Vinegar FTW

The frustrating thing about woo-woo ideas is that they never really go away permanently.

Take, for example, the Ancient Aliens thing.  It really came into the public eye with Erich von Däniken's 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods.  Buoyed up by his book unexpectedly catapulting him into fame, he followed it up with a number of sequels, including: Gods from Outer Space; The Gold of the Gods; In Search of Ancient Gods; Miracles of the Gods; Signs of the Gods; Pathways to the Gods; and Enough About The Fucking Gods, Already, Let's Talk About Something Else For A Change.

Ha!  I made the last one up, of course, because von Däniken is currently ninety years old and still talks about The Gods all the time, raking in huge amounts of money from conferences and keynote speeches (as well as book royalties).  And that's the difficulty, isn't it?  When there's money to be made (or clicks to be clicked -- which in today's social media world, amounts to the same thing), you can never really be confident of saying goodbye to an idiotic idea.

Which, unfortunately, brings us to "chemtrails."

Chemtrails -- known to us Kool-Aid Drinkin' Sheeple as ordinary jet contrails -- got their start in 2007.  A reporter for KSLA News (Shreveport, Louisiana) was investigating a report of "an unusually persistent jet contrail," and found that a man in the area had "collected dew in bowls" after he saw the contrail.  The station had the water in the bowls analyzed, and reported that it contained 6.8 parts per million of the heavy metal barium -- dangerously high concentrations.  The problem is, the reporter got the concentration wrong by a factor of a hundred -- it was 68 parts per billion, which is right in the normal range for water from natural sources (especially water collected in a glazed ceramic bowl, because ceramic glazes often contain barium as a flux).  But the error was overlooked, or (worse) explained away post hoc as a government coverup.  The barium was at dangerous concentrations, people said.  And it came from the contrail.  Which might contain all sorts of other things that they're not telling you about.

And thus were "chemtrails" born.

Since then, the Evil Government has been accused of putting all sorts of things into jet fuel, with the intention of spraying it all over us and Causing Bad Stuff.  Mind-control chemicals, compounds that can alter our DNA, pathogens (anthrax seems especially popular), chemicals that induce sterility.  Notwithstanding the fact that if you want to get Something Nasty into a large fraction of the population, sneaking it into jet fuel and then hoping that the right people are going to be outside when the jet goes over, and then will inhale enough of it to work, has to be the all-time stupidest Evil Plot I've ever heard of.  I mean, this one makes Boris and Natasha's Goof Gas thing seem like unadulterated genius.

Oh, but don't worry; this time the Good Guys are way ahead.  Chemtrail your little hearts out, Evil Deep State Operatives, they're saying.  Because they have a secret weapon in their arsenal that will neutralize all chemtrails.  You ready?

Vinegar.

And not even special magical vinegar; ordinary white vinegar that you can buy from the supermarket.  You're supposed to "gently heat (not boil)" it, and the vapors rise and do battle with the poisonous chemtrails.  How this supposedly works adds a whole other level of facepalming to the discussion.  "White vinegar is acetate acid [sic]," said one YouTuber.  "It eats alkaline metals which is [sic] what they spray to create the geoengineered clouds."

The problem here -- well, amongst the myriad problems here -- is that dissolving a chemical element doesn't destroy it.  If there really were alkaline metals in jet contrails, vinegar might react chemically with them, but the metals would still be there (and presumably, still be just as toxic).  It's like the claim I've seen about pillbugs (isopods) being our friends because they "remove heavy metals from soils."  Now, isopods might well be tolerant to soils with heavy metal contamination -- I haven't verified that possibility -- but if they do consume plant material laden with heavy metals, where do you think those contaminants go after they're eaten?  They're now inside the isopod's body, and when they isopod dies, the heavy metals leach right back into the soil.  Barium, cadmium, lead, arsenic, and so on are elements, and if you are unclear on why that point is relevant, I refer you to the definition thereof.

Notwithstanding, the anti-chemtrail people claim that simmering vinegar in your back yard can "clear contaminated chemtrails in a ten-mile radius in a few hours."  Which would be a pretty good trick, if it weren't for the fact that jet contrails themselves always disappear completely on their own in fifteen minutes or so.

The whole issue hasn't been helped by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who in between sessions of Congress seems to spend her time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars, proposing a bill prohibiting "geoengineering and weather modification," which includes chemtrails.

But of course, the bill conveniently says nothing about the carbon dioxide released by burning jet fuel, which actually is modifying our climate.  Can't mention climate change and piss off the corporate donors, after all.

So once again, we're confronted by a conspiracy theory that keeps rising, zombie-like, from its shallow grave.  At least in this case it'll keep the woo-woos busy simmering (not boiling) vinegar in their back yards, which is fairly harmless.  And it'll give a boost to the vinegar manufacturers.  Me, though, I'm kind of pining for the Ancient Aliens to come back around again.  At least they keep people interested in stuff like history and mythology and archaeology, even if their conclusions aren't any more grounded in reality than the vinegar/chemtrail people.

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Making the sky great again

It's been a while since we've heard from the contingent that believes the best way to dose a population with nasty chemicals is to put them into jet fuel, so that the residue coming from the engines would waft about and settle on our unsuspecting heads.  Which, and I must point out at this juncture that amongst other things I write murder mysteries, has always struck me as the worst way to deliver poisons I can think of.  Anyhow, it was with great anticipation that I checked out a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia in which a fellow named David Hodges takes Donald Trump to task for not clearing the skies of chemtrails.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Hodges starts out pretty positively:

Donald Trump has made good on a lot of promises.  He's stood up against the free trade agreements.  He's battling to secure our borders against the entry of unknown terrorists into our country.  He's battled the mainstream media with their incessant lies and propaganda.  He's all in all done a really good job.  He's also moving churches away from the 501(c) restrictions against political comment.  I love what he's done in many ways.

But then we hear that there's a big "if" in Hodges's mind:

But President Trump, sir, there is an issue that you're not dealing with, and it's an issue of paramount and critical and immediate importance: it's the issue of chemtrails.  I fully expected by now that the sky over America would be devoid of chemtrails.  You, sir, as the Commander in Chief, have the authority to make this happen.  Read the reports, President Trump.  Barium, chromium, magnesium, aluminum, causing early-onset dementia, Alzheimer's, causing autism in the young, lowering crop yields because it reduces sunlight by as much as 18 to 20 percent, messing with the weather patterns... I could go on, and on, and on.

As, in fact, he does:

This is a depopulation movement by the globalists.  Donald Trump has the ability to stop this, at least territorially.  And I cannot believe that he has not ordered the grounding of these transports that lay down these chemtrails.  This is a litmus test, sir, of your administration.  If you care about the American people as you claim, you cannot make this claim with 100% steadfast honesty unless you are willing to stop chemtrails and stop them now.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you the name of Hodges's YouTube channel:  It's called "The Common Sense Show."

I find it wryly amusing that here we have a Trump supporter who is ready to rescind his approval of the new president if he doesn't find a way to get rid of perfectly ordinary jet contrails.  Of course, this really shouldn't be surprising, as this sort of thing seems to be all too common in the folks who voted for Trump.  The whole administration has its support from people who evidently feel like if they click their heels together and wish hard enough, reality will suddenly conform to their wishes -- Jeff Sessions won't have lied under oath about his connection to the Russians, Betsy DeVos will be the best thing ever to reform public schools, Kellyanne Conway will suddenly become capable of telling the truth, and Trump himself will be a good family values Christian instead of a serial adulterer and probable sex offender whose most notable religious accomplishment is embodying all seven Deadly Sins in one individual.

So I thought the whole thing was pretty ridiculous until I started looking at the comments section, and yes, I know that no one should do that because it's simultaneously risking valuable brain cells and also whatever shreds of confidence remain that the human race is salvageable.  But I did it anyway, against my better judgment, and here's a sampling of what I found:

• Please stop overspraying us with chemicals like we are bugs!!!!
• It's one of my top concerns as well. Here in Central FL, they are greatly diminished since the inauguration, but not eliminated. Call in the Air National Guard.
• Here's my question.. Who is piloting these planes and what airports do they use? They are not passenger planes that are spraying. We must get to the bottom of this.
• Trump is in charge of the Navy and the Navy runs the Chemtrail program. When's he going to do what's right.
• It’s now apparent that the U.S. government has implemented Teller’s theory by spraying megatons of particulate heavy metals and chemicals like aluminum, titanium, barium, strontium and sulfur hexafluoride into the stratosphere.
• Trees and forests are DYING ALL OVER THE WORLD DUE TO CHEMTRAILS AND HAARP.
• I'm so sick of never seeing a sunrise or sunset. It's been literally a year since I remember seeing a clear sunset. They cover up all the stars, too.

No, you moron, those are called "clouds."

What has me worried is that someone will actually get President Trump alarmed about this, and he'll start trying to do something about it, which will mean he'll propose making some kind of damnfool changes to the rules surrounding airplanes, despite the fact that he clearly knows nothing about them.  Look what happened when he got wind of the whole vaccine/autism nonsense; he jumped right on the bandwagon and now is blathering on about creating a commission to make sure vaccines are safe (there's already such a commission, and in fact it's been around since 1987).  Worse still, in the last months he's met with noted anti-vaxxers Andrew Wakefield and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and seems to be turning a deaf ear to the thousands of doctors and medical researchers who have written to him explaining that there is no connection between vaccines and autism.

For fuck's sake.

So I'm perhaps to be pardoned for having very little confidence that Donald Trump will take the scientific stance on "chemtrails," namely, that they're water vapor.  Of course, I have to admit that it might be entertaining to see what he'd propose doing about them.  Maybe build a wall around every airport.  Or, in an analogous move to all of his other appointments to key government posts, just hire someone who knows absolutely nothing about airplane engines to Make Jets Great Again and call it done.

Chemtrail survey

One of the problems with scientists being understood by laypeople is that they don't speak the same language.

I'm not just talking about technical vocabulary, here, the ability to throw around words like photophosphorylation and anisotropy and eigenstate.  I'm talking about how they each use fairly simple words -- words like theory and hypothesis and proof.

As an example, consider the kerfuffle over the activation of the Large Hadron Collider, instrumental in the search for (and ultimately discovery of) the Higgs boson.  There was concern, mostly on the part of non-scientists, that the energy released by the collisions within the LHC could cause some untoward effects.  Since one of the metaphors used to describe what was happening therein was "recreating the conditions that were present at the Big Bang" (a statement that in any case is incorrect by several orders of magnitude), people wondered if the activation of the machine might generate mini black holes -- or possibly a new universe, which would expand and tear our universe apart from the inside.

So looking for reassurance, the scientists were contacted, and asked if this was possible.  And that's when the trouble started.

Scientists, for the most part, are extremely careful to differentiate between the words "possible" and "likely."  So they said, sure, it's possible.  Given that we haven't ever achieved collision energies this high, lots of things are possible, including some we probably haven't foreseen.  You can't rule out an eventuality that depends on data we don't have yet.

Well, at that point, the media was off to the races.  Headlines saying "Scientists Admit It's Possible the LHC Will Destroy the Universe!" began to appear.  Only after the hue-and-cry began did the scientists say, "Now, wait just one minute.  We didn't say it was likely.  In fact, it's extraordinarily unlikely."  But by that time no one was listening, because most people were too busy wailing about how we were all gonna die and it was the physicists' fault.

I'm happy to say, though, that not only did we not die when the LHC was activated, the scientists are beginning to learn how to talk to the rest of us.  Witness, for example, the rather annoyed-sounding paper that appeared in Environmental Research Letters a few days ago, entitled, "Quantifying Expert Consensus Against the Existence of a Secret, Large-Scale Atmospheric Spraying Program," by Christine Shearer, Mick West, Ken Caldeira, and Steven J. Davis.  If you're thinking, "wait, this can't be about what it sounds like," well, yes, it is:

Nearly 17% of people in an international survey said they believed the existence of a secret large-scale atmospheric program (SLAP) to be true or partly true.  SLAP is commonly referred to as 'chemtrails' or 'covert geoengineering', and has led to a number of websites purported to show evidence of widespread chemical spraying linked to negative impacts on human health and the environment.  To address these claims, we surveyed two groups of experts—atmospheric chemists with expertize in condensation trails and geochemists working on atmospheric deposition of dust and pollution—to scientifically evaluate for the first time the claims of SLAP theorists.  Results show that 76 of the 77 scientists (98.7%) that took part in this study said they had not encountered evidence of a SLAP, and that the data cited as evidence could be explained through other factors, including well-understood physics and chemistry associated with aircraft contrails and atmospheric aerosols.  Our goal is not to sway those already convinced that there is a secret, large-scale spraying program—who often reject counter-evidence as further proof of their theories—but rather to establish a source of objective science that can inform public discourse.

So this brings up a couple of points.  First, these folks are going about this the right way.  None of this pussyfooting around about how "we can't prove it" or "without evidence, we can't say it's impossible;" Shearer et al. are saying, "No, you loons, there are no such things as 'chemtrails.'"

Second, didn't you just love the comment about how conspiracy theorists "often reject counter-evidence as further proof of their theories?"  That, I believe, is what is referred to in scientific circles as a "mic drop moment."

But third, I have to wonder who the 77th atmospheric scientist was, the one who had found evidence of chemtrails.  I'd like to talk to that guy, wouldn't you?

Be that as it may, I think the scientists are figuring out that you can't just assume that everyone gets the way evidence and proof (and disproof) are used in science.  They're becoming bolder about saying things like, "Evolution is a fact," "Anthropogenic climate change is happening," and "Homeopathy is pseudoscientific bullshit."  Unfortunate though it may be, using the more cautious diction that is necessary in a scientific paper just doesn't work when communicating scientific findings to the masses.

Anyhow, that paper cheered me up immensely.  Given that common-sense considerations -- such as the fact that jet contrails would be a really crappy toxin delivery device -- don't seem to dissuade the True Believers, it's time for the scientists to come together and say, "Um... NO."  Not, as they pointed out, that it will convince the True Believers -- but because it will let anyone still on the fence know that there is no discussion about this amongst people who aren't certifiable wackos.