The Truth About Chemtrails - Dumb Question Tuesday
- Kevin Lankes
- Aug 22
- 6 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/DlRy5r-XPdY
When the topic of conspiracy theories comes up, there are a few really classic hits that likely come to mind immediately. You have the JFK assassination, you have alien abduction stories, the illuminati or the new world order, and of course, chemtrails. Chemtrails are probably my personal number one top choice when it comes to the most quintessential conspiracy theory out there.
I’m Kevin Lankes and you’ve stumbled onto another Dumb Question Tuesday edition of Let’s Do Some Effing Good. As always, it isn’t Tuesday. So let’s talk about chemtrails. First off, what the heck are they?
Chemtrails are supposedly some kind of chemical that’s been sprayed into the atmosphere by a passing plane. Though the exact details of the conspiracy theory change and expand from there, that’s pretty much the underlying fear. That the government is spraying all of us with some unknown substance for whatever reason. And 10% of Americans think that chemtrails are “completely true,” with another 20-30% reporting that they believe the conspiracy theory to be “somewhat true.”
The word chemtrail is a play on the word contrail, which is what’s actually coming out of a jet engine that you see streaking across the sky. Contrail is itself a condensing of the phrase condensation trails. It’s a really simple and straightforward thing that happens; exhaust from jet engines, which is made up of primarily water, mixes with particles of soot or other substances burned inside the engine and then they freeze together. You may know from science class that clouds are just water droplets that attach to dust particles in the atmosphere and then freeze, and then collect together in big clumps. So in effect, contrails are a kind of human-caused cloud. They last different lengths of time based on the conditions of the day, and that’s determined by the properties of thermodynamics.
So no, there are no sinister chemicals flying out of the backs of planes. If it’s a jet, and it’s in the air, and the engine is on, you’re going to get contrails. So why does this particular conspiracy theory persist?
Conspiracy theories in general work because a lot of the time there’s some kernel of truth involved, maybe not directly, but somewhere. Like, throughout history, there really were chemicals we dropped from planes that caused a lot of harm to people’s health, like the Vietnam-era Agent Orange, and the once-popular insecticide DDT. We know now that both of these chemicals have very serious negative health effects. But when we dropped those, they were designed to fulfill a purpose, and the fact that we simply didn’t know the intense harm they could cause to human life isn’t a conspiracy. We just didn’t know. The same thing has happened with countless substances over the course of even my lifetime. Leaded gasoline wasn’t banned in the U.S. until the year 1996. And we knew that lead was bad for you basically since forever. Ben Frankin wrote about it in 1786. That’s how hard it is to get harmful substances out of consumer products that we know about.
The other kernel of truth is cloud seeding. This is a weather-modifying process that’s used to encourage rain or snowfall. Silver iodide is injected into clouds in order to assist in the formation of ice crystals. Without them, certain clouds would just never give off any precipitation. There are air-based dispersion methods, so yes, planes do sometimes fly over clouds to release the silver iodide, but the majority of cloud seeding is done using ground-based systems. And silver iodide is a naturally occurring substance in the environment, and so far we have no data to suggest that it causes any harm to human life. So cloud seeding isn’t a magic weather control conspiracy; it’s actually used to help everyday Americans by supplementing the available water supply in a specific area. There’s no standard effectiveness for cloud seeding and every time it’s done you’ll get different results, but there are long-term projects around the world, and one of them in Nevada has seen snowpack levels increase by 10% each year.
One other thing about contrails that we’re just learning about now is their possible environmental impact. The airline industry contributes 2% of the world’s CO2 emissions and CO2 is a huge contributor to human-caused climate change. Now, in the right conditions, some contrails can persist for long enough that they spread out and turn into human-made cirrus clouds. This causes more heat to become trapped and unable to escape into the atmosphere. Some research suggests this could be a major problem. The effect on warming isn’t certain, but early data like this study from the Rocky Mountain Institute shows that it could be, at the very least, half of that caused by airline CO2 emissions, and possibly even up to three times greater than airline CO2 emissions. So we don’t know for sure yet, and we need more people to study that particular aspect of contrails to find out. The issues is that there are a lot of planes in the sky at any given time, and chasing down all the contrails to see which ones turn into cirrus clouds and collecting data from those is a real chore. We also don’t have the right instruments yet to measure humidity levels of the atmosphere at cruising altitude. So there’s lots of work to be done before we can figure this out. Bottom line is that it turns out that contrails might pose a significant negative effect on the world, but in a way none of the conspiracy theories could predict.
The final thing we need to talk about is why several states are proposing bans on chemtrails, even though they aren’t real. This one’s going to be hard for me to articulate because I have strong feelings about it, but the basic underlying issue is two-fold. One is that all of these things are getting lumped together in the public narrative: contrails, chemtrails, Agent Orange, cloud seeding, weather control conspiracies. Lots of people aren’t separating them out into the individual parts, which are all very separate things, some of them real, some of them not. The second thing is a big one, and that’s the loss of faith in expertise. There’s a wealth of misinformation parading through our lives these days, and a great deal of it is designed to turn people away from facts and science. The “just asking questions” crowd has done the world a huge disservice, because they aren’t able to ask the questions that make sense to ask in these circumstances. Let them go get a PhD and submit peer-reviewed research and then they can debate with the genuine experts. That’s how science works. You believe the evidence because it comes out of a consensus of hard-earned data, not because you just like some argument that some random person made that you think sounds good. That’s not how any of this works.
And, of course, misinformation is now political and weaponized. I did a video about the dead internet theory and how half of all web traffic is now artificial through AI and bot accounts, so check that out if you want to know more. I’m planning to do one soon on the recent history of misinformation and how we all got caught up in this whole fiasco of media illiteracy. So look out for that soon.
In this environment, we end up with politicians who are either pandering to their voters and attempting to push through legislation that appeals to their conspiracy-minded base, or they’re just also people who believe the conspiracy theories. It’s hard to tell, but it doesn’t matter because the effect is the same. And they’re going to do real harm, because as we’ve seen with cloud seeding, that’s a process that has a lot of benefit for populations all over the world, and will definitely have at least some impact on the agricultural industry and food production for U.S. citizens. So you should be straight up mad at anyone proposing legislation like this that just makes no sense, for one thing, and for another, is potentially very harmful.
Okay, I hope this has cleared up at least some of the confusion about chemtrail conspiracies. And if not, or if you want to dive into the research by yourself, you can find all my sources below in the didgeridoo like always. Remember that finding the truth of something isn’t about uncovering an idea that you find personally satisfying, it’s about understanding the scientific data and the research consensus surrounding a subject. In short, it doesn’t matter what you think, it just matters what vast numbers of researchers have empirically proved about the world.
And, let’s make sure to do some f*cking good in our own little corners of that world. Try to make things just a little better than you found them, and try not to believe in conspiracy theories. See you next time.
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