One of the most pervasive conspiracy theories is that the guvmint are controlling the population via chemtrails, the white streaming gas-looking things coming from the wings of jets as they go about their gravity defying business.
And it’s bollocks, just to be clear – that’s a super inefficient way to distribute mind-control serum, for one thing, and there’d be noticeable cluster of unusually placid people under flightpaths which doesn’t appear to be the case in Sydney’s inner west.
Also, it’s a really silly theory.
But it turns out that contrails are genuinely worse than we’d realised. Just not for mind control reasons.
Contrails – condensation trails – happen when the moisture from jet exhaust freezes into ice crystals in the cold upper atmosphere. And, counter-intuitively, that actually has an effect on global warming because it forms short-lived cloud layers called contrail cirrus which contributes to the heating of the earth by preventing heat from escaping into space.
And yes, those clouds only exist for hours or days – but given the level of global air traffic, there’s a hell of lot of it. And recent calculations suggest that the effect on climate change is greater than the effect of CO2 from aeroplane fuel emissions.
And that… look, that’s bad.
Not least because all the work on reducing the impact of air travel is based around CO2 reduction, and because more and more planes are flying at higher altitudes where the contrail cirrus effect is made greater.
So yes, the conspiracy theorists were right, a bit – if not about the mechanism, then certainly about it being bad.
Honestly, if it turns out that tinfoil hats really do stop people reading our minds then we might have rethink everything.