George Monbiot in his diatribe against the chemtrail conspiracy, concedes that aircraft emissions besides carbon dioxide alter the climate to an even greater extent. What does he lay the blame on? Water.
Hot water meets cold air and becomes cold ice. Ice become cirrus clouds which have an overall warming effect.
The fact that water vapour from jet engine exhaust is hot has no bearing on its formation into ice crystals. This simply tells it is in gaseous form before it freezes but it is a narrative that I am sure would have been reinforced by his government link.
Such government sources, when disseminating to the public, incessantly come out with such blandishments along the lines of:
“Contrails form from hot humid air from jet exhaust condensing in the much colder, drier air around it, producing ice crystal clouds. Like your breath on a cold day.”
“A half-truth is much worse than a whole lie because it makes it even harder to tell the difference between the two.”
― Gene Ruyle
George’s link to the debunking fact sheet produced by the government no longer functions. So, I will use NASA as my source:
“Nearly all of the contrail is created from the moisture in the atmosphere.”
This alone is enough to put to rest the canard that contrails are merely formed from jet engine water vapour.
Water produced by combustion of jet fuel is relatively insignificant compared with atmospheric water in the formation of contrails and aviation-induced clouds. It has been conservatively estimated as being around 24,000 times less.
On a cold day one does not have to walk through trails and vast clouds of frozen, human-generated breath that linger all day. This means contrails are nothing like your breath. The question remains as to how all this atmospheric water associates with the relatively smaller quantity of jet-produced water to form these great canopies.
When further pressed on whether they are really based on just water, official sources will allow that the nuclei of some of the ice crystals in a contrail will contain minute products of combustion but that they are essentially ice.
What does NASA say about how contrails are really formed?
“Contrails are clouds formed when water vapor condenses and freezes around small particles (aerosols) that exist in aircraft exhaust.”
Contrails are artificially-induced cirrus clouds. Like cirrus clouds they form from ice nucleating on small particles at around 10 km, cruise altitude. These particles, known as ice nuclei, play an essential role in contrail formation. The core of each ice crystal is thus, not ice. Claiming that contrails “are essentially ice” is false and disingenuous, as it leaves out the essential role of these tiny seeds, without which, contrails, contrail cirrus and aviation-induced clouds would simply not occur.
As confirmed by physicist Jasper Kirkby, contrails are evidence that large regions of the atmosphere, prior to aircraft emissions, lack sufficient aerosols to form clouds. Only about 1 in 100000 aerosols present in the upper atmosphere will nucleate ice.
Now we are rarely given this picture that includes the tiny but essential aerosols by official sources. Why is that? Is it because the full picture of artificial clouds created by aerosols emitted by aircraft begins to more closely resemble, in a rather uncomfortable fashion, the claims of the “crazy chemtrail conspiracy loons?”
More contrail canards:
“Contrails that disappear almost instantly, do so due to the ambient atmospheric conditions of relatively high temperature, high pressure and low atmospheric humidity.”
According to NASA, there are two main kinds of contrail:
Short-lived contrails
These trails last only a few minutes. There is only a small amount of atmospheric water available to form the contrail. The ice that forms around the aerosols returns to a vapour state very quickly. Note that the aerosols themselves do not evaporate, they are still present in the atmosphere, contributing to the burden. Officialdom, when addressing the concerned public, neglects to mention them.
“Contrails that persist, do so due to the “just right” ambient atmospheric conditions of relatively low temperature, low pressure and high atmospheric humidity.”
Persistent contrails
These remain in the sky long after the plane has disappeared. This shows that the air where the airplane is flying is quite humid, and there is a large amount of atmospheric water vapour available to form a contrail. Again, that water would remain as water, were it not for the numerous ice nuclei present in such numbers as to entrain and spread the available water out. This ensures that it takes a lengthy period before each ice crystal reaches precipitation size. Again, it is the presence of ice nuclei as much as water vapour, that determines the formation of persistent contrails. Aerosols override the requirement for the “just right” ambient atmospheric conditions. This is the real reason for the ubiquitous presence of contrails across the planet.
“Contrails that persist, can also grow and, given a high enough atmospheric humidity, spread to become indistinguishable from naturally occurring cirrus clouds. “
Persistent spreading contrails,
This is the phenomena that is causing global concern on the part of the public and features in the voluminous photographic evidence.
As the name implies, these spread out, covering a large area, thousands of square kilometres, and affect the climate. In fact, spreading is an inaccurate term, as the ice nuclei entrain further atmospheric ice from the point of origin and grow in size. The resulting cirrus formations contain many thousands of times the amount of atmospheric water vapour compared to the relatively insignificant water vapour produced by the jet engines. They do not merely merge with pre-existing cirrus clouds, they generate entirely new, artificial, cirrus cloud formations of vast proportions.
Related phenomena, aviation-induced cirrus clouds, occur when particulates are released from aircraft, without visible trails, and later entrain water vapour from the atmosphere to form cirrus formations.
“Aviation-induced cirrus can occur through two different pathways: via contrails spreading out and by injection of aerosols into the upper troposphere to provide ice nuclei that may subsequently form cirrus clouds [Lee et al., 2009].”
In fact, the initial line-shaped trail, with water contributed from both the jet engine and the atmosphere, is not in itself necessary for aviation-induced clouds to occur. It’s the injection of aerosols, ice nuclei, that is the key factor. They disperse and entrain water from the surrounding atmosphere to grow to cover areas that have been recorded as large as 50,000 square kilometres.
Another official canard goes:
“Photographic evidence of contrails is not evidence of chemtrails.”
Leaving aside, for the present, photographic evidence of very strange contrails left behind by aircraft of non-commercial origin, such evidence of the criss-crossing variety in such global profusion falsifies the notion that contrails only form “occasionally” when the atmospheric conditions are “just right.”
They don’t form “sometimes” rather they are virtually ubiquitous, otherwise why would they pose the threat that even George claims they do – namely warming the planet?
And this is the interesting part. Officials, when presenting to the public, pretend that scientists are rather confused or at least uncertain as to whether cirrus clouds formed from aircraft, warm or cool the planet.
Whilst cirrus clouds do reflect sunlight, they also trap infra-red radiation (heat) much like CO2 does. In actuality the science is very clear that the heat-trapping effect outweighs the solar-reflecting aspect so that cirrus clouds are net-warmers. Moreover, the closer to night and the further poleward they occur, the greater the warming. Integrated over the planet and throughout the year, cirrus clouds most certainly and significantly warm.
Today, the mainstream media has begun to admit to the public the role that artificial clouds generated by aircraft have in warming the climate. Below are a couple of such controlled disclosures:
Airplane contrails are changing the climate
Contrails Are Air Travel’s Dirty Secret
They are based on a study carried out in 2019:
Contrail cirrus radiative forcing for future air traffic
Four simulations carried out by the German Aerospace Center’s Institute for Atmospheric Physics modelling the potential effects on the climate accounting for “increased air traffic, climate change, improvements in fuel efficiency, and decreases in soot emissions.”
They predicted that air traffic would both shift towards higher altitudes and increase in volume four-fold from 2006 levels to 2050, tripling contrail formation and radiative forcing from around 50 – 60 mW m−2 to 160 – 180 mW m−2.
The study thus suggests that currently global contrails account for 50 milliwatts per square metre of Earth’s surface. This is 0.05 W m−2
This seems a paltry sum when compared to the radiative forcing from all recognised climate drivers of around 1.9 W m−2.
Well it would be were it not for the fact that the forcings from contrails and contrail-cirrus are almost certainly, and criminally, underestimated.
Corridors of Power
Climatologist Olivier Boucher found a correlation between air traffic corridors, specifically the spatial distribution of aviation fuel consumption and the increase in cirrus cloud cover.
Over the ten-year period under study, between 1982 and 1991, with an average annual growth of 3.2% in total fuel consumption, he found cirrus frequency increased globally on average by 1.1% and 3.5% for land and ocean, respectively, with regional average increases of 2.9% to 4.6% over the principal flight corridors.
This matches well with the High Resolution Infrared Radiometer Sounder (HIRS) polar orbiting satellite data reported by Wylie and Menzel which found from 1979 to 2001, that cirrus clouds had increased globally by 1.95% on average, per decade. The more sophisticated infra-red spectral-channels onboard the satellite were able to detect 10-15% more cirrus clouds than that detected by the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP).
Boucher goes on to estimate the forcing that would result from these changes:
“Experiment measurements of the net change in radiation associated with high thin clouds suggest a 0.2 W m−2 per 1% of condensation trail or high-level cloudiness
I therefore estimate that the trend in cirrus amount over the continental regions of high air traffic (2.9% as discussed above) would correspond locally to an additional cloud radiative forcing of about 0.7 W m−2”
Like-wise a 4% increase from 1979 to 2001 would indicate a global forcing of around 0.8 W m−2. This is clearly a good deal greater than the mainstream media reports on the effects of contrail-cirrus cover. A tripling of this would be 2.4 W m−2 in 2050.
Considering that, according to the IPCC, the CO2 forcings from 1979 (1.027 W m−2 at 383ppm) to 2001 (1.535 W m−2 at 444ppm) amount to 0.508 W m−2 over the same period, it is clear to see that cloud cover alterations are climate game changers. It is important to take note of how relatively swiftly this has occurred whereas CO2 levels have been building up since the 18th century to their 2016 forcing of 1.985 W m−2.
In this short but wonderful video, atmospheric scientist Jasper Kirkby outlines the prime importance that clouds hold for the planet.
Cloudy climate change: How clouds affect Earth’s temperature – Jasper Kirkby
Jasper begins:
“Earths average surface temperature has warmed by 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1750. When carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have doubled, which is expected before the end of the 21st century, researchers project global temperatures will have risen by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. If the increase is near the low end then we are already halfway there and we should be able to more adapt with some regions becoming drier and less productive but others becoming warmer, wetter and more productive.
On the other hand, a rise of 4.5 degrees Celsius would be similar in magnitude to the warming that’s occurred since the last glacial maximum 22,000 years ago when most of North America was under an ice-sheet two kilometres thick.
So that would represent a dramatic change of climate.”
He then goes onto ask why we haven’t been able to narrow down this range of uncertainty 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius.
“The answer is we don’t yet understand aerosols and clouds well enough”
The Cloud project at CERN is addressing big problems:
“How cloudy was the pre-industrial climate and hence how much have clouds changed due to human activities?”
I suspect they may find that this potentially catastrophic extra 3 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century and perhaps as a much as 54% of warming today will not be due mostly to cloud feedback but rather due to cloud forcing – namely artificial clouds arising from aerosols emitted by aircraft in the upper atmosphere.
Call me a chemtrail conspiracy loon if you must.
George’s diatribe is more fully addressed here:
Baker Street Rising 
2 thoughts on “Cloud Wake – Catastrophic Forcing”