I'm looking at contrails out my window--HEEEEELP!

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I'm looking at contrails out my window, as I type! It's really scary; am I gonna die? I'm kinda elderly, and what's worse, there have been contrails about every three days for the last ten or fifteen years here. I live in Josephine County, Oregon. We must be some kind of horribly diabolic test area, 'cause the population of the whole COUNTY is only about 75,000 friendly people, and three or four of us old grouches. No wonder everybody around here coughs and sneezes every winter.

And to think, I always thought it was the persistent rain and cold we get here in the winter.

Uh....How long will it take until I start feeling the REALLY bad effects from this stuff?

Al

-- Al K. Lloyd (al@ready.now), August 19, 1999

Answers

Al, Just keep feeling good. God bless.

-- Mara Wayne (MaraWAyne@aol.com), August 19, 1999.

This is clearly a meme I'm battling, but just in case someone still values scientific facts:

Small particules in the atmosphere fall very slowly. Not at all if there's any slight updraft. Watch the dust motes dancing in a beam of sunlight if you doubt this.

Anything fine enough to make a clearly visible contrail sprayed out of an aeroplane so high up that you can't clearly see the plane IS NOT going to land on what is directly underneath. Even if the particles fall at their terminal velocity, the weather will have drifted it many tens of miles sideways. Allowing for wind and weather, that becomes anything from hundreds of miles to the other side of the planet.

This even happens with fine particles released almost at ground level. What went up chimneys in the UK at the dawn of the industrial revolution makes a clearly detectable layer in the Greenland icecap. Pollen from crops grown in the USA has been shown to trigger allergies in people in the UK (and GM pollen is doubtless likewise grossing the Atlantic). When Krakatoa blew, the dust went around the whole planet and took two years to settle out (making significant changes in the global climate while it did so). A few years ago I woke up and found that overnight London had been coated in fine red dust, from a sandstorm in the Sahara desert a few days earlier. Etc.

In short, this contrail theory is plain BUNK!

-- Nigel Arnot (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), August 20, 1999.


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