Is it spring? The sunny day outside thinks so, but being caught in a Desert Road snowfall coming back from the New Zealand Psychological Society conference suggests it’s a bit early to start cutting the daffodils. But you can’t beat Wellington on a good day – when the sky is blue with nary a cloud, unless you count the aeroplane trails.
Sorry, did someone say “chemtrails”? For those not familiar with the term it is used by people who believe state, military or “big pharma” actors have been secretly using commercial and/or military planes to spray chemicals across the skies since the 1990s.
Why? Perhaps weather modification – causing storms, for example – in support of some narrative or to cover up nefarious deeds. Or for mass vaccination, say. Or for mind control, making populations docile using psychoactive drugs. Among other “theories”.
I should be clear: the scientific fact is chemtrails are not real. They are actually contrails. That is, vapour trailing behind something jet-propelled, seen as a white streak against the sky.
Contrails have long been shown – since at least 1953 – to be a by-product of jet-engine combustion. At high altitude, the atmosphere gets colder as vapour pressure drops. When a jet engine burns hydrocarbon fuel and spits out hot air rich in water vapour, the exhaust rapidly condenses into water droplets that turn into ice.
The chemtrail theory took root on the internet in the late-1990s after the US Air Force published a report about weather modification. Internet forums drew on a range of “evidence”, including claims that residents of Oakville, Washington, became ill in 1994 after a military airdrop of a mysterious gelatinous substance.
How does belief come about when there’s no widely accepted evidence? In social psychology, others’ beliefs and actions are “social proof”; if others believe or do a thing they must have a defensible reason. With chemtrails, there are at least three sources of belief.
The first is the evidence of your own eyes or others’ accounts. Surely if contrails are real then all planes would make them?
Further nourishing the conspiracists is the fact the British Air Force conducts cloud-seeding experiments to induce rainfall. And the US Army has released fluorescent compounds over populated areas to investigate the hypothetical dispersal of biological warfare agents by foreign invaders.
Another seed for this particular misguided belief is investigation of geoengineering as a potential climate-change mitigation measure. Consistent with chemtrail narratives, its hypothethised that aerosol particles could be injected into the atmosphere to reflect solar radiation.
Chemtrail adherents also point to “scientific” but subsequently debunked analysis of samples of supposed chemtrail contamination. Once such claims are made, even when discredited it is difficult to erase them.
This column, I expect, will be dismissed by some on the basis I am clearly either a part of, a mouthpiece for, or deluded by, the powers that engage in chemtrail spraying and geoengineering.
It doesn’t help that there’s a great deal of clearly doctored “evidence” in this space, such as photos of cockpit dashboards with switches apparently labelled for the release of chemtrails, as well as innocent photos misattributed for this same purpose.
Although surveys of experts show an overwhelming consensus that there is no basis to chemtrail claims, large-scale polls indicate lumpy levels of belief in such a conspiracy in different countries.
In Aotearoa, Massey University’s Matt Williams has found 7% of us swallow the story. But Pew Polls show as many as 40% of participants in the United States Cooperative Congressional Election Study describe the chemtrails conspiracy as at least “somewhat true”. Why am I not surprised?
