Chemtrails? 'Stratospheric Aerosol Injection', Sayeth 'The Science™'

Experiments are going on since 2007/09, but we don't really know what we're doing, and we better hope and pray that 'the Science™' doesn't destroy us all

Today I’ve got a special one for you, dear readers. Many of you might have at some point heard or seen about so-called ‘chemtrails’ on the internet or, more recently, sometimes by looking up into the sky.

Here’s a primer to get this conversation started:

I would encourage you to click on this Wikipedia link for the above text, as well as for the de facto ‘official™’ version. Notes 1 and 2 read as follows:

Fn. 1: Science, Carnegie (12 August 2016). ‘“Chemtrails” not real, say leading atmospheric science experts’. Carnegie Institution for Science. Archived from the original on 20 December 2016. Retrieved 11 May 2019. ‘Some groups and individuals erroneously believe that the long-lasting condensation trails, or contrails, left behind aircraft are evidence of a secret large-scale spraying program. They call these imagined features “chemtrails”.’

Fn. 2: Fraser, Stephen (2009). ‘Phantom menace? Are conspirators using aircraft to pollute the sky?’. Current Science. 94 (14): 8–9. ProQuest 195877531. ‘Some theorists speculate that the goal is population control; some say it’s climate modification; others say it’s military weapons testing.’

We note, in passing, two things: first, none of the information quoted is ‘recent’, with the first note being borderline ‘relatively recent’ and the second one clearly ‘outdated’ (apart from the author being a Star Wars™ fanboy).

Second, have a look (and laugh) at the ‘evidence™’ mustered in note 6, reproduced below:

Fn. 6: Shearer, Christine; West, Mick; Caldeira, Ken; Davis, Steven J. (1 January 2016). ‘Quantifying expert consensus against the existence of a secret, large-scale atmospheric spraying program’. Environ. Res. Lett. 11 (8): 084011. Bibcode:2016ERL....11h4011S. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/11/8/084011.

Of course, Wikipedia is a notorious agit-prop tool for the powers-that-be (if you don’t believe it, have fun looking at virtually anything that involves ‘Israel’ and its neighbours there, e.g., this piece in Haaretz from 2023), hence a brief look at the ‘evidence™’ mustered against the ‘Chemtrails conspiracy theory’ is warranted.

In what follows, emphases mine (if not mentioned otherwise).

Carnegie Science: ‘“Chemtrails” not real’ (2016)

Here is an archived link (which you can access directly from the above-linked Wikipedia entry), and here are some choice quotes from the piece entitled, most tellingly, ‘“Chemtrails” not real, say leading atmospheric science experts’ (I’m not kidding):

Well-understood physical and chemical processes can easily explain the alleged evidence of a secret, large-scale atmospheric spraying program, commonly referred to as “chemtrails” or “covert geoengineering,” concludes a new study from Carnegie [sic] Science, University of California Irvine, and the nonprofit organization Near Zero.

Here’s a link to the ‘nonprofit org Near Zero’, whose copyright covers 2017-19, whose ‘about section’ is devoid of any concrete information about who funds them, and despite loads of boilerplate blablabla, there’s apparently no-one who works there (ProPublica also has no record of this nonprofit). I’d call this a BS org, but then again, we don’t have time for this particular rabbit hole as there are ‘other’ burrows to explore.

Back to the thingy in Carnegie (sic) Science:

The authors of this study, including Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira [a senior scientist emeritus], conducted a survey of the world’s leading atmospheric scientists, who categorically rejected the existence of a secret spraying program [so, they asked their peers if stuff circulating online might be bogus: ‘the Science™’, hard at-work]. The team’s findings, published by Environmental Research Letters, are based on a survey of two groups of experts: atmospheric chemists who specialize in condensation trails and geochemists working on atmospheric deposition of dust and pollution.

The survey results show that 76 of the 77 participating scientists said they had not encountered evidence of a secret spraying program [absence of evidence ≠ evidence of absence], and agree that the alleged evidence cited by the individuals who believe that atmospheric spraying is occurring could be explained through other factors, such as typical airplane contrail formation and poor data sampling.

So, after reading these two paragraphs, I looked at the paper—and let out a big sigh.

Note the last few words: ‘poor data sampling’. Will it surprise you that out of a the total of 3,105 people the authors queried, they’d highlight ‘76 of the 77 participating scientists’? And then they highlight 76 or 0.24% of the sample to support their claims? The sample and the survey are said to be documented at—guess which website/say the name—Near Zero’s website.

Here’s the gist from Caldeira’s Carnegie (sic) Science article:

‘We wanted to establish a scientific record on the topic of secret atmospheric spraying programs for the benefit of those in the public who haven’t made up their minds’, said Steven Davis of UC Irvine. ‘The experts we surveyed resoundingly rejected contrail photographs and test results as evidence of a large-scale atmospheric conspiracy.’

The research team says they do not hope to sway those already convinced that there is a secret spraying program—as these individuals usually only reject counter-evidence as further proof of their theories—but rather to establish a source of objective science that can inform public discourse.

‘Despite the persistence of erroneous theories about atmospheric chemical spraying programs, until now there were no peer-reviewed academic studies showing that what some people think are “chemtrails” are just ordinary contrails, which are becoming more abundant as air travel expands. Also, it is possible that climate change is causing contrails to persist for longer periods than they used to.’ Caldeira said. ‘I felt it was important to definitively show what real experts in contrails and aerosols think. We might not convince die-hard believers that their beloved secret spraying program is just a paranoid fantasy, but hopefully their friends will accept the facts.’

At this point, we shall leave ‘the Science is settled’ crowd behind, for their feelings and opinions isn’t exactly what, above anything, the Wikipedia article makes it out to be.

Forget ‘Chemtrails’, it’s Stratospheric Aerosol Injection

To understand better how propaganda is obscuring what we can observe (just search for ‘chemtrails’ on X/Twitter), the term ‘Stratospheric aerosol injection’ or SAI has been introduced around 2006 (if Google’s ngrams viewer is any guide).

Of course, there’s a Wikipedia article on it, and here’s Wikipedia’s definition (references omitted):

Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is a proposed method of solar geoengineering (or solar radiation modification) to reduce global warming. This would introduce aerosols into the stratosphere to create a cooling effect via global dimming and increased albedo, which occurs naturally from volcanic winter. It appears that stratospheric aerosol injection, at a moderate intensity, could counter most changes to temperature and precipitation, take effect rapidly, have low direct implementation costs, and be reversible in its direct climatic effects. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that it ‘is the most-researched [solar geoengineering] method that it could limit warming to below 1.5 °C (2.7 °F).’ However, like other solar geoengineering approaches, stratospheric aerosol injection would do so imperfectly and other effects are possible, particularly if used in a suboptimal manner.

O.k., I have a ton of questions, such as: are these effects factored into the IPCC’s ‘models™’? Now, if one ventures over to the IPCC’s current Assessment Report 6, there are, well, at least ‘some’ answers, specifically in Chapter 3 on ‘Mitigation Pathways Compatible with Long-Term Goals’, and I shall quote from p. 340:

…only a few studies have examined solar radiation modification (SRM), typically focusing on Stratospheric Aerosol Injection [so much for ‘it is the most-researched method’, which of course begs the question: how shoddy are the other ‘methods’?] (Arinoa et al. 2016; Emmerling and Tavoni 2018a,b; Heutel et al. 2018; Helwegen et al. 2019; Rickels et al. 2020; Belaia et al. 2021). These studies find that substantial mitigation is required to limit warming [how much effort/stuff we’d have to put into the atmosphere would that mean?] to a given level, even if SRM is available (Moreno-Cruz and Smulders 2017; Emmerling and Tavoni 2018b; Belaia et al. 2021). SRM may reduce some climate impacts [that’s all you’ve got? ‘may’? I’m sorry but that’s not good enough], reduce peak temperatures, lower mitigation costs, and extend the time available to achieve mitigation; [also: what could go wrong?] however, SRM does not address ocean acidification and may involve risks to crop yields, economies, human health, or ecosystems (AR6 WGII Chapter 16; AR6 WGI TS and Chapter 5; SR1.5 SPM; and Cross-Working Group Box 4 in Chapter 14 of this report).

This is, of course, insane, and the one thing that is even more insane—is what follows the above lines:

There are also significant uncertainties surrounding SRM, including uncertainties on the costs and risks, which can substantially alter the amount of SRM used in modelled pathways.

Bottom line here: the IPCC appears to include SAIs in its models.

What’s the issue here? Well, you see, ‘Chemtrails’ are, of course, a ‘Conspiracy Theory™’, but if ‘the Science™’ calls this ‘Stratospheric Aerosol Injection’, it’s, of course, ground-breaking research.

And all of this brings us to the issue that burns under my toenails now: how long has ‘the Science™’ been doing Stratospheric Aerosol Injection?

The answer may surprise you.

[the following section has been amended pursuant to a comment by the reader

unworried

: thanks for the tip]

SAI Began in…2008, According to ‘the Science™’

Turns out that Stratospheric Aerosol Injection actually commenced in 2008 [and not in 2003, as I originally wrote], or a years after the people began posting stuff about ‘Chemtrails’ (sayeth Google’s ngram viewer).

Also, in case you’re wondering—here’s my reference: Wake Smith and Gernot Wagner, ‘Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment’, 2018 Environ. Res. Lett. 13 124001. Here’s their abstract:

We review the capabilities and costs of various lofting methods intended to deliver sulfates into the lower stratosphere. We lay out a future solar geoengineering deployment scenario of halving the increase in anthropogenic radiative forcing beginning 15 years hence, by deploying material to altitudes as high as ∼20 km. After surveying an exhaustive list of potential deployment techniques, we settle upon an aircraft-based delivery system. Unlike the one prior comprehensive study on the topic (McClellan et al 2012 Environ. Res. Lett. 7 034019), we conclude that no existing aircraft design—even with extensive modifications—can reasonably fulfill this mission. However, we also conclude that developing a new, purpose-built high-altitude tanker with substantial payload capabilities would neither be technologically difficult nor prohibitively expensive. We calculate early-year costs of ∼$1500 ton⁻¹ of material deployed, resulting in average costs of ∼$2.25 billion yr⁻¹ over the first 15 years of deployment. We further calculate the number of flights at ∼4000 in year one, linearly increasing by ∼4000 yr⁻¹. We conclude by arguing that, while cheap, such an aircraft-based program would unlikely be a secret, given the need for thousands of flights annually by airliner-sized aircraft operating from an international array of bases.

[here’s the main revision] In short: they write about a possible, or potential, world-wide program of SAI.

Have such tests or studies been carried out? Well, the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, the German Greens’ political/party foundation, actually has a quite interesting ‘Geoengineering Monitor’, where, among other things, I found the following information:

The only known SAI field experiment injected sulphate into the troposphere and was conducted by a Russian institution in 2009.

A few years earlier, this happened:

David Keith, based at Harvard University, is the foremost geoengineering advocate advancing solar geoengineering. He is an investor in the technology, has lobbied governments, and manages, along with Ken Caldeira [look who’s there], the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (FICER), a multimillion geoengineering fund provided by Bill Gates since 2007.

[end of the updated/revised section]

I now have many more questions, specifically why sulfates? I mean, it’s a fair question because the top-cited paper on ‘expert consensus’ asked ‘the experts™’ about ‘strontium, barium, and aluminum’, i.e., stuff that’s decidedly not sulfates. Interestingly, neither of these three candidates for SAI appears in the paper by Smith and Wagner.

Why the latter is important? Well, it begs the question: why sulfates? Here’s what Smith and Wagner have to say:

We focus on SAI using sulfates, not because they are optimal—they may not be (Keith et al 2016)—but because the long record of prior analyses on both efficacy and risks of sulfate deployment (National Research Council 2015) renders them the best understood and therefore least uncertain material with which to commence in this hypothetical scenario of partial deployment.

So, ‘the science™’ is basically making an argument analogous to the drunk looking for his car keys under the street lamp, not because he lost his keys there but because there’s a street lamp.

Here’s Rachel Kaufman, a ‘contributing writer’ (whatever that means) to the Smithsonian Magazine in a piece from 2019 explaining the problem:

While many scientists believe that geoengineering the Earth may someday be necessary to preserve life as we know it, the public, so far, isn’t buying it. As a result, the preliminary research to figure out if geoengineering projects would even work is proceeding with extreme caution.

See the problem? It’s ‘the public™’ that doesn’t like the idea of putting gigatons of whatever stuff into the atmosphere because, unlike in lab experiments, the margin of error is, well, inexistent. This is a smart reason to be wary (but there are others, trust me).

‘I think if research on solar geoengineering’s going to move forward, it's important that it’s done responsibly and that it’s done at a pace that … doesn't get too far ahead of itself,’ says Lizzie Burns, the project manager of Harvard’s solar geoengineering research program. ‘I think it's important to co-develop governance with research, and if that takes a little longer, I’m fine with that.’

Here’s my solution™: add a label, such as ‘drink responsibly’ or ‘smoking kills’, because it worked like a charm with alcohol consumption and tobacco. Or let’s throw in people warning of AI going to kill us all.

There are many ‘studies™’ done by ‘experts™’ that are arguing to proceed at full-steam with SAI, including the following three:

• Pope et al., ‘Stratospheric aerosol particles and solar-radiation management’, Nature Climate Change volume 2, pages 713–719 (2012)

• Irvine et al., ‘Halving warming with idealized solar geoengineering moderates key climate hazards’, Nature Climate Change volume 9, pages 295–299 (2019)

• Sun et al., ‘Stratospheric transport and tropospheric sink of solar geoengineering aerosol: a Lagrangian analysis’, npj Climate and Atmospheric Science volume 7, Article number: 115 (2024)

We don’t have time to go through all of them, so let’s look at the most recent one. Here’s the abstract from Sun et al.:

Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) aims to reflect solar radiation by increasing the stratospheric aerosol burden. To understand how the background circulation influences stratospheric transport of injected particles, we use a Lagrangian trajectory model (lacking numerical diffusion) to quantify particles’ number, flux, lifetime, and tropospheric sinks from a SAI injection strategy under present-day conditions. While particles are being injected, stratospheric particle number increases until reaching a steady-state. During the steady-state, the time series of particle number shows a dominant period of ~2 years (rather than a 1-year cycle), suggesting modulation by the quasi-biannual oscillation. More than half of particles, injected in the tropical lower stratosphere (15° S to 15° N, 65 hPa), undergo quasi-horizontal transport to the midlatitude. We find a zonal asymmetry of particles’ tropospheric sinks that are co-located with tropopause folding beneath the midlatitude jet stream, which can help predict tropospheric impacts of SAI (e.g., cirrus cloud thinning).

So, it’s a computer model. Let’s see how accurate it is (references omitted):

Lagrangian trajectory models have high computational efficiency and lack numerical diffusion, which makes them good at tracking the location of individual particles in the stratosphere [eh, it’s a model, it’s tracking bytes in the computational model, not in the atmosphere]. This can help us better understand both particle-scale transport and the statistical properties of large injections in the stratosphere for SAI. Even though Lagrangian trajectory models have been widely used in simulating the transport of water vapor, ozone, and volcanic particles, there are limited SAI studies using this Lagrangian method…

Our results from the Lagrangian method can be complementary to previous SAI studies using global climate models (GCMs).

Translation from the academese BS: our model is fitted to global climate models. Bonus question: try to identify the potential problems here, both on a heuristic and an epistemological level.

The remainder of the paper is basically irrelevant, because the model used assumes SAI beginning in 2000 and ending a decade later. At the same time, as we’ve learned in the paper we checked out before, these experiments have been going on since at least 2003.

Note, furthermore, that the IPCC’s Assessment Report 5’s chapter on mitigation strategies has but two mentions of ‘stratospheric aerosol injections’. (AR6’s above-linked chapter 3 has five mentions.) The IPCC’s Assessment Report 4’s chapter on mitigation strategies does not mention SAI.

I suppose, without having checked the specifics about the models used, that said global climate models reflect this situation, i.e., that they do not, or only to very limited degrees, include SAI into their calculations.

Therefore, the 2024 paper by Sun et al. is highly problematic as it uses current ERA5 model. In layman’s terms, this is like using your 2022 model car and compare it to road safety issues twenty years ago.

Bottom Lines

Doing so is about as useful as scratching one’s groin, I suppose, but without any benefits in terms of scientific enquiry.

In addition, lingering questions emerge, too, such as: do these global climate models account for SAI since 2003 (my guess would be no). I’m fairly certain, though, that SAI would have to have a measurable impact to study it, hence their likely exclusion adds to the uncertainty of global climate models, which are notoriously bad when it comes to clouds in the first place. And once we add the effects of SAI, I’m not sure these models are…well, offering much of anything in this regard.

And all of that happens well before we’d look at the epistemological problems associated with pumping out tons of stuff, such as aluminium, barium, or strontium into the stratosphere. I mean, this stuff comes down, and if I’m certain of anything, I’m certain that one should not inhale these particulates, let alone ingest them via tap water or eat them as these particulates would be eaten by livestock.

Do regulators even consider any of these items? I only briefly checked with the FDA’s current (2022) ‘Food Code’, and the term ‘aluminum’ appears only once (Ch. 1, p. 18) in the context of ‘single-use articles’ and explicitly refers to food containers; neither barium nor strontium appear in the Food Code.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization similarly’s doesn’t check for these items, it would appear (judging from the FAO’s mentioning of food inspections that focus ‘on points of the food chain or processes that pose highest risk’).

I doubt that even national foodstuff and/or agricultural safety inspectors would have stratospheric aerosol injection anywhere on their radar. This is likely not a big, grand ‘conspiracy™’ but the consequence of regulators trying to play catch up with gov’t and industry ‘progress™’.

Moreover, since regulatory agencies are often staffed by the least capable university graduates; we’ve seen this during the Covid scam, and we shouldn’t assume this is different in terms of food safety and veterinary controls, which is way less ‘sexy’ in terms of appeal.

‘What do you do for a living?’—’Well, I work in food safety.’—‘Interesting, tell me more.’—‘You see, I take stool samples from livestock…’

This entire rabbit hole has been, well, more proof that this is all highly insane.

There’s no margin for error here (beyond the tolerance of the atmosphere relative to human interventions), and it leads to other questions, such as: how real is ‘the weather’? Has it turned into ‘the weather™’ already?

Are the observed weather phenomena natural or (partly) man-made?

(As an aside, yes, I know about HAARP and US patents on weather modification, but that topic will have to wait for another day.)

And, finally, if they are not: what are the consequences?