āCHEMTRAILSā? REALLY? DID YOU FLUNK SCIENCE?
For the past few years, my Facebook page kept flagging strange websites that claimed that ordinary contrails formed by high-flying aircraft are āchemtrails,ā a special kind of chemical sprayed on the unwitting population for reasons too bizarre and illogical to take seriously. For a long time, Iāve ignored this garbage on the internet, but in recent years it has gotten more and more pervasive, and Iāve run into people who believe it. There are whole shows about it on the once-scientific Discovery Channel, and the History Channel as well.
Now the chemtrail community circulatesĀ their photos and videos among themselves, put hundreds of these videos on YouTube, and on their own sites and forums. But the way the internet works as a giant echo chamber for weird ideas with no peer review, fact checking, or quality control, itās getting impossible to ignore them any more, and itās time to debunk it.
The first few times I heard about āchemtrailsā, my reaction was āYou canāt be serious.ā But the people who spread thisĀ areĀ serious. They are generally people who have already accepted the conspiracy theory mindset, where everything that they donāt like or donāt understand is immediate proof of some big government conspiracy. But thereās an even bigger factor at work here: gross science illiteracy. The first thing that pops in my mind reading their strange ideas is āDidnāt this person learnĀ anyĀ science in school?ā And the fastest rebuttal I give when I run into one of these nuts is: āDo you even understand the first thing about our atmosphere? Anything released at 30,000 feet will blow for miles away from where you see it, and has virtually no chance of settling straight down onto the people below, and be so diluted it would have no measurable amount of the chemical by the time it lands. Thatās why crop-dusting planes must fly barely 30 feet off the ground so their dust wonāt blow too far away from the crops!ā
AsĀ Kyle Hill describes it:
If the chemtrail conspiracy were true, millions of pilots would be needed to crop dust the American population. A typical crop duster might use seven ounces of agent diluted in seven gallons of water to cover one acre of land. Chemtrail āpeople dustersā would use a similar concentration to cover the entire United States, just to be safe. For 2.38 billion acres of land, the pilots would then needāfor just one week of sprayingā120 billion gallons of these cryptic chemicals. Thatās around the same volume as is transported in all the worldās oil tankers in one year. And such an incredible amount of agent would need an incredible number of planes. Considering that a large air freighter like a Boeing 747 can carry around 250,000 pounds of cargo, at the very least, the government would need to schedule four million 747 flights to spread their chemicals each weekāeighteen times more flights per day than in the entire US.
