A ROYAL FLUSH BEATS A FULL HOUSE OF WINDSOR:

EXCHANGING YOUR TV 

FOR YOUR LOST MIND

 Artwork by Artnuko: Carl Chaplin carlchaplin@shaw.ca

By Alex Hunter

April 23, 2011

By now you’d think we’d all be aware that the charade which is “democracy” is merely a NY Shell Game, a political puppet show put on as one of the mechanisms used to distract us from what is really going on in the world, to keep us from meddling in the decision making process and to conceal the fact we are mere tax slaves in a master slave ~ society. A global society ruled by a psychopathic, arrogant, inbred and ruthlessly militant global oligarchy.

Left Wing ~ Liberal, Right Wing ~ Conservative, Tail Feathers ~ NDP and I’ll leave it up to your imagination to determine where it is on the ruling group parrot the Green Party comes from.

If people had time to realize what is really going on in the world right now they’d be shocked ~ horrified even ~ and eventually they’d become very angry. That is why the globalists employ teams of think tanks, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), secret societies and social psychologists to engineer our synthetic reality which is then pimped out to us via their agents of social control, PR departments, political puppets and media puppets.

Shortly after Sept 11th George W Bush stated that all science had to go through Washington.

Shortly after that our Canadian PM parroted Bush’s statement; all science had to go through Ottawa, thus neutering it and transmogrifying it into nothing more than globalist propaganda. This is of no small significance or consequence as the elites have cooked up the great global warming swindle to relieve us of ethereal carbon taxes and make a killing on ‘carbon credits’ ~ and all of it gets deposited straight into the Rothschild’s unaudited Swiss bank account.

That the Rot n’ Royals are ‘experimenting’ on us with their state of the art military ~ industrial weather, tectonic and psychotronic weaponry (HAARP) is the largest insult to humanity, the Earth and Her creatures.

The second largest insult being all of their illegitimate and unnecessary wars followed closely by the pathological monetary ~ military ~ industrial ~ corporate ~ ‘legal’ global warming ~ banking swindle and the great global economy swindle.

Since the Earthquake in Japan 5 weeks ago the ‘experts’ and the ‘news’ has delivered you the usual 3 week roller coaster ride of emotionally, psychologically and physically draining information and probably left you bewildered this last couple of weeks. Perhaps out of frustration many of you decided that you would just continue your lives as usual, especially as the ‘experts’ and the ‘news’ said it was safe to do so.

To be crystal clear it is because they lied to us all that we continued to exercise outdoors, bike to work, take the children to soccer, whatever… such is the design and effect of the PR, propaganda, psyops, psycholinguistics, etc pimped out to us from these mind controlled military ~ industrial malfeasants via their mindless media puppets.

IN FACT IT IS SO ADVANCED NOW

MANY OF YOU DON’T SEEM TO REALIZE

WE ARE 9.5 YEARS INTO WWIII.

I urge you to turn off/throw out your televisions and think for yourselves.

The warmongering ruling group psychopaths/sociopaths and their minions masquerading as our ‘incompetent’ leaders seem bent on leading us all to Hell itself.

Judging by the myriad of ways we’re being exposed to extremely unhealthy (and increasingly fatal) health hazards ~ our ‘regulatory’ bodies notwithstanding ~ they just can’t seem to be able to do it fast enough.

Contact Alex at: ahunter100@shaw.ca

CHEMTRAIL: NAWWWW IT'S A CONTRAIL DUMMY!

A lot of people just don't seem to believe in chemtrails. I don't know why when they see the evidence on a daily basis. The fellows who posted the following video finally answer this question once and for all.  Concrete filmed evidence cannot be ignored.  They took quite a risk both taking the film and then posting it. If you have any doubts that chemtrails exist, please watch this short video and then start seeing what you can do about this.
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Illustrations by David Dees.

CHEMTRAILS: THEY LIVE WE SLEEP

CHEMTRAILS OVER MY HOUSE YESTERDAY

Yes, right overhead, all day long. This is what I see.

This video features extensive video evidence of a Geo-Engineered, Biological Attack against Canada filmed on March 23, 2011 over Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. 
 

Uploaded

By islandonlinenews 

Mar 24, 2011

This has got to be one of the best local documentaries that I've watched thus far covering the chemtrail issue in Victoria, B.C.

Dozens upon dozens of jets spraying continuously over the area, some approaching from the US side of the border then doing a 360 degree loop leaving their chemical-laden payload to waft downward upon the breezes that are blowing into Canada's sovereign air and land spaces. This video features extensive video evidence of a Geo-Engineered, Biological Attack against Canada filmed on March 23, 2011 over Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. My sincere respect goes out to videoto-grapher Fritz Stammberger for his efforts in producing this coverage.

Naysayers are a dime a dozen these days; when asked to remove their head from its usual resting place and actually check out what's going on above their domes they always seem to also have a dozen or more feeble excuses to justify not taking the time to do so.

Whether suffering biologically from lack of sunlight, poor soil conditions, polluted drinking water, compromised immune systems, respiratory illnesses or man made viruses, Geo-Engineering is affecting us all.

This video features extensive video evidence of a Geo-Engineered, Biological Attack against Canada filmed on March 23, 2011 over Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.

Stammberger of Victoria, B.C.'s IslandOnlineNews.com should help to dispel any doubts as far as what is now occurring on a regular basis across Canada, the USA and much of the globe, but most specifically in the video, right over my head.

As the morning sun rises in a clear blue sky it's destined to be shrouded over with a blanket of chemical toxins so that by nightfall a gloomy canopy of darkness is preceded by a blanket of grey-black chemtrails that give off an eerie, artificially false-coloured sunset.

Please do watch this video and also pass it along to any naysayer you may encounter who still believes that contrails and chemtrails are one and the same.

CHEMTRAILS FOR DUMMIES.COM

Radical Press

By Arthur Topham
March 4, 2011

Why “Chemtrails For Dummies.com” you might ask? Good question; even for a dummy I might add!

Well, it appears that most folks are just too dumbed down these days to realize that they’re being sprayed like insects or weeds from jet planes flying over their heads. Now whether it’s the contents of the sprays themselves affecting their cognitive abilities or some form of inherent stupidity endemic to the general population, the fact remains, and is clearly evident, that the problem has been around in our face for well over a decade now and still your average dummy hasn’t caught on to the fact. Thus the need for added remedial intervention.

This is why I posted such a large graphic image with this article. It’s because so many people who actually believe they have eyes in good, functioning condition and who ought to be able to recognize chemtrails in the sky, inevitably react to the mention of this phenomenon with immediate skepticism and denial as if those delivering the goods were somehow imagining it all and playing tricks on them.

To suspend their disbelief for but a moment when actually pressed to do so and then tilt their heads back 20 degrees or so and look up at the sky, becomes, for all practical purposes, an insurmountable task; one they will do anything to wriggle and squirm out of rather than willingly do. Exhibitions of such overt behavior are indicative of of one the fundamental hallmarks of dummies. No question.

THE ENIGMATIC DUMMY

Now why this dumbed down reaction pattern is present in so many otherwise intelligent people remains an enigma to this day. Even though the information is out there in print, on dvd and currently is spreading across the cyberian firmament like wildfire, the number of dummies remain exceptionally high.

On Facebook it’s the talk of the town amongst such groups as the “Chemtrail Consciousness Coalition (CCC)” where members are continually screaming out in digital octaves and imagery to the world,

“WAKE UP PEOPLE!

YOU’RE BEING LITERALLY POISONED

AND SO IS THE WHOLE FREAKIN’ EARTH

AND YOU STILL REFUSE

TO OPEN YOUR EYES TO THE REALITY

OF WHAT’S HAPPENING!!!”

If you haven’t joined Facebook and wish to in order to participate in the chemtrail awareness movement then just click here to find out how to become a member.

In many ways it’s like the old days, back in the 60s, when the stoners would use expressions like, “You’re either on the bus or off” to indicate a person who had been “Experienced” (as Jimi Hendrix used to say). 
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Magnificent? Yes. Natural? No!

 Seems like this aspect of human life never changes.

Until a person wakes up to whatever it is that they’re slumbering through, be it the fact that they’re being drenched in an array of chemicals, heavy metals, biological organisms inimical to human health or the other assorted arsenals of lab created Frankenstein toxins,  or unaware of the basics of history itself, they just go on behaving as if the problem is somehow not there or not real and the people who say it is are just all conspiracy nuts trying to freak  others out because they get off on that sort of thing.

While I don’t have enough data at hand to explain it conclusively I firmly believe that it is somehow tied in with other similar types of aberrant behaviour wherein the majority of people are so conditioned mentally to perceive outer forms of reality in a certain, prescribed manner that, whenever they are confronted with the actual and true, their mental synapses, preconditioned by pseudo-informational overload, suddenly short-circuit and the message to the appropriate area of the brain is derailed or blocked, leaving them somehow suspended in the Dummy Zone; frozen in time like some Kurt Vonnegut character.

We can see this in other areas as well particularly with mainstream television viewers who will become so emotionally wrapped up in their favorite programming that it becomes virtually impossible to explain to them that what they are watching is not actually real.

Religion, Philosophy and Politics are other similar fields of mental activity wherein people form certain images or constructs that, once solidified over time, become adamantine in the mind and extremely difficult to re-envision and let go of.
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THE DUMMY ON THE HILL

Not too long ago I had ordered the new DVD “What In The World Are They Spraying?” from the fine fellows down in the U.S. of A. who, being caring, concerned and conscious enough to have got their acts together, had produced a feature length video on the subject of spraying chemicals and other assorted nasty shit into our collective breathing space.

I am of course referring here to Michael J. Murphy, G. Edward Griffin and Paul Wittenberger, the three musketeers of the Great Unveiling of this dark, sinister and deadly attack upon humanity and all living forms. While they weren’t the first to investigate this monstrous act of global terrorism against life itself, their dvd has been extremely useful in shattering the ‘glass darkly’ that prevents the awakening of a lot of otherwise prime candidates for Chemtrails for Dummies.com.

Those wishing to check out the excellent efforts of G. Edward Griffin should take the time to visit his website at www.RealityZone.com and find out a whole lot more about chemtrails and related topics. As for Michael J. Murphy’s work I suggest visiting his two sites as well. The Coalition Against Geo-Engineering and Truth Media Productions.

As for myself I’m not your average dummy when it comes to the chemtrail spraying issue. I first got wind of it back in the last century and actually started publishing articles on chemtrails in my former alternative newspaper, The Radical back in the year 2000. What a hell of a way to begin a new century I thought! knowing that the planet was being subjected to this ultimate insanity and yet no one would cop to it and the vast majority of people, because they didn’t see it on CBC, BBC, CNN or FOX, refused to admit that it could possibly exist.

Well anyway, after I received and watched the DVD a couple of times and was convinced of its efficacious nature, I invited my good friend to watch it with me. He lived just down the road a ways, his home situated atop a small hill overlooking the once scenic Fraser River valley in central B.C. When the DVD was finished I expected that he would be in wholehearted agreement with me that this criminal conspiracy to poison and kill people and planet was precisely what had been happening in the skies above us for well over a decade now.

Instead, I was shocked to hear him say, in obvious sincerity, that yes he agreed that this was going on down in the states and in Hawaii and in Europe (areas where the DVD producers had gone to film the phenomenon) but that he had never seen any chemtrails overhead in the region of the province in which we both had resided for the past twenty years or longer!

At first I couldn’t believe my ears and in sheer exasperation I questioned him as to his response thinking that possibly he was giving me the old ‘tongue in cheek’ patent reply that the normal dummy does. But eventually, it finally sunk in, the realization that people are actually incapable of grasping what is taking place in the skies and assuming that the assorted fake cloud cover they see is actual natural formations.

This same reaction is repeated over and over on the net but there it’s exacerbated by the presence of nay sayers and disinfo agents who do their utmost to spray out digital trails of disinformation regarding chemtrails.

I would be remiss here were I not to include a few more websites in my short list of online chemtrail information centers. One of the original pioneers of the anti-chemtrail movement worldwide is a man by the name of William (Will) Thomas, a Canadian, living in the Gulf Island region of British Columbia. He has written books on the subject, lectured widely and researched extensively this conspiracy to commit global genocide. I first learned of the subject from him and recommend that all dummies take a good look at his William Thomas Online website for all the gory details and stats.

Further information on Chemtrails/Chemtrail Facts/Chemtrail Books/Contrails/ChemtrailsConfirmed/Weather Modification can also be found at: http://www.willthomas.net/chemtrails/index.htm

Please see Conscious Life News for more information on spraying.

Thanks to the good work of Murphy, Griffin & Co. interested readers should also check out a European site called The Balfort Group founded by the former Mayor of Evergem, Belgium, Mr. Peter Vereecke. The Belfort Group has been working hard to document and uncover the goods on the perpetrators of this criminal act against Life.

And finally, from Miami, Florida the work of S.H. Pearson who has been documenting the disasters for some years now. Their work can be found at The Payload.
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CHEM OR CON? A DUMB QUESTION?

Chemtrails versus contrails has thus become another area of dispute that tends to dominate discussions and prevent people from gaining a clear understanding of what’s going on above their heads.

While the explanations are simple enough to understand when it comes to differentiating between a con trail (frozen, con-densed ice crystals that jets flying through cold air leave behind then disappear within minutes) and chemtrails (artificial chemical gases containing a multiply combination of toxic heavy metals such as aluminum and barium and strontium plus other poisonous, biological ingredients of a dire and sinister nature, all of which DO NOT DISSIPATE after being sprayed into the atmosphere but slowly spread out and transform themselves into an assortment of shapes, many eventually resembling formations similar to cirrus clouds and what meteorologists called “horsetails,”)

There is a grouping on the internet similar to those who infiltrate the countless blogs and forums of cyberspace to cause confusion and disruption, who are attempting to make this distinction between the two as convoluted and confusing as possible. Their motives for doing so are to keep people unaware via deception and distraction and therefore rendered unwilling to act and do something to stop this ultimate crime of global genocide from occurring.

WHO’S CON-NING THE DUMMIES ABOUT CHEMTRAILS?

This, of course, is the $64,000 question. Who, in this war of the world scenario, is actually responsible for the bio-chemical assault upon the planet and why are they able, in the face of insurmountable evidence, to continually elude detection and prevent national governments from acting to gain knowledge of their nefarious actions?

Most people today, including a growing number of dummies even, are aware of the usual suspects when it comes to the psychopaths de jour; those who continually busy themselves screwing up the environment and nation state economies and cultures, in their endless quest for more wealth and power and control.
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Victoria BC ~ subtle isn't it?

We have an over abundance of acronyms and tags to identify these possible perpetrators, some of the main ones being the New World Order (NWO); the Illuminati; the Space Aliens; the Icke Reptilians, the Council on Foreign Relations, the UNO, WB, MIT, etc., but, obviously, having these generic descriptive terms at hand hasn’t helped one bloody bit to expose the problem or stop the spraying (thus far anyway).

All bullshit aside, somewhere, someone, or a group of someones, is issuing these massive spraying directives and no military, be it that of the USA or Canada or NATO or any other nation like Australia or New Zealand or the EU countries, is willing to challenge these orders or question publicly why the spraying is occurring over their airspace.

Now I ask you, just how dumb is that?

Here we have a virtual threat occurring that will have global consequences for all sentient life on the planet yet this mysterious group of self-appointed gods (some might prefer the term “devils”) continue to pursue a course of poisoning and killing people, soil, water, air and the myriad other species that obviously depend upon this living planet for their healthy and survival without a single politician, statesman, academic or mainstream media asking why.

When crap like this is happening around the planet and the governments (supposed representatives of the welfare and well-being of their constituents) are complicit in it by the obvious fact of their silence and tacit consent, then it really doesn’t take the proverbial rocket scientist to figure out that something is very, very seriously amiss in the whole equation. Even a dummy ought to be able to figure that one out, non?

Addressing this very question of responsibility and accountability and what repercussions ought to occur respecting the punishment of those found to be guilty of these crimes against the planet, the website www.aircrap.org (motto: “Monitoring the Planned Poisoning of Humanity”) has posed the question, “WHAT IS JUST PUNISHMENT?” to its audience in the form of a poll where people can register their sentiments.

In response to the question, “What is the just punishment for those orchestrating and taking part in the death dumps?” the voter is given four choices:

~ A slap on the hand and told not to do it again?

~ 10 years in prison with time off for good behavior?

~ Life in prison without possibility of parole?

~ Death by hanging or lethal injection?

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The results thus far do not bode well for those who ultimately WILL be held accountable for these insidious crimes. 61% of the votes cast to date indicate that the culprits ought to bite the dust; 35% would cast them into a dungeon for life; 3% would give them 10 years in prison and 1% feel a slap on the hand is sufficient for the crime.

It’s fairly obvious that people who realize what’s going on are pissed off, big time, and for good reason. Whether the dummies will vote in a similar pattern is of course debatable for the simple reason that most, if not all of them, are still too dense to even realize that the poll is happening. Best they get with the program and check out the site. It definitely contains much in the way of valuable information on health effects, areas where spraying is happening, and much more.

SO?

What do we do? It always comes down to this question in the end. How do those who know what the problem is teach, convince, awaken, spur on, cajole, harass, push, shove, demand, enlighten, etc. the vast numbers of dummies who for a myriad of reasons refuse to respond to endless pleading and consistent insistence that they give their heads a shake and wake up?

It truly is a conundrum of universal proportions.

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Victoria BC ~ How can anyone look at this and not wonder a little?!??

If we all lived in the Middle East, as someone once suggested, we could take a hostage; someone of such stature that the world’s controlled media would be forced to cover the story.

The terms of release would be the exposure on prime time television around the world of all the documented evidence to date proving that humanity is under the gun and systematically being poisoned and condemned to a slow and agonizing death along with all the rest of our fellow species.

Once the dummies viewed it on the Idiot Box there would be no turning back.

Big Bro would have spoken and they would in all likelihood rise up en masse and demand that the spraying stop.

Politicians would quake in their boots and calls for investigations would resound across the nations where the spraying was occurring.

The world would be aflame with outrage and head would definitely roll.

Apart from such a radical solution there remains only the peaceful process of carrying the flame of truth to each and every corner of the planet in the hope that eventually enough numbers will be recruited to form an army of protesters strong enough to take to the streets and demand their governments

DO SOMETHING!

After a decade and more of trying to initiate change via this method I’m not at all convinced any longer that it will prove effective and I certainly don’t foresee another decade of continuous spraying without such permanent damage occurring that will make any future efforts worthwhile.

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Summer sunset in Victoria, BC.

All we can possibly hope for is the unfolding of the old occult expression: “As Above, So Below.”

Not in the sense of the contaminants continually falling to earth but in the more vital and virtual context of numbers of people from Cyberspace who will continue to organize and transform their knowledge into down-to-earth movements and protests that will soon show the rest of the dummies that we truly are serious about putting a final end to this mass murder of planet Earth.

Arthur Topham is a writer, researcher, publisher, builder and placer miner living in the mountains of central British Columbia, Canada. He can be reached at radical@radicalpress.com 

Arthur has also begun a site for British Columbians on chemtrails generally as well as to alert them to just how high local activity is. The photos used in this piece are photos Arthur took around his own area; he has been speaking to me of these things for a few years now.  I, too, am in British Columbia, and here, beside the ocean, we are very heavily sprayed. The weather has changed, the skies are often a hazy white instead of sunny blue.

A few weeks ago I was looking at sunsets and sunrises in Flickr or one of those sites and it was amazing how many chemtrails were obvious in the photos and how people just saw them as part of a beautiful photograph ~ thus are they conditioned to not know real clouds from streaks across the sky.

When was the last time you heard of children being taught about various cloud types in science class?

Arthur’s chemtrail site is  BRITISH COLUMBIA Chemtrail Alert

 

His political blog is: RADICAL PRESS

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 Maui Chemtrail sunset

OBSERVATIONS

Heavy Aerosol Activity Over Cheshire
www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150379429430436&set...

More Experiments
www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150410971250436&set...

Insane Geoengineering over Cheshire
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mxp_ejtTj_w

Easyjet Cloud Seeding
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwqZf5d6rKM

Aerosol Attack in August 2010 over Cheshire
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VELS-50zmO8

FACTUAL MOVIES AND DOCUMENTATION

What in the World Are They Spraying - Full Movie
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMKduPIkqaE

Parliamentary Document on Geoengineering.
www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsct...

Belfort Group - Belgian Watchdog - Case Orange Scientific Study
www.belfort-group.eu/sites/default/files/page/2010/05/COp...

Sulphur in the Jet Fuel on TV
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkBoFfSbzUc

Chemtrails - List Of Countries / "Why?"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJPS9vo1pB8

G. Edward Griffin talks about new CHEMTRAIL film
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiG-rKVBI3s

Evergreen Aviation Admits to Chemtrail Contracts with USAF
coupmedia.org/arial-spraying/evergreen-aviation-admits-to...

Former FBI Chief Ted Gunderson Says Chemtrail Death Dumps Must Be Stopped
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx8rTUvzQWA&sns=fb

200 Million Tons of Aluminum Aerosol Chemtrail Poisoning All Life! Scientific Proof!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFpS1yVioLM

Killer Chemtrails: The Shocking Truth
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psdg3OAw_a8

Chemtrails: British Gov Admits to Spraying Norwich
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMEonM0dtS0

Chemtrails Admitted and Confirmed by History Channel
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGdE_jkVsXs

It's all secret
www.nerc.ac.uk/research/programmes/aerosols/
/cmselect/cmsctech/221/221.pdf

I've got all the PDFs you can shake stick at.
downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap2-3/sap2-3-final-repo...

Whitening the Clouds
www.scribd.com/doc/45712918/Whitening-the-clouds

Anyone want any info LOL
www.scribd.com/doc/45712909/Weather-Modification

Pass it on.
www.scribd.com/doc/45712425/Engineering-the-Climate-Resea...
Owning the weather

www.scribd.com/doc/45712427/Owning-the-Weather-Vol-3-Weat...

Here's some more
www.scribd.com/doc/49643527/ENGINEERING-THE-CLIMATE-RESEA...

It's all interesting reading.
www.scribd.com/doc/49643519/Acid-Deposition-7

Angels Don't Play This HAARP
www.scribd.com/doc/49643509/Angels-Dont-Play-This-Haarp

One of the numerous HAARP Patents
www.scribd.com/doc/49643485/Method-and-Apparatus-for-Alte...

Ba Dum Pssssh!
www.scribd.com/doc/49643483/CTFC-Records-Event-Contracts-...

PROPAGANDA

They are experimenting and want us to do the observations for them.
www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/mar/02/plane-spotters...

How Vapour Trails Block the Sun.
www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1289893/Attack-va...

The San-Francisco based “Silver Lining Project” directed by entrepreneur Kelly Wanser has so far received $ 300,000 dollars from Bill Gates to develop technologies that will increase the whiteness of marine clouds.
www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_i...

silverliningproj.org/

HUMANS HAVE INTENTIONALLY WEATHER FOR MILITARY PURPOSES AND WEATHER CONTROL FOR DECADES

AKA Chemtrails

Washington’s Blog
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Weather modification is a well-known endeavor. For example, governments have been seeding clouds for decades to create more rain.
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And during warfare to create mud to slow the enemy’s ability to use roads.

As the Guardian reported in 2001:

During the Vietnam war, the Americans launched Project Popeye, a secret mission to seed the tops of monsoon clouds and trigger phenomenal downpours that would wash away the Ho Chi Minh Trail used for ferrying supplies.For five years Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were sprayed during the monsoons, and military intelligence claimed that rainfall was increased by a third in some places. It only came to an end in March 1971 when [Washington Post] journalist Jack Anderson exposed the project and caused such a public furor that the UN general assembly approved a universal treaty banning environmental warfare.

But the US air force planners recently came up with new proposals to launch new weather weapons. Instead of silver-iodide, the idea is to shower fine particles of heat-absorbing carbon over clouds to trigger localised flooding and bog down troops and their equipment. Lasers on aircraft would also trigger lightning onto enemy aircraft, whilst other lasers could be fired at fog to clear a path over enemy targets on the ground.

Whether or not they work, past experiences tell us to be wary of tampering with the weather. In 1947, meteorologists tried to kill off a dying hurricane out at sea by seeding the clouds. The following day, the hurricane suddenly gathered strength, swung round and hit Savannah, Georgia causing extensive damage.

The weather boffins were so rattled by the disaster it was not until August 1969 that they dared try again.
When Hurricane Debbie was 700 miles out at sea, they flew three seeding missions around its eye, where tropical storms are at their most intense, but the results were mixed ~ with each seeding the hurricane’s winds were reduced and each time they picked up again.

Interestingly, U.S. weather modification efforts during the Vietnam war were revealed as part of the Pentagon Papers.
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In early 1967, the US military carried out a cloud-seeding operation for a period of over five years during the Vietnam War to extend the rainy season. The military seeded the clouds with sodium iodide over the Ho Chi Minh Trail to create floods and wash out North Vietnamese supply routes.

As the Washington Post reported on July 2, 1972:

Indochina ~ by the evidence of a long-ignored passage in the Pentagon Papers ~ has been a test battleground, the site of purposeful rain-making along the Ho Chi Minh trails.
***
Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.) is prominent among members of Congress who believe it has become a reality. “There is very little doubt in my mind,” he says. Rep. Gilbert Gude (R-Md.) states: “There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s going on in Vietnam.”

“I think there’s no doubt rain-making was used in Laos on the trail,” says a Senate committee aide well versed in defense affairs. (See above)
***
It is a “successful” pre-1967 use which is documented in the “senator Gravel” version of the Pentagon papers. In late February, 1967, this document discloses the Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared a list of “alternative strategies” for President Johnson.

One, titled “Laos Operations”, read:

“Continue at present plus Operation Pop Eye to reduce trafficability along infiltration routes … authorization required to implement phase of weather modification process previously successfully tested and evaluated in same area. (Italics added)

In 1967 ~ according to columnist Jack Anderson, who published the first allegation of Indochina rain-making ~ U.S. forces started secret Project Intermediary Compatriot “to hamper enemy logistics” … (with) claimed success in creating man-made cloudbursts … and flooding conditions” along the Ho Chi Minh trails, “making them impassable.”

The Post makes clear that cloud-seeding wasn’t limited to the Vietnam war theater:

The Defense Department freely reports that it has “field capacities” for making rain. It used them in the Philippines in 1969, in a six-month “precipitation augmentation project” at the Philippines request; in India in 1967, at a similar invitation; over Okinawa and Midway Islands, and in June, July and August, 1971, over drought-stricken Texas, at the urgent request of Gov. Preston Smith.

***

Navy rain-makers are currently involved in two long-range California programs ~ one over the Pacific off Santa Barbara, an attempt to increase rainfall over a national forest; the other over the Central Sierras to try to increase the snow-pack for electric utilities that depend on water power.

In 2008, the Denver Post noted the enormous scope of weather modification projects:

Scientists are monitoring more than 150 weather-modification projects in 40 countries, including at least 60 in the Western United States. The projects include wringing additional snow out of clouds for California hydropower and easing droughts in sub-Saharan Africa.

Most of the current research on this inexact science is being conducted abroad ….

In 2005, the Boston Globe provided an account of the early discovery of silver iodide as a tool for modifying weather:

In 1946, over Mount Greylock in western Massachusetts, a General Electric research chemist named Vincent Schaefer scattered three pounds of crushed dry ice out of an airplane into a cloud and set off a snow flurry. It was the world’s first successful cloud seeding ~ later that year, the meteorologist Bernard Vonnegut (brother to the novelist) discovered that silver iodide smoke had a similar effect- ~ and weather modification emerged from the realm of con men and eccentrics. Most meteorologists remained skeptical, but by 1951, 10 percent of the United States was under commercial cloud seeding.

“Intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters on any desired scale” was only decades away, predicted John von Neumann, the mathematician who helped invent and began programming the first electronic computers to model the weather. Over the next 30 years, the federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars on projects all over the country to increase precipitation, to mitigate hailstorms (an age-old enemy of farmers), and, most successfully, to clear the fog from around airports. Perhaps the era’s most ambitious endeavor was Project Stormfury, which sent up airplanes to seed the eye walls of hurricanes with silver iodide to weaken the winds before landfall.

(And see this discussion by an MIT scientist regarding the use of weather modification to mitigate hurricane damage.)

Moreover, the Post points out that ~ even in 1972 ~ weather modification has been tested for other applications as well:

Among patterns that can be predictably” be modified [Robert M. White, the current chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ] said, are: cold fog (which can be cleared from airfields) ; cumulus clouds (most common in the tropics ~ “In Florida,”, White said, “we have been able almost at will to make them grow explosively”); orographic clouds (moist air moving up over mountains ~ “At the right temperature you can begin thinking of milking them for water”) and hailstorms (which can often be suppressed, according to recent claims by the Russians, who fire silver iodide into them from rockets and artillery).

And ~ as the Post notes ~ even in 1972, the government was studying the affect of weather modification on climate:

ARPA Director Stephen J. Lukasik told the Senate Appropriations Committee in March: “Since it now appears highly probable that major world powers have the ability to create modifications of climate that might be seriously detrimental to the security of this country, Nile Blue [a computer simulation] was established in FY 70 to achieve a US capability to

(1) evaluate all consequences of of a variety of possible actions …

(2) detect trends in in the global circulation which foretell changes … and

(3) determine if possible , means to counter potentially deleterious climatic changes …”

“What this means,” Lukasik explains, “is learning how much you have to tickle the atmosphere to perturb the earth’s climate. I guess we’d call it a threat assessment.”

The Post also quoted high-level scientists warning that enemies could modify weather as a direct form of warfare, for example, by flooding coastal areas where one’s enemy resided.
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Now, weather modification is so mainstream that Texas openly discusses it’s cloud-seeding programs.

And U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas introduced the Weather Modification Research And Technology Transfer Authorization Act in 2004, saying:

Weather modification is the general term that refers to any human attempt to alter the weather…. These efforts have been used in the U.S. for more than 50 years to reduce crop and property damage, optimize useable precipitation during growing seasons and lessen the impact of periodic, often severe droughts.

The weather modification projects in Texas and other States in the U.S. are much more than well considered responses to drought. They are trying to use the latest technological developments in the science to chemically squeeze more precipitation out of clouds. Moisture that is needed to replenish fresh-water supplies in aquifers and reservoirs.

(The bill apparently didn’t pass)
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There’s even a Journal of Weather Modification (here’s a peek inside).

The Technology Has Advanced Far Beyond Seeding Clouds With Silver Iodide

The technology has advanced a long way since the early 1970s.

For example, the Telegraph reported yesterday that Abu Dhabi ‘creates man-made rainstorms’ by “using giant ionisers, shaped like giant lampshades, to generate fields of negatively charged particles, which create cloud formation.” “There are many applications,” Professor Hartmut Grassl, a former institute director, is quoted by the Daily Mail as saying. “One is getting water into a dry area. Maybe this is a most important point for mankind.”

And former secretary of defense William Cohen told a conference on terrorism on April 28, 1997 that people can:

Alter the climate … remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.

The Use of Sulfur Dioxide to Affect Climate?
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Tom Wigley ~ senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and former director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and current ~ has proposed releasing sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight and reduce warming. And see this.

Wigley talks about this proposal in a Discovery channel special on weather modification.

Other scientists have suggested the same thing. See ~ by way of example only ~ this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.

"Those of us inside the Bird's Nest feared rain ~ and secretly, because of the heavy heat and humidity, prayed for it ~ the city's meteorological bureau peppered approaching clouds with over 1000 silver-iodide rockets. That triggered intense showers outside the city and preempted a rainfall on China's parade. "We fired a total of 1,104 rain dispersal rockets from 21 sites in the city between 4 pm and 11:39 pm on Friday, which prevented a rain belt from moving toward the stadium," bureau chief Guo Hu said, according to China Daily. " 

More History … and Complicated Issues to Consider for the Future

The above-described Boston Globe article pointed to the complexity of the issues involved in weather modification:

In 2003 the National Academy of Sciences recommended “a coordinated national program” to “conduct a sustained research effort” into weather modification.

Politicians in Western and Southwestern states are funding attempts to tickle more moisture out of the clouds ….

Last fall, a meteorologist named Ross Hoffman suggested in Scientific American that a network of microwave-beaming satellites could literally take the wind out of hurricanes.

In some of the driest parts of Mexico, a Bedford-based company called Ionogenics is testing a rainmaking apparatus that uses an array of steel poles to ionize the air.

China, a country with widespread cloud seeding, has announced plans to engineer clear weather in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.(See image above)

Meanwhile, deepening concern over the possibly cataclysmic effects of climate change has spurred a number of recent proposals, some sketched out in considerable detail, to engineer a measure of counteractive cooling. John Latham, an atmospheric physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., has proposed increasing the reflectivity of the cloud cover by stirring up water vapor from the ocean with a fleet of giant egg-beater-like turbines.

A few years ago, a team led by the late Edward Teller suggested creating a similar effect by launching a million tons of tiny aluminum balloons into the atmosphere.

***

As our ability to comprehend the weather improves and as the threat of climate change looms larger, some scientists are ready to brave the uncertainty and tangled ethics of tinkering with the skies. . . .

The US military, unsurprisingly, was intrigued by the possibility of a godlike meteorological arsenal. According to Spencer Weart, a physicist and historian of science at the American Institute of Physics, the thinking in the Defense Department was “maybe we’ll give the Russians a real Cold War, or maybe they’ll give us one, so we should be ready.”

Pentagon money funded much of the era’s climate research, helping to create the weather models we now use in forecasting. War gamers dreamed up climatological warfare scenarios like laying down a blanket of fog over an airfield or visiting drought upon an enemy’s breadbasket.

***

But the grandest climate engineering schemes came from the Soviet Union. The most Promethean among them was a late 1950s proposal to dam the Bering Strait and, by pumping water from the Arctic Ocean into the Pacific, draw warm water northward from the Atlantic to melt the polar ice pack, making the Arctic Ocean navigable and warming Siberia. The leading Soviet climatologist, Mikhail I. Budyko, cautioned against it, arguing that the ultimate effects were too difficult to predict (though he himself had played with the idea of warming the Arctic by covering it in soot to decrease its reflectivity).

John F. Kennedy, as a presidential candidate, suggested the United States look into collaborating on the project. While the two countries continued desultory discussions of the Bering Strait plan into the 1970s, the American government was by then losing interest in the whole field of weather modification.

***

In 1972, a government cloud-seeding run in South Dakota was followed by a violent deluge, and more than 200 people were killed in the ensuing flood. Meteorologists disagreed over whether seeding was to blame, but the incident became an ominous symbol for those who saw weather modifiers as latter-day Pandoras. . . . Boyle’s caution may be merited, but scientists are better equipped today to understand and manipulate the weather than they were 30 years ago.

***

Some scientists and engineers, such as Daniel Schrag, director of Harvard’s Laboratory for Geochemical Oceanography, point out that, in light of the planet’s growing thirst and rising temperature, even Soviet-scale climate modification is attracting real consideration. Boyle, who spoke at a joint MIT-Cambridge University conference on the topic last year, readily concedes, “There are very prominent, serious scientists who are considering these things.”

***

A 1996 Air Force report entitled “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025,” argued that “the tremendous military capabilities that could result from this field are ignored at our own peril.”

***

Even purely peaceful aims would lead to a cascade of seemingly zero-sum conflicts. In the US, cloud seeding has set off several lawsuits in which, for example, downwind farmers have accused a cloud-seeding neighbor of “stealing” their rain. Such issues only grow in complexity along with the scale.

***

According to Joe Kaplinsky, a technology analyst in London, “To raise these things before the technology has really gotten off the ground is to deprive us of the potential benefits of any technology, because any technology can be misused.” “Of course some people will benefit and some people will lose,” Kaplinsky says, “but there are social mechanisms for solving disagreements, either through compensation or through democratic debate.”

Here is a copy of the Air Force study “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025″.
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The American Institute of Physics ~ the organization mentioned in the Boston Globe article ~ provides an interesting overview of the history of weather modification:

From 1945 into the 1970s, much effort went into studies of weather modification. American entrepreneurs tried cloud-seeding to enhance local rainfall, Russian scientists offered fabulous schemes of planetary engineering, and military agencies secretly explored “climatological warfare.”

***

In the mid 1970s … Research turned instead to controversial “geoengineering” schemes for interventions that might restrain global warming if it started to become unbearable.

***At the close of the Second World War, a few American scientists brought up a troublesome idea. If it were true, as some claimed, that humans were inadvertently changing their local weather by cutting down forests and emitting pollution, why not try to modify the weather on purpose? For generations there had been proposals for rainmaking, based on folklore like the story that cannonades from big battles brought rain.

Now top experts began to take the question seriously…. At the end of 1945 a brilliant mathematician, John von Neumann, called other leading scientists to a meeting in Princeton, where they agreed that modifying weather deliberately might be possible. They expected that could make a great difference in the next war.

Soviet harvests, for example, might be ruined by creating a drought. Some scientists suspected that alongside the race with the Soviet Union for ever more terrible nuclear weapons, they were entering an equally fateful race to control the weather. As the Cold War got underway, U.S. military agencies devoted significant funds to research on what came to be called “climatological warfare.”

***

In 1953 a President’s Advisory Committee on Weather Control was established to pursue the idea. In 1958, the U.S. Congress acted directly to fund expanded rainmaking research. Large-scale experimentation was also underway, less openly, in the Soviet Union.Military agencies in the U.S. (and presumably in the Soviet Union) supported research not only on cloud seeding but on other ways that injecting materials into the atmosphere might alter weather.

Although much of this was buried in secrecy, the public learned that climatological warfare might become possible. In a 1955 Fortune magazine article, von Neumann himself explained that “Microscopic layers of colored matter spread on an icy surface, or in the atmosphere above one, could inhibit the reflection-radiation process, melt the ice, and change the local climate.”

The effects could be far-reaching, even world-wide. “What power over our environment, over all nature, is implied!” he exclaimed. Von Neumann foresaw “forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined,” perhaps more dangerous than nuclear war itself. He hoped it would force humanity to take a new, global approach to its political problems.

***

Around 1956, Soviet engineers began to speculate that they might be able to throw a dam across the Bering Strait and pump water from the Arctic Ocean into the Pacific. This would draw warm water up from the Atlantic. Their aim was to eliminate the ice pack, make the Arctic Ocean navigable, and warm up Siberia. The idea attracted some notice in the United States ~ presidential candidate John F. Kennedy remarked that the idea was worth exploring as a joint project with the Soviets, and the discussion continued into the 1970s.

***

Beginning around 1961, Budyko and other scientists speculated about how humanity might alter the global climate by strewing dark dust or soot across the Arctic snow and ice. The soot would lower the albedo (reflection of sunlight), and the air would get warmer.

Spreading so much dust year after year would be prohibitively expensive. But according to a well-known theory, warmer air should melt some snow and sea-ice and thus expose the dark underlying soil and ocean water, which would absorb sunlight and bring on more warming. So once dust destroyed the reflective cover, it might not re-form.

***

A 1972 U.S. government rain-making operation in South Dakota was followed by a disastrous flood, and came under attack in a class-action lawsuit.

***

Already back in 1965, a Presidential advisory panel had suggested that if greenhouse effect warming by carbon dioxide gas ever became a problem, the government might take countervailing steps. The panel did not consider curbing the use of fossil fuels. They had in mind geoengineering schemes ~ spreading something across the ocean waters to reflect more sunlight, perhaps, or sowing particles high in the atmosphere to encourage the formation of reflective clouds.

Some back-of-the-envelope arithmetic suggested such steps were feasible, and indeed could cost less than many government programs. In 1974, Budyko calculated that if global warming ever became a serious threat, we could counter it with just a few airplane flights a day in the stratosphere, burning sulfur to make aerosols that would reflect sunlight away.

For a few years in the early 1970s, new evidence and arguments led many scientists to suspect that the greatest climate risk was not warming, but cooling. A new ice age seemed to be approaching as part of the natural glacial cycle, perhaps hastened by human pollution that blocked sunlight. Technological optimists suggested ways to counter this threat too. We might spread soot from cargo aircraft to darken the Arctic snows, or even shatter the Arctic ice pack with “clean” thermonuclear explosions. [For background, see this and this.]

***

The bitter fighting among communities over cloud-seeding would be as nothing compared with conflicts over attempts to engineer global climate. Moreover, as Budyko and Western scientists alike warned, scientists could not predict the consequences of such engineering efforts. We might forestall global warming only to find we had triggered a new ice age.

Such worries revived the U.S. military’s interest in artificial climate change on a global scale. A group at the RAND corporation, a defense think tank near Los Angeles, had been working with a computer climate model that originated at the University of California, Los Angeles.

***

The RAND group had to scramble to find support elsewhere. They turned to the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense.

***

When a National Academy of Sciences panel convened in 1991 to catalog the options, the members got into a long and serious debate over whether to include the grand “geoengineering” ideas. Might hopes of a future fix just encourage people to avoid the work of restricting greenhouse gas emissions? The panel reluctantly voted to include every idea, so that preparations could start in case the climate deteriorated so badly that radical steps would be the lesser evil. Their fundamental problem was the one that had bedeviled climate science from the start ~ if you pushed on this intricate system, nobody could say for sure what the final consequences might be.

What About Contrails?
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The Environmental Protection Agency notes in a report entitled “Aircraft Contrails Factsheet”:

Persistent contrails can last for hours while growing to several kilometers in width and 200 to 400 meters in height.

 

Figure 2. Photograph of two contrail types. The contrail extending across the image is an evolving persistent contrail. Shown just above it is a short-lived contrail. Short-lived contrails evaporate soon after being formed due to low atmospheric humidity conditions. The persistent contrail shown here was formed at a lower altitude where higher humidity was present …. (Photos: J. Holecek, NOAA Aeronomy Laboratory, Boulder, CO.)

Figure 3. Persistent contrails and contrails evolving and spreading into cirrus clouds. Here, the humidity of the atmosphere is high, and the contrail ice particles continue to grow by taking up water from the surrounding atmosphere. 

These contrails extend for large distances and may last for hours. On other days when atmospheric humidity is lower, the same aircraft passages might have left few or even no contrails. (Photo: L. Chang, Office of Atmospheric Programs, U.S. EPA.)

 

Figure 5. Satellite photograph showing an example of contrails covering central Europe on May 4, 1995. The average cover in a photograph is estimated by using a computer to recognize and measure individual contrails over geographical regions of known size. Photograph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-12 AVHRR satellite and processed by DLR (adapted from Mannstein et al., 1999). (Reproduced with permission of DLR.)

***

Persistent contrails are of interest to scientists because they increase the cloudiness of the atmosphere. The increase happens in two ways. First, persistent contrails are line-shaped clouds that would not have formed in the atmosphere without the passage of an aircraft. Secondly, persistent contrails often evolve and spread into extensive cirrus cloud cover that is indistinguishable from naturally occurring cloudiness (See Figure 3).

At present, it is unknown how much of this more extensive cloudiness would have occurred without the passage of an aircraft. Not enough is known about how natural clouds form in the atmosphere to answer this question. Changes in cloudiness are important because clouds help control the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Changes in cloudiness resulting from human activities are important because they might contribute to long-term changes in the Earth’s climate. Many other human activities also have the potential of contributing to climate change. Our climate involves important parameters such as air temperature, weather patterns, and rainfall.

Changes in climate may have important impacts on natural resources and human health. Contrails’ possible climate effects are one component of aviation’s expected overall climate effect.

***
Persistent line-shaped contrails are estimated to cover, on average, about 0.1 percent of the Earth’s surface ….

It is clear that persistent jet contrails can affect weather and climate. I have no idea whether persistent jet contrails are an unintentional affect of airplanes interacting with the environment, or an intentional attempt to affect the weather.

The articles quoted in the first part of this essay provide support for the possibility that at least some of the affects might be intentional. And as a 2008 international workshop on weather modification noted:

It has been well established that successful implementation of Cloud Seeding resulting in precipitation enhancement has significant positive beneficial impact in managing the issue of global warming and climate change….

German television network RTL purportedly alleges that the German government has admitted testing persistent jet contrails for military purposes ~ as a high-tech form of “chaff” to disrupt enemy radar.

The EPA attributes formation of persistent jet contrails to altitude and humidity, as well as trace impurities such as sulfur contained in jet fuel. On the other hand, some claim that very high concentrations of chemicals like barium and sulfur have been found in groundwater after the incidence of persistent jet contrails increased. And see this.

But whether or not persistent jet contrails are intentionally being created to affect climate or for military purposes or are an unintentional byproduct of flying a modern airplane is beyond the scope of this essay.