Cloud seeding in China?

A screen shot for posterity

You really have to wonder whether or not chemtrail-hoaxers even bother to check their sources when making their various accusations.

Clare’s posted a list of various videos showing various clouds and contrails from a mix’n'match of media sources. (This includes some Warner Bros. cartoons that date back to the 1950s, presumably long before the modern ‘geoengineering’ conspiracy that is Clare’s new theory du jour came into being — let’s put that aside for now).

The one that piqued my interest was the last video, entitled, interestingly enough: “CHEMTRAILS ADMITED BY CHINA (see correction below)”.

So, has China ‘admitted’ to laying chemtrails? And just what did this correction have to say? Turns out…

CHINA USES WEATHER MODIFICATION TO MAKE IT SNOW.. BUT THAT KINDA STUFF IS CONSPIRACY… RIGHT? * THIS IS ABOUT CLOUD SEEDING… SORRY FOR THE CONFUSION

So, the video’s actually about cloud-seeding? Indeed, if you watch it, that’s exactly what it’s about — and there’s no sign of chemtrails. The cloud-seeding is being done by shooting cigarette-sized sticks of silver iodide (not aluminium, or barium, then) at clouds.

Apropos of nothing in particular, I would also like to direct people to this series of comments (for as long as they last, archived here). Not only for another example of Clare’s breathtakingly hypocritical attitude as to what is and isn’t acceptable as evidence, but also for that fact that it looks like there’s a new “disinformation agent” on the block! (Although, I didn’t get the memo. The NWO really needs to get its internal comms sorted out…)

Clouds are weird

Don't panic! It's some quite normal mammatus cloud.

There are all sorts of weird-looking clouds. Mammatus is my particular favourite, but you can also get Morning Glory clouds, clouds shaped like waves formed by Kelvin-Helmholz instability and noctilucent clouds, just to name a few. They’re all pretty rare, but they do happen from time to time, and, of course, they’re all quite natural and can be explained using sound scientific principles.

Naturally though, like our friend Liara in Hawaii who craps her pants at the sight of (relatively common, in NZ) lenticular clouds, Clare over at Northland NZ Chemtrails seems to see the presence of a hole-punch cloud as evidence of ‘full-time weather modification’. You’d think if ‘full-time weather modification’ was actually happening and resulted in hole-punch clouds, then we’d see this type of cloud all the time. I await further pictorial evidence of the increased commonality of hole-punch clouds with bated breath. (It goes without saying that attempts to point out to Clare just what type of cloud this was were deleted in short order).

Of course, hole-punch (or fall-streak) clouds are perfectly normal. The wikipedia entry has a nice succinct explanation on their formation…

A fallstreak hole (also: hole punch cloud, punch hole cloud, canal cloud) is a large circular gap that can appear in cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds. Such holes are formed when the water temperature in the clouds is below freezing but the water has not frozen yet due to the lack of ice nucleation particles. When a portion of the water does start to freeze it will set off a domino effect, due to the Bergeron process, causing the water vapor around it to freeze and fall to the earth as well. This leaves a large, often circular, hole in the cloud.

It is believed that a disruption in the stability of the cloud layer, such as that caused by a passing jet, may induce the domino process of evaporation which creates the hole. Such clouds are not unique to one geographic area and have been photographed from the United States to Russia.

Because of their rarity and unusual appearance, fallstreak holes are often mistaken for or attributed to unidentified flying objects.

It’s interesting in this instance that, to an extent, hole-punch clouds can sometimes be triggered by human interfence — passing planes, as mentioned in the wikipedia entry, can set off the process whereby a hole-punch cloud is formed. You can see some good examples of this in the gallery of hole-punch clouds over at the Cloud Appreciation Society — they really are quite spectacular.

Why argue the point?

Craego, a commenter over at Northland NZ Chemtrails asks a good question of those of us who spend time debunking chemtrail believers [edit: comment has now been deleted, presumably in another bout of site 'cleansing' by Clare] …

LMFAO now WHY would anyone with half a brain waste their time creating a webpage trying to PROVE that something they believe doesnt exist, does not in fact exist??

Yes indeed, a question that requires a LMFAO and a two question marks! (And no apostrophes). That aside, why do we do it?

Now, my ‘debunking’ days started when I was browsing through YouTube one evening, and stumbled across a video showing what it purported to be ‘chemtrails’. To me, they looked like normal contrails, so I asked the poster why they thought they were ‘chemtrails’. The answer: ‘because real contrails don’t persist for more than a few seconds’. I was pretty sure this wasn’t right, so I asked a meterorologist and a commercial pilot about the science behind contrails. Of course, the fact of the matter is that contrails can persist for minutes, or even hours — it all depends on the conditions at the time. The evidence for this (both scientific and observational) is irrefutable.

But, browsing around the (many) sites dedicated to chemtrails, it quickly became apparent that this piece of misinformation (that persistent contrails = chemtrails) is deeply entrenched in the chemtrail believers’ community. However (as I quickly found out), if you point this out to them, you get labelled as a ‘shill’ or ‘disinformation’ agent. Here’s a fantastically representative example of this happening over at uncensored, where the “persistent contails = chemtrails” meme is repeated (again), and when I point out the inaccuracy of this statement, the original poster (surprise surprise, Clare Swinney), starts shouting ‘disinformation agent’ at the top of her voice, whilst completely avoiding the actual mistake she’s made (again).

So, why continue? I’m never going to change the mind of someone like Clare, so why persevere?

The thing is, not everyone is like Clare, and there are probably plenty of people (like myself) who do catch a whiff of this thing called ‘chemtrails’ on the internet, and then do some ‘research’ to discover what it’s all about. And if you’re the type of person who believes what they read, then if the only type of site you find when googling up ‘chemtrails’ are the likes of Uncensored, Northland NZ Chemtrails and Pacific Chemtrail, then you’d very quickly start to believe that a persistent contrail is a chemtrail, that the presence of aluminium and barium in water samples is somehow unnatural, and that a pretty sunset or a 22° halo indicates the presence of man-made chemicals in the atmosphere.

Chemtrail believers often decry ‘disinformation’ agents who spread incorrect facts, but are amongst the worst perpetrators of such behaviour themselves. Hence the desire to add some balance (i.e. facts) to the discussion. Hopefully people doing some online reading on the ‘chemtrail’ phenomena will also stumble across sites like this one, Contrail Science and Contrails North NZ that will let people realise that those long white clouds formed by planes are nothing but condensed water vapour and nothing to worry about.

After all, there are plenty of things that are worth worrying about in this day and age, so having one less thing on that list is surely a good thing.

Venus now responsible for chemtrails?

Rather than continuing my ‘What in the world are they smoking’ series, I’ve been procrastinating by looking at some of Rose’s lovely sunrise photos over at Pacific Chemtrail.

In her latest series she observes….

Yesterday witnessed a bright object over the rising sun – it looked like a star only there were no other stars in the sky. It shone in broad daylight on the east coast (over the sea in an orange hazy sky) just above the rising sun. This morning it is not there. They are up to something and that object was not a star.

Intriguing. I fired up Stellarium to make sure Rose hadn’t made a stupid mistake like mistaking a planet for something more ‘sinister’. Here’s what Rose would have seen, looking east from Kaikoura, just before sunrise on Nov 4th…

You are my venus, etc...

I think Rose was right — it wasn’t a ‘star’, but feel free to draw your own conclusions.