February 13, 2023
If I drew a tic-tac-toe board with chalk on a large stone wall, I might get away with it the first day. But if I got out the chalk every single day, sooner or later I would be caught and the state might well charge me with graffiti, a form of vandalism. If I wielded that chalk for long enough, it would be hard to erase the graffiti and even harder to remove the residue from the wall.
Now what if we drew lines across the sky day and night, on an ever-increasing number of days each year? Take five minutes to look skyward and you are likely to witness chalk-like lines emerging from airplanes and crisscrossing the sky. Some people call these lines chem-trails, others say they are part of a covert solar radiation management (geo-engineering) program, while most consider them ‘just contrails’. Whatever you call them, these persistent trails in the sky cause significant issues.
Those of us who enjoy looking up into the heavens are annoyed by these trails that mar the sky with unartistic graffiti. Often the trails spread out to form cirrus clouds that blanket the sky, turning a bluebird day the color of tarnished aluminum. At night these trails, and the cirrus clouds they create, blot out the stars, often rendering amateur astronomy a fruitless activity even in the darkest regions of our planet. According to a 1998 study by NASA scientists, a figure 8 trail 10 km wide formed 12,000 square kilometers of cirrus clouds, while a cluster of “contrails presumed to be from commercial aircraft, “ 35km long, became 35,000 square kilometers of cirrus clouds. (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/97GL03314)
Perhaps the graffiti in the sky doesn’t bother you, as you feel no desire to look up. Well, it turns out there are benefits to simply raising your gaze. The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkley found that “when we look up, our brains get better at being playful, creative and thinking critically.” (https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/podcasts/item/why_we_should_look_up_at_the_sky_the_science_of_happiness#:~:text=When%20we%20look%20up%2C%20our,day%2Dto%2Dday%20lives.)
Even if you aren’t seeking to improve your creative thinking, marvel at the clear blue heavens or gaze at the stars, there is another major issue that impacts us all. Linear sky trails and the cirrus clouds they form cause “radiative forcing,” better known as global warming. In fact, there is strong evidence to suggest these cirrus clouds cause three times more warming than the actual CO2 emissions from air traffic. https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-the-growth-in-greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-commercial-aviation
It’s time to take a critical look at the sky. Whether you consider them chem-trails or contrails, air traffic is pumping out trails that obscure our skies, threaten our psychological well-being, and warm our planet. There are proven ways to reduce or even eliminate them through the use of technology and practices such as small-scale flight diversion (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b05608) . In a democracy the will of the people brings change. It’s time to demand a reduction in aircraft trails, our present and future health depends on it. The future starts now.
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