About the Author : )
Above all, I’m a researcher. A professional Dot Connector, if you will. I’ve researched a lot of things, usually related to science and technology but also marketing stuff. I’m also a designer and web developer focusing on content strategy and user experience.
My Background
As a Navy swimmer and navigator, I stood watch as a Ship’s Lookout, ASROC Sentry and Quartermaster. I received my first training in geo-sciences in the military navigation school in Orlando. I was trained to observe the weather, including clouds, barometric readings, and ocean conditions related to ship’s navigation.
In college I continued to take science courses, especially Earth Sciences and Biology, while working on my degree in English and World Literature, but after college became involved in computer science and mechanical engineering.
I focused on Linguistics and computers at CalPoly in San Luis Obispo where, in the English department, I studied spoken language systems and began producing websites.
What I’m Doing Here
Probably the most confounding subject I’ve researched is this one– artificial clouds formed by contrails. It’s one of the least understood phenomena, in great part due to the scientific community’s ignorance of the facts as well as the public.
The uneducated observer (myself included) would say that “the jet is spraying something” because, well, it’s obvious.
But not so. In fact, the jets are emitting the same super-heated steam they always did, although much more of it… about ten trillion cubic feet per year globally.
However, the atmosphere isn’t the same, and here’s why: We “spray” chemicals into the atmosphere to create an abundance of cloud condensation nuclei. We use a variety of methods, but the most prolific in the US and most countries is flares attached to the wings of aircraft. It’s called weather modification, cloud-seeding or precipitation enhancement… we do it to induce more rain and snow.
The swirly nature of the atmosphere means that after these aerosols are injected into the sky at 20,000 feet or so, they mix up and down, and with the wind.
Keep in mind that cloud-seeding aerosols– which are also called “mineral dust and aerosolized metals”– are also the basis of even higher clouds at 30,000 and 40,000 feet.
What are these tiny particulates, exactly? Mostly salt, which is not good news for the soil, as its buildup has altered our soil pH and salinity levels. But they also contain metals, including silver iodide (silver nitrate and potassium iodide), aluminum, magnesium and strontium.
So what I’m doing here is trying to share this information, especially with the scientists involved in climate studies, so we can all be more aware of what the problem is… and the real reason why contrails are more persistent now, forming artificial clouds around the Earth: artificial condensation nuclei dispersed in the atmosphere across every continent.
-Dave
“Even small changes in the abundance or location of clouds could change the climate more than the anticipated changes caused by greenhouse gases…”
—NASA