wikipedia explanation that chemtrails are not scientifically proven, and then send them the EPA-NASA-FAA fact sheet about contrails.”

Murphy’s film spreads the idea that aluminum from the chemtrails is seeping into local watersheds.

Patterns in the sky such as these are becoming a familiar sight. Questions have arisen regarding whether these are the result of secret weather modification programs or normal contrails.

Whether or not chemtrails have validity, Ventura County has nothing to worry about, says Susan McMahon, water quality supervisor. In California, the maximum contaminant level is 1,000 micrograms per liter. In 2009, Ventura County did not detect aluminum in the raw water supply. In 2010, 20 micrograms were detected per liter, and in 2011, 30 micrograms were detected per liter. For each of those years, aluminum was not detected in treated water.

Hitt, Dimas and Murphy all suggested an increase over the years in the number of jet trails and amount of activity overhead, also saying the flight patterns are more erratic.

But that doesn’t make sense, according to Santa Paula Airport manager Rowena Mason. There are hundreds of flights a day between regional airports, all with fixed flight patterns resembling something like a highway.

“It’s not just random,” Mason says.  “Depending on wind, if it’s blowing in the opposite direction, they will be out over the ocean that day because they have to go in a different direction. But there is a fixed pattern for each airport.”

On clear days, with no visible contrails, it’s not as if pilots all took the day off, Mason says. “Some days there will be lots of trails, and other days not at all,” she says. “Jets at certain altitudes in weather conditions won’t create a trail. It’s not that they are not flying, but the dew point has to be just right for heated exhaust to create vapor.” Sometimes, Mason explains, you can follow a jet on its path and “It will start making a trail and then stop because conditions are just right for it and then not.”

By typing in “flights overhead” on Wolframalpha.com or visiting Flightaware.com, those interested can track all airplanes in the control system, their current altitudes and the humidity level. “If you look up in the sky and see a trail, you can see what it is.”

The exception is military planes, whose flights are classified. Naval Base Ventura County, Point Mugu, is designated as one of the primary locations of the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, which is reason for concern for those believing the government is readily experimenting with how to use weather as the ultimate weapon.

Murphy says, “If you control the weather, you control food supply and every political system.”

What the chemtrail phenomenon — validity claims aside — does for the mainstream is propel discussion about the practice of geoengineering. As studies indicate, geoengineering on a much larger scale than that of cloud seeding may one day be seriously considered to keep the planet’s surface temperature sustainable.

“When you approach these kinds of global problems, there is usually a mitigation phase that people go through,” says Ditmore. To slow down global warming, explains Ditmore, the mitigation phase includes buying electric cars, going green or reducing the burning of carbon fuels. “That is mitigation. The next phase is called adaptation. So what do you do when mitigation doesn’t work?”

In 2009, Novim sponsored a one-week “technical review and evaluation of proposed climate engineering concepts that might serve as a rapid palliative response to such climate emergency scenarios.” The authors of the study included noted climate scientists David Keith and Ken Caldeira. The study is mostly focused on one particular method: stratospheric aerosol injection to increase the earth’s reflectivity. The report is strictly a study, and never suggests that stratospheric aerosol injection should be pursued, but says, “We do judge it among the most feasible and potentially useful.”
“People have a reaction of ‘don’t you ever think of doing that,’ ” says Ditmore, who adds that, to the best of his knowledge, aerosol geoengineering is not currently employed. “Whereas the more logical thing is to say, ‘All right, let’s take the worst-case scenario and the planet starts going up 2 or 3 degrees. What the hell you going to do about it?’ ”

It’s a global decision, and Ditmore says it’s certainly logical for the world to have a Plan B.

“It’s kind of like having a fire extinguisher in a glass case on the wall,” he conjectures. “Do you wait until there is a fire and break the case and read the instructions? Or do you learn how to use the fire extinguisher and break the glass so you can use it immediately? Logic may tell you it’s better to figure out what might happen if you have to reach for that fire extinguisher before you have to do it. That is just prudence. That is how a logical person would tend to view geoengineering. Let’s do everything we can to understand the subject short of doing anything that might be catastrophic with unintended consequences.”