Finally got that Freemason invite!

Hahahahaha! This blog was always destined to FAIL! No posts or comments in over a year. Maybe the annoying little boy that started this blog actually grew up?! They all do eventually and figure out how immature & futile their pursuit of “professional argumentativeness” actually is. Ce la vie. Yet another in a long line of silly hobby “debunking” sites bites the dust while actual truth moves on as ever… gone AND forgotten!

So sayest the fantastically named ‘NutbarsnzRtheRealNutbars’ in a typically considered, thoughtful comment from the conspiracy theorist side of the fence. (And I’d be impressed if the email address they commented with really was ‘nutbarsnzyousuckbigones@andyouhaveatinypenis.com’.)

Anyway, as NutbarsnzRtheRealNutbars has pointed out, this site has been put on indefinite hiatus. As the site byline states, I’ve been banging my head against various conspiracy theories for a few years now, and you can only point out other people’s mistakes for so long before realising they’re never going to (or will never want to) learn. The chemtrail hoax is pretty well dealt with by other sites (notably Metabunk and Contrail Science) for anyone who’s at all confused about the science behind contrails (and the non-science behind ‘chemtrails’).

Elsewhere…

And smashdracs! I’d've put you at the top if you’d just asked!

Oh and on another related sidenote that some here may find amusing… before I stated adding any comments in these forums I did a little back-reading and followed a few links. One that I visited only a few times was this rather silly little debunking blog called nutbarsnz. I laughed raucously at the massive amount of spamming they were receiving from one commenter in particular before the blog pretty much dried up (and blew away) just over a year ago. Cut a long story short…

Oh, come on Karmakazi Angel!? Surely you’re not accusing our favourite commenter – Biblical Prophet – of being a ‘spammer’? He just made, um, ‘interesting’ points. Unlike, say, MysteriousNZ, Clare Swinney or The Contrail, I’m not in the habit of deleting comments or banning people whose views disagree with my own.

Rightio, leaving the chemtrail hoaxers to their paranoid little delusions … now.

Cloudbusting

Seems Clare and the crew over at the Con Trail have discovered cloud-seeding!

How does cloud-seeding marry up with popular chemtrail theory?

• ‘Chemtrails’ are long straight lines of ‘chemicals’ that spread out to form cirrus-like clouds.
  Cloud-seeding is done directly into clouds – no ‘line’s are created.
• ‘Chemtrails’ contain aluminium, barium, and other miscellaneous chemical and biological agents
  Cloud-seeding uses silver iodine.
• ‘Chemtrailing’ started in the late 1990s.
  Cloud-seeding has been around since the 1940s.

So cloud-seeding doesn’t look like ‘chemtrails’, doesn’t contain any of the chemicals that you’d expect to find in ‘chemtrails’, and pre-date the ‘chemtrail’ era by fifty years.

And on that last point, the guys over at Metabunk have even discovered that this specific cloud-seeding operation has been in existence since 1948.

To think, all that work the NWO has been doing on keeping chemtrails a secret, and then someone goes and puts an ad about it in the local paper!

Here’s Kate, singing about another weather modification technique…

Contrails over Adelaide

Clare’s posted a report and some pictures from ‘CuzzieBro’ that showing ‘trails’ over Adelaide.

Surprisingly, the report contains enough actual facts to make some sort of analysis as to what was going on. Using flightradar24, CuzzieBro established that the plane in question was Thia [sic] Airways THA461, and it was at a height of 37000ft when his pictures were taken. Not surprisingly, neither CuzzieBro nor Clare bothered to take the extra step of trying to figure out if the atmospheric conditions at that time were conducive to contrails.

So, again, using the guide Clare recommends, let’s find the upper atmospheric readings for a nearby weather station (in this case, Adelaide Airport), for that day. The results…?

At a height of 370000ft (11277m), for Adelaide Aiport on the 31st of October:

• Temperature: -54C
• Pressure: 223hPa
• RelH%: 42%

And then we plot that on the Appleman Chart…

…which would make you think that maybe, just maybe, what was photographed were contrails?

Colourless clouds?

This time it’s cirrus…

I saw colours in it too, which one does not see in natural cloud material.

So sayeth Clare, when trying to argue that some cirrus clouds she saw on the 18th of October were, in fact, human-manufactured ‘aerosol material’.

Now, I’m not sure when refraction and iridescence stopped working in Clare’s universe, but the effect of sunlight passing through clouds and creating various colours is well-understood, often observed, and perfectly natural…

A google image search reveals dozens of pictures of this phenomenon.

It’s also helpfully pointed out that the clouds in question are, in fact, normally-occurring cirrus. Surely a quick squizz at the satellite picture for that day (also provided to Clare) would certainly suggest that this is the case…

Given the length and breadth of the cloud system — stretching from north of Northland, to (at least) the coast off the Wairarapa — you’d think that had this been a human operation, that it would have taken many many planes to have laid down this ‘aerosol material’. Clare saw these clouds in the morning, so, logically, the planes doing the ‘spraying’ must have been operating throughout the early hours of that day (between midnight and 6am) to have achieved that level of coverage.

So, where did these planes come from? Where did they land? Did anyone see or hear them? Can you take-off and land that many planes in NZ airspace at that time of the night and early morning without alerting someone, somewhere that something strange is going on?

Apparently so!

Caught in the act

I must be making a mistake. Any suggestions/pointers as to where my analysis has gone wrong is welcome.

Here’s the gist of it. Clare reports she’s caught  Korean Air 129 En Route From Seoul To Auckland ‘in the act’ of laying down a ‘chemtrail’.

Anyway, following the Appleman Chart video guide that Clare has so helpfully been referring people to recently, I looked up the nearest upper atmosphere sounding (Whenupai) to get an idea of upper atmosphere conditions at the time. Now, ‘normal’ cruising altitudes for 747-400 can vary greatly, but let’s say for the sake of argument and erring on the side of conservatism, that it was somewhere in the bally-hoo of 25000 to 30000ft as it approached Auckland for landing. I got this…

So, here’s where I’m not sure. At the higher altitude (within normal 747-400 cruising range), it would seem that contrails were almost certain to occur, at the lower one (assuming some altitude drop on approach to Auckland), we’re in the ‘maybe’ range. But if that’s the case, why has Clare deemed her observation as a ‘chemtrail’ certainty when it goes against the advice of the guide she herself has been advising people to use when trying to determine what and what is not a ‘chemtrail’. Am I grossly over-estimating the altitude of a 747-400 that’s twenty minutes from its arrival time?

Can someone with a greater handle on the science in this situation steer me right? Thanks.

(I should point out, I’m not being entirely disingenuous here, I honestly think I must have made a mistake if Clare is so being so adamant about her observation).

Other people speculate. I state facts.

She says there are no chemtrails, but that the atmosphere has changed with the result that there appears that there are chemtrails.

Well, I happen to know that’s not the case, and it annoys me intensely when people make authoritative statements which are essentially conjecture.

…says Steve Clougher, over at MysteriousNZ.

Does he annoy himself, I wonder?

Is The Aerosol Material Up There To Facilitate Corporations’ Transmissions?

Well, no. Although someone over at Clare’s would beg to differ…

…it’s completely overcast the whole of Auckland … And guess what, there’s the live All Blacks game at Eden Park on TV tonight – big deal…they’ve got it covered though, becasue there ain’t no sun to interfere with their satellite transmission, not that there would have been at 7.30pm anyway – just testing for the real thing though, eh … I say there is absolutely no chance of the sun getting in the way of their precious satellite transmission ($$$$) for the World Cup or any other satellite transmission – they already have that sorted with the white haze and grey CRAP they put up into our beautiful skies. I’m currently of the belief that that crap up there, [aerosol material], IS for their satellite transmissions …

It is, of course, true that there’s a chance that the sun might interfere with live TV broadcasts during the cup, as the satellite supplying all the NZ broadcasters, is going to be passing in front of the sun around that time. From the Herald…

Sun outages happen during the summer and winter equinoxes in April and September, when day and night are of equal length. The phenomenon occurs when the satellite passes directly between the antenna on earth and the sun. All World Cup broadcasters share the same satellite – Optus D1. Sun outages would hit regions at slightly different times but disruptions would last for a quarter of an hour each day, for a fortnight, TVNZ Transmission services manager Wayne Huggard told NZPA. Viewers who had a standard satellite-dish would experience outages between September 4 and September 12. The peak outage would be at 1.20pm at on September 8, and last for 14 minutes

Bummer. So how is this likely to affect the “precious satellite transmission ($$$$)” of actual World Cup games?

A pool match between Scotland and Romania on September 10 at 1pm has been scheduled during a sun outage.

And that’s it. One game. And remember, this outage is only affecting NZ viewers, who are a tiny proportion of the world-wide audience. To protect their precious $$$$, the powers-that-be are supposedly pumping aerosol material into the atmosphere to save a few minutes of broadcast time for those of us here in NZ who are desperate to watch the Scots beat up their Eastern European cousins.

Even worse, whether it’s cloudy or not will make little difference to the sun’s effect on the broadcast. What’s relevant is that sun outages cause interference in the microwave part of the spectrum, which is the same bandwidth satellites use for broadcasting. Cloud coverage is irrelevant (which is why satellite transmissions continue to work when it’s cloudy), although you do run the risk of rain fade should it get too damp up there.

Someone should have a word to the Corporations physics team before they waste any more of their precious $$$$ on unnecessary and ineffectual chemtrailing missions.

April Fools

Rose over at the CONTrail (and reposted by Clare, here) posts some info about an ‘anomaly over Christchurch’. Here’s the vid…

Wow. Massive blue glowing ‘vortexes’ over New Brighton? Freaky stuff.

What’s even freakier, to my mind, is that no-one else saw them. The original source of the YouTube vid ProfanityDubstepNZ, does state that the photos shown in the video were taken at 5am in the morning. His mate, Rudy P, who supplied the photos to ProfanityDubstepNZ says…

My Mum took these photos at about 5am on 29th March from her balcony on Scarborough Hill in Sumner Christchurch. The city lights you can see is New Brighton area. She said this thing stayed visible well into the day

ProfanityDubstepNZ tries to defend the lack of any corroborating witnesses by commenting…

Take in to fact that this happened at 5am in Christchurch, we were only hit by that 6.3 just over a month ago and it is said up to 200,000 people have left the city out of a population of not even 1,000,000 before the time, take it from me its a lot quieter around here so im thankful we have photo’s

The actual population of Christchurch is a bit under 400,000, so even if we accept half that number did leave the city after the quake (and haven’t returned), we’re still left with the fact that the only witness so far claimed that this anomaly was visible “well into the day”, and that not one of the remaining one-fifth of a million people remaining in the city spotted these huge glowing blue vortices hovering above the city’s eastern suburbs.

Naturally, chemtrails have to get involved. Says Bill Blyth…

There also seems to be a faint line of a CT in one of the shots.4th pic down from the top.

That’s this photo. Crank up the levels, and you can see that the said chemtrail is, in fact, the window-frame of the room from where the photo was taken. (Also visible here, here and here.)

So, there are two possibilities:

On the one hand we have a youtube user whose mate’s mum took some photos of a quite extraordinary phenomenon. There really was an anomaly of some sort over New Brighton, but it was completely missed by the rest of the population, despite being visible into the daylight hours, when tens of thousands of people would have been passing directly underneath it (not to mention the many people who would’ve been awake and working at 5am anyway).

…or…

It’s just someone messing about with torches.

You decide.

Belief ≠ Science

I see Contrails North NZ has already covered this topic pretty well, but I thought I’d add my own thoughts, as it really is a story packed to the brim with head-against-brickwall ignorance. The gist of the story is such: NZ Member of Parliament Jim Anderton has replied to a chemtrail-hoaxer’s letter by asking for scientific proof. To quote a bit of Jim’s reply…

…I do not have any scientific credentials myself, and is the case in such circumstances I have to rely on those who do. The source you quote does not seem to have any such credentials either, and I have seen no evidence to date to suggest that the claim you make has any scientific foundation.

Well, he wouldn’t have, would he — there isn’t any. Of course, Clare & co. have had to think of how they might get some of this so-called ‘scientific evidence’. Bill Blyth suggests non-scientists using the scientific method might be in with a shot. He undermines this sensible suggestion by alluding to the fact that the existence of ‘chemtrails’ is just blindingly obvious, and draws on this analogy:

…would you need a scientific report if a tsunami was ariving in ten minutes, of cause not.” (sic)

Well, actually, unless you’d felt the earthquake that had triggered the tsunami and suspected one might be on the way, you would need a scientific report; probably relayed by a non-scientifically worded alert from the media or civil defense, but a scientifically-sourced report nonetheless. Anyway…

The problem is, of course, that no chemtrail-hoaxers ever get to the ‘experimentation’ step of the process. Instead of doing any sort of logical scientfic analysis, they tend to see a persistent contrail, at which point they jump straight to the ‘draw conclusion’ step of the process (“it’s a chemtrail!”) and call it quits.

You can see a classic example of such non-science on a subsequent post (in fact, you could just about pick any post at random, but anyway): Person sees ‘chemtrail’. Person gets sick. Thus ‘chemtrail’ has caused ‘illness’. The complete lack of any scientific rationale there is mind-boggling. Has Whitianga really been hit with wave of inexplicable disease? Has anyone checked?

It’s actually a hypothesis that is often suggested by chemtrail-hoaxers (that we’re being sprayed with various diseases in some sort of depopulation programme), and one that you’d think would be pretty easy to analyse. If you see ‘chemtrails’ (A), check hospital admissions (B). If  (A) leads to an unexpected increase in (B) then you’ve got a working hypothesis! This approach was even suggested to Clare Swinney over at Uncensored a while back, but such suggestions just lead to the usual cries of ‘disinformation agent’. Sigh.

Paeroa weighs in with, again, some sensible suggestions, which are, again, undermined by glaring problems:

A team could be assembled to interview on video, people suffering from the classic symptoms of being exposed to the sprays.

Just what are the ‘classic symptoms’? How do you prove it’s caused by the ‘chemtrails’? Oh, hold on, Paeroa continues:

Difficult to prove it’s caused by chemtrails, just need to show there is something very wrong occurring in our environment and the health issues can be linked to the common chemicals used in the spraying.

On the first point – dead right. On the second point, there very likely are problems with our environment that are causing health issues for some people, but to pin it on persistent contrails is a stretch, at best.

Still, maybe it’s a step in the right direction. If some of the chemtrail-hoaxers do apply a little scientific scrutiny to their hare-brained theories, they might well discover they’ve been woefully misguided, and decide to put their energies into some sort of activism that better serves the community. We can but hope.

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.