What is the purpose of that foggy/smoky trail that we see that's being sprayed from airplanes? I think it is called chemtrails. I've recently heard all kinds of things about how it could be harming us because of some coverup, or some kind of substitution of what we think it is.
Posts: 6612 | Location: Land of Lincoln, USA | Registered: 07-04-02
They're called contrails, and no, there's no conspiracy involved. Basically, it's the same phenomenon as when you breathe out on a hot day. The water in hot, humid air condenses when it hits the cold air that can't hold as much water. Where does the water come from?
When you burn methane, the reaction is CH4 + 4O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O The basic idea holds for any hydrocarbon, including jet fuel: hydrocarbon plus oxygen becomes carbon dioxide plus water. **************************************************** 02-20-06, 10:34 PM honilov Thanks Methos for giving me the right term. Anyway, by this, you mean that it just automatically emits via the exhaust system?
02-20-06, 10:52 PM DorianGreyed Yes, that is what he means. You may have noticed just about the same thing coming out of a car's exhaust on a cold winter day, along, of course, with all the other car exhaust pollutants. It is just water vapor.
02-20-06, 10:55 PM Professor There is a lunatic fringe who believe that normal contrails, as explained nicely by Methos, are actually part of a government conspiracy to spray toxic chemicals in the sky. They call them "chemtrails."
New Mexicans for Science and Reason have this article debunking it. Here's an excerpt:
quote:
Contrails ("CHEMTRAILS") are NORMAL. The International Space Station crew sees them all the time, except when airplanes are not flying, as happened in the days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Here is the report from www.space.com from September 14th, 2001:
"Three days after suicide airplane hijackers toppled the World Trade Center in New York and slammed into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., the station crew noted an obvious absence of airborne jetliners from their perch 240 miles (384 kilometers) above Earth. 'I’ll tell you one thing that’s really strange: Normally when we go over the U.S., the sky is like a spider web of contrails,' U.S. astronaut and outpost commander Frank Culbertson told flight controllers at NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston. 'And now the sky is just about completely empty.
Here's another picuture of contrail clusters around Atlanta photographed from space.
When the conditions are right, I've been able to observe on the ground the shadow of the contrail forming behind the very airliner I'm riding in.
[edited by professor to fix a link]
02-20-06, 11:20 PM honilov Thanks.
It's just that I've been in conversations at work where we've been trying to figure out how come there is so much sickness now and this is one of the things that came up. I hear so many people say it must be something in the air or the food we eat.
02-21-06, 08:48 AM methos Although I'm sure pollutants cause sickness that would otherwise not occur, people in developped countries are far healthier than in the past, so I'm not sure I understand why you're looking for some human-related cause.
02-21-06, 03:27 PM honilov Methos, people in developed countries might be healthy, but people in America sure are not. Long time ago, Americans were a lot healthier than they are now and lived to a very old age. Now Americans are sicker, taking numerous pills a day, and dying a lot younger. Something is causing it. I'm not actually looking for a human-related cause. I'm just curious as to what's causing it. Some of it could very well be human related though. It's been a rumor for years that Aids was a man-made disease.
02-21-06, 04:24 PM methos I don't know where you're getting that. The US lifespan is increasing - Americans are now living longer than in the past. The increase in medication is largely because we are living longer and partly the medications weren't around in the past.
I don't mean to suggeast that things are perfect, our lifespans would be even longer without certain health issues, particularly those related to obesity and lack of healthcare, and there is evidence that our lifespans aren't growing as fast as they used to, but our lifespans are still growing.
Except for major catastrophes such as famines, wars and pandemics, the life span of the average American has been increasing steadily for the past two centuries, reaching an all-time high of 77.6 years in 2003, the most recent data show.
*The article was about projections that the trend might slow or reverse itself (that is, lifespans might stop growing or get shorter) in the future due to obesity. However, as the article points out, American lifespans are still getting longer now.
02-21-06, 05:25 PM honilov Interesting article Methos, and I agree that obesity is a cause of a lot of deaths.
However in doing more research I found that polution is causing people to die younger. link
I also found that minorities are dying younger. Research shows that African Americans receive inferior health care even if they have the same resources and health insurance as whites. Black cancer patients, for example, are less likely to receive pain medication in nursing homes. Black patients are less likely to be recommended for organ transplants. Black lung cancer patients are less likely to receive needed surgery. The fact that the US lacks a national health care system compounds the problems. There are 45 million (out of a population of 270 million) US people without health care coverage. Approximately 20% of all blacks lack health insurance, nearly twice the percentage of uninsured whites. Could be that I'm a little more familiar with minorities and thought everyone were dying younger.
Still, something is causing all these problems. I think maybe that article about polution has hit the nail on the head.
02-21-06, 05:37 PM DorianGreyed This needs to be pointed out - Except for the medical advances in the last 4 decades, which actually extended the lifespans of older adults, the increase in life span in the previous 100 years, especially in the first part of the 20th Century, was primarily due to two things: Fewer women dying in childbirth due to now preventable causes, and fewer childhood deaths. Those who doubt that those two have not been the major agent of change need to consider this - Jimmy Carter was the first US President to be born in a hospital. Prior to Carter, every single US President was born in a home, including several who were wealthy. The doubters should also look at the downturn in childhood deaths, both from disease, and injury. In the 1800s, children often worked, often on family farms. Farm work is dangerous, as is coal mining, an industry which had many young boys working. The smaller children could get into areas that adult men just couldn't fit. It is in the last 4 decades that the US lifespan of adults had been extended. Fifty years ago, a 60-70 year old was considered old, and near his three score and ten year allotment. Now we see people in their 70s and 80s living active lives, with many still participating in sports activities.
02-22-06, 07:38 AM methos I did say "I'm sure pollutants cause sickness that would otherwise not occur" Wink. Again, I don't mean to suggest that there aren't things that could (and should) be changed to make Americans healthier and longer-lived, I just take issue with the idea that Americans lived longer in the past. Even in the case of the study on pollutants, the finding was that people in cities with high levels of pollution don't live as long as those in cities with lower levels of pollution, not that people in cities don't live as long as they used to.
02-22-06, 07:53 AM methos DG: I'm not sure the infant mortality part is completely true. I don't mean to suggest that infant mortality wasn't very high in the past - it was very very high, but I don't think it effects this particular statistic. I'm pretty sure lifespan statistics are based only on adult deaths.
This table has some interesting information. Looking at the different columns can show you how large of an effect infant mortality was in the past. In 1850, white male newborns would die at an average age of 38.3. If they survived until age 10, however, they could expect an average lifespan of 58. In 2003, the numbers are 80.5 and 71.1, showing an enormous drop in infant mortality. The difference would likely be even more extreme in Europe, where infant mortality rates today tend to be lower than in the US.
Although the table shows a faster lengthening of life expectancy for adult women than adult men (supporting DGs point about deaths in childbirth), it does show a steady increase in life expectancy for adult men, who would be unaffected by either deaths in childbirth or infant mortality.
02-22-06, 10:46 AM DorianGreyed "I'm pretty sure lifespan statistics are based only on adult deaths."
Most of the lifespan information I have seen that give any additional information phrase it in such a way that it is obvious that infant deaths are a factor. In fact, this part of your post
In 1850, white male newborns would die at an average age of 38.3. If they survived until age 10, however, they could expect an average lifespan of 58.
seems to agree with what I say. The most often quoted lifespan information is the one about the 47 year lifespan in the US in 1900. If that didn't include childhood mortality, surely it would have been higher in light of your 1850 information. Anecdotal evidence is found all through history, with proven ages of people living into their 70s, 80s, and 90s going back to the Romans. That doesn't mesh with the lower lifespans of the times unless infant mortality is factored in. We also have many rulers with proven ages much older than the lifespans of their times, and that may mean even more when you consider that, for most of history, a physician's advice was more often bad advice, yet the rulers are the ones most likely to have a physician.
A side note - I would like to see a year-by-year compilation of lifespans for every year of the 20th Century. It would be interesting to see the dips resulting from war and the influenza epidemic.
02-22-06, 12:11 PM methos I meant to say "these lifespan statistics," referring to the obesity study. I took a look at the article and it turns out they mention both in the introduction, but look at adult deaths for their study.
I agree that the 77.6 for 2003 and 47 in 1900 are for life expectancy at birth, though.
My point was not that infant mortality and childbirth deaths haven't decreased greatly, they obviously have as the first set of numbers in my last post supports. My point was just that there are other strong factors, as seen in the increasing life expectancies of 10-yeal-old males.
02-22-06, 07:17 PM Professor honi, you've pointed out valid and real reasons why some groups of people face additional (i.e., below average) health risks -- city dwellers due to air pollution, blacks due to racism, the poor due to difficult access to care, etc. There are lots of groups like that.
Meanwhile methos and DG are busy showing good evidence that there is no overall trend downward of health in the U.S. In a way this is depressing because, given some of the minorities you mentioned, it highlights the social injustice in our society. Yet the point is: there's no evidence of widespread poisoning of the population, by high-flying aircraft or any other means, that reaches everybody in the US or world. This would be, in fact, an extraordinary claim and -- as the saying goes -- would require extraordinary evidence. So far there's none.
Finding a statistically unusual number of cancers in a given neighborhood--such as six or seven times greater than the average--is not rare or unexpected. Much depends on where you draw the boundaries of the neighborhood. Clusters of cancers that are seven thousand times higher than expected, such as the incidence of mesothelioma in Karian, Turkey, are very rare and unexpected. The incidence of thyroid cancer in children near Chernobyl was one hundred times higher after the disaster (Gawande)...In epidemiology, the clustering illusion is known as the Texas-sharpshooter fallacy
The term refers to the story of the Texas sharpshooter who shoots holes in the side of a barn and then draws a bull's-eye around the bullet holes. Individual cases of disease are noted and then the boundaries are drawn -- just another way that statistics can be misused, naively or deliberately -- by mistake or deception.
quote:
Originally posted by honilov: I hear so many people say it must be something in the air or the food we eat.
honi, as someone who's looked into urban legends (try snopes.com) I think that all people (including me at times!) have a tendency to repeat what they've heard until it becomes a self-confirming rumor fabricated out of thin air! Your assertion that "there must be something in the air or the food" is trying to explain a phenomenon -- diminishing health of US citizens -- that evidently doesn't exist in the first place.
Aircraft contrails are just water, along with some added engine exhaust whose quantity surely pales in comparison to total fossil-fuel emissions.
Contrails appear to be harmless.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: DorianGreyed,
