“While scientists continue research into any global climatic effects of greenhouse gases, we ought to study ways to offset any possible ill effects. Injecting sunlight-scattering particles into the stratosphere appears to be a promising approach. Why not do that?”—Edward Teller[1]
“To accept opinions in their terms is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think. “—C. Wright Mills[2]
For anyone who looks up in the sky every so often while fostering some recollection of what a sunny day used to resemble, the reality of geoengineering—what are often referred to as “chemtrails”—can no longer be easily dismissed. For over a decade military and private jet aircraft have been spraying our skies with what numerous independent researchers, journalists, and activists observe to be an admixture of aluminum, barium, strontium, and other dangerous heavy metals. Such substances distributed into the atmosphere as microscopic subparticulates eventually descend to earth where they are breathed by living things and absorbed by the soil and plant life.
“A glimpse into new death technologies” intended to modify weather and the environment “is in legislation introduced by Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich,” investigative writer Amy Worthington wrote almost a decade ago. Kucinich’s
unsuccessful Space Preservation Act of 2001 was intended to ban space deployment of:
*electronic, psychotronic and information weaponry
*high altitude ultra low frequency weapons
*plasma, electromagnetic, sonic and ultrasonic weapons
*laser weapons
*strategic, theater, tactical or extraterrestrial weapons
*chemical biological, environmental climate or tectonic weapons
*chemtrails (this term was stricken from a later version, suggesting duress)
In their quest to remain top dog in the kill chain, the purveyors of perpetual war have deliberately dimmed earth’s life-giving sunlight, and reduced atmospheric visibility with lung-clogging particulates and polymers. This ecological terrorism has severely compromised public health, according to thousands of testimonials.[3]
A recently discovered NASA document from 1966 indicates that weather modification efforts have been underway since the 1940s. “There is ... great motivation to develop effective countermeasures against the destructive measures of weather,” the paper observes,
and, conversely, enhance the beneficial aspects. The financial and other benefits to human welfare of being able to modify weather to augment water supplies, reduce lightening, suppress hail, mitigate tornados, and inhibit the full development of hurricanes would be very great.[4]
According to the report, in 1964 the National Science Foundation formed a Special Commission on Weather Modification. Thereafter, weather weapons in the form of cloud seeding were used to flood North Vietnamese supply lines during the Vietnam War.[5] More recent documentation points to private and government bodies’ active pursuit of weather modification, including the US Department of Homeland Security’s Hurricane Aerosol and Microphysics Program.[6] And in mid-2012 scientists proposed a $5 billion geoengineering plan to potentially unleash one million tons of particulates in the upper atmosphere each year to “cut world greenhouse gas emissions.”[7]
Since this is such an open program—taking place in plain sight directly over our heads—why is there almost complete silence about it in academic circles as well as mainstream and “alternative” progressive media outlets, particularly if one is to conclude that academe and the press are where disinterested inquiry and the dissemination of information and ideas in the public interest are allegedly anticipated and guaranteed? Indeed, geoengineering and weather manipulation are “a scientific taboo,” Michel Chossudovsky points out.
The possibility of climatic or environmental manipulations as part of a military and intelligence agenda, while tacitly acknowledged, is never considered as relevant. Military analysts are mute on the subject. Meteorologists are not investigating the matter, and environmentalists are strung on global warming and the Kyoto protocol.[8]
In this way such a condition is also attributable to the deleterious effect of intellectual disengagement and naivete originating within scholarly and journalistic communities that, combined with well-funded public relations efforts promoting the CO2-specific theory of global warming, eventually compromises the reasoning and communicative capacities of the broader public sphere.
The Trouble with Normal
When individuals share certain understandings and rationalities about themselves, their profession, and the broader society and culture, as is the overwhelming case in academe or journalism, they possess a binding ideology, and thereby a basis where certain perceptions and beliefs may become readily embraced or dismissed. Concepts inimical to such firm convictions are verboten. Moreover, the heavy reliance on foundation funding combined with rigid hiring and peer review processes ensure that ideas and research challenge this institutional matrix and the broader order of things in only playful and generally non-threatening ways.
Speaking as someone who works in the academy, the fear of being rejected as a crackpot also plays a large role in self-censorship. I never wholly dismissed the chemtrail phenomenon or the reports of chemtrail activists. Yet the very idea of such a nefarious program was so disturbing and surreal that several years ago I half-heartedly sought out a variety of what appeared to be conflicting information of both chemtrail activists and skeptics via online sources to placate and thereby suppress my concerns. After all, I thought, if there was anything to such claims they would be interrogated and ferreted out by university research itself and the independent progressive-left news media and intelligentsia that I relied on so heavily to form my worldview. The real problem, clearly articulated by United Nations agencies, Noble laureates and from seemingly every corner of our mediated environments is the abundance of carbon dioxide and the threat it poses in the form of melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and severe weather events.
Not until 2010, when I happened across the documentary What in the World Are They Spraying? (WITWATS) did I become more fully convinced that coordinated geoengineering programs not only exist, but that they are far-reaching in scope and have major implications for life on earth. Perhaps alongside the alleged scourge of CO2-induced global warming, geoengineering programs that are purportedly in place to “curb” such processes actually pose the greatest threat to humanity and the environment. Like Monsanto, which seeks to control all facets of agriculture and thus our physiological makeup, the US military’s self-admitted objective is to “control the weather” through atmospheric manipulation by 2025.[9]
Living in a tropical climate and spending much of the time outdoors I eventually became something of a novel “skywatcher.” Upon closer observance it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the activity of numerous high altitude aircraft leaving plumes that over the course of several hours expand and coalesce to make massive cloudlike formations that could be easily mistaken for overcast above sometimes naturally-occurring cumulus clouds. I recognized how throughout most of the year this was an almost daily phenomenon initiated by planes with sometimes bizarre and inconsistent flight paths.
When I contacted to Federal Aviation Administration in Fort Lauderdale on a day with high aerial activity of this nature, I was consoled by an overly polite FAA agent that the trails were merely “water vapor,” and that dispersal of any substances several miles overhead would have but negligible effects at ground level. While it is true that jet engines can briefly produce plumes akin to cirrus clouds resulting from the exhaust process, the prevalence of this activity once I became aware of it struck me as highly unusual, and geoengineering activists contend that the inexplicable and often dangerous admixture of microscopic heavy metal particulates now common in our air—particularly aluminum—originate in the persistent contrails. A variety of air samples, most recently by activists at losangelesskywatch.com, confirm this phenomenon.[10]
In late 2011 my six year old daughter had a long-running respiratory ailment which prompted me to send off a small sample of her hair for lab analysis. The results indicated a high level of aluminum.[11] This was disturbing especially given that she had received an abbreviated vaccine regimen, drank water run from a state-of-the-art reverse osmosis filter, and ate only organic food. Her pediatrician expressed some astonishment, asking whether we use aluminum cookware. Apart from this he could offer no explanations and merely prescribed a popular antibiotic for the cough. While there may have been no correlation between the symptoms, it seemed as if the often obscure and bizarre government projects pointed to by “conspiracy theorists” had now struck home in a most intimate way.
It was around this time that I proposed to my department chair we invite WITWATS co-director Michael Murphy to screen his film and give a public talk on campus. Earlier that year a colleague hosted De Franklin Lopez, the director of EndCiv, a provocative documentary profiling the ideas of radical environmental activist and writer Erick Jensen that compares CO2-producing activities with the severest forms of colonial exploitation and Nazi war crimes while advocating violence and vandalism to save the earth. The screening was well-attended by faculty and graduate students.
At the time our department also included on faculty a talented documentary filmmaker whose work has become a platform for proselytizing on anthropogenic global warming and the many lifestyle changes necessary to thwart it. I took for granted that the university was a place where a variety of ideas, however controversial, could be presented, scrutinized, and pondered. However, after emailing the WITWATS YouTube link to my superior I was told in no uncertain terms, “That’s far right propaganda.”
Following a lengthy and good-natured exchange (which included an apology) there was no moral or monetary support forthcoming, which prevented me from approaching other university-related funding sources. Aided by Murphy’s honest willingness to forego an honorarium, I helped to support his campus visit to speak to one of my classes and present the film to the broader public. The screenings and question and answer sessions were very well-received by the students especially, all of whom can detect baloney a mile or two away. Yet despite publicity for the screening and personal invitations to colleagues I found it instructive that none were in attendance.
The story provides a microcosmic demonstration of the limited parameters for the exchange of information and ideas, that are at least as constrictive in the academy—which asserts a license on what constitutes truth and knowledge—as they are in the broader public sphere that is typically policed by ideas and assumptions that have legitimacy and rootedness in academic circles. Along these lines, within mainstream and specifically progressive media the hypothesized ecological dangers of CO2 have become the default line of reasoning for environmental issues. And, as public discourse in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy suggests, such notions overwhelmingly constitute the precognitive conditions and informational frames through which “extreme weather” events are interpreted.
The CO2 Noise Machine
A significant portion of the underlying research and public relations maneuvers of conventional environmental groups alleging CO2’s baneful and poisonous nature are funded almost entirely by major philanthropic foundations, and this goes a long way in drowning out other arguably more clear-cut and well-documented explanations of weather events, above all geoengineering and weather modification programs.
A foremost reason for the CO2 climate change theory’s endurance is the perceived legitimacy of its proponents, a widescale uncritical acceptance of its assumptions by mainstream and purportedly “alternative/progressive” media figures and outlets, and a limited understanding of the dubious science often based on drastically tortured and opaquely-constructed measurements and data. That a minority of climate scientists and seemingly impartial United Nations entities such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have apparently managed to convince a wide swath of opinion leaders and policy makers that the atmosphere is heating up because of genuinely miniscule increases in carbon dioxide is a feat that takes substantial resources and coordination.[12]
A passage from “economic hitman” John Perkins’ second semiautobiographical book provides an illustrative example how the CO2 theory of climate change becomes a deep-seated component of an ostensibly well-informed individual’s outlook and belief system.
I checked the clock on the bookcase and, aware that I had dallied too long, headed for the shower. As I passed the radio I flicked it on the local NPR station ... Then suddenly the words of the radio announcer caught my attention.
“Within less than a hundred years,” she said, “all the maple trees—and the fall foliage—will be gone from Massachusetts. According to a recent scientific study, global warming will make our climate here similar to North Carolina’s. So” she sighed, “enjoy this year’s display. We may not have many more like it.” I stood there for a moment staring through the bathroom window. Outside, the old red maple next to the house bowed in the wind, its branches scrapping against the wall. The familiar sound now seemed foreboding, a death rattle. I felt absolutely devastated.[13]
Scratching the veneer of some of the major climate change movers and shakers one finds a very well-financed assemblage of entities with major philanthropic foundation ties. Indeed, the Rockefeller Foundations alone are major players behind the anthropogenic global warming “activism” and propaganda. For example, in 2009 the Rockefeller Family Foundation gave $3,500,000 to Grace Communications Fund, an organization that “builds partnerships and develops innovative media strategies that increase public awareness of the relationships among food, water, and energy systems.” Also in 2009 Rockefeller gave $775,000 to the Natural Resource Defense Council, whose foremost agenda is “curbing global warming” and “creating a clean energy future.” Another $650,000 was channeled to the World Wildlife Federation, $350,000 to the Center for Climate Strategies, and $200,000 to the Sierra Club.[14]
As bizarre as it may seem, such organizations are funded to such a degree because of their express intent on austerity and even depopulation programs. Toward this end they speak in one powerful voice that climate change is caused by the CO2-specific consumptive practices of human beings. Curiously, however, these extremely well-funded groups completely ignore actually existing or impending environmental upheavals brought about by geoengineering, dangerously designed nuclear power plants, the wanton disbursal of depleted uranium, and the proliferation of genetically modified organisms throughout the food supply.
A leading mouthpiece of the CO2 global warming hysteria is science author and journalist Bill McKibben, who oversees the popular 350.org publicity outlet. Through this effort McKibben has succeeded in convincing young and old alike to draw attention to the “scientific” assertion that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are advancing from the low 300s to 400 parts per million of overall atmospheric gases—an ominous .01 percent—by sending in money, buying 350.org paraphernalia, partaking in civil disobedience and even hiking across the United States. This is an impressive public relations accomplishment. More importantly, however, such antics cleverly lend themselves toward authenticating the notion that most every extreme weather event is attributable to dangerous CO2 levels. This conjecture has become as central part a part of the powerful liberal and progressive opinion generating apparatus as the declarations of eugenicists seeking to build a master Nordic race a century ago—an assemblage of scientists and publicists who were, uncoincidentally, funded by some of the same interests.
McKibben’s 350.org project is the public face of his 501(c)(3) 1Sky Education Fund, which between its founding in 2007 and 2009 took in close to $5,000,000 in foundation money and “public contributions.” In 2010 the Rockefeller Brothers Fund gave 1Sky $200,000. The key “scientific” paper McKibben points to as support for his dire warnings on climate change, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim,” coauthored by NASA scientist James Hansen, was partially funded through Rockefeller Foundation money.[15]
The piece is not so much a scientific report as it is a set of mandates calling for drastic social and political action to avert continued CO2 “buildup.” “Preservation of a climate resembling that which humanity is accustomed,” the authors assert, “requires that most remaining fossil fuel carbon is never emitted to the atmosphere.” Independent researchers and journalists assert that such proposed policies based on tying carbon emissions to atmospheric decay, many of which are already underway in some US states at the local level, will inevitably curtail further industrial development (and consequently economic growth) of almost every type and circumvent existing property rights while ushering in a new age of near-feudal hardship.[16]
McKibben and 350.org are an especially proficient example of the many foundation-supported promotional outlets that, in the tradition of Edward Bernays, have since the late 1990s fundamentally altered public perception and discourse on weather and the climate. This is particularly the case among members of the intelligentsia who disturbingly accept the pronouncements of calculating figures such as McKibben and Vice President Al Gore—individuals that routinely demonstrate their contempt for science and the public interest by trumpeting the assumed inevitability of an uncertain theory. As a result the CO2 explanatory phantom dominates center stage and wholly removes from consideration far more probable causes of unusual and extreme weather.
Piece of Mind through Conformity
The established intellectual communities’ uncritical acceptance of the CO2-specific description of climate change has far less to do with its plausibility or scientific soundness—the “science” is too opaque for pedestrian comprehension and its accompanying shortcomings and qualifications are routinely and fraudulently downplayed—than it does with the overall ubiquity of the notion and an especially naïve faith in the fair and equitable production and dissemination of scientific knowledge.
The reasoning goes something like this. If non-CO2-related explanations of unusual weather patterns existed, the benevolent and impartial foundations would recognize their significance and fund such countervailing scientific research. As the histories of modern medicine, psychiatry, eugenics, and public education suggest, however, the reality is that the dominant paradigm is not the one that is ultimately the most valid and principled, but rather the one that is best funded. In this regard the foundations’ wealthy benefactors call the tune and run the show.
The overall effort has been a public relations coup of immense proportions not because it has seized the hearts and minds of the general public, many of which remain skeptical of the theory, but rather among educated opinion leaders who through personal mystification with their own credentials and titles are the most steadfast in the beliefs they are inured to accept. Even the few who have misgivings about the prevalent explanation of climate change and less examined yet entirely conceivable causes will seldom speak their minds for fear of incurring the wrath of their colleagues and peers, thus perpetuating a professional sphere that more closely resembles a Stalinist inquisition than one where free and open debate are fostered.
In order to preserve ones sanity, reputation and specialized status one need recognize the importance of alignment with an unexamined belief in what one has been told by the “experts” and their spokespersons while simultaneously assuming excessive skepticism toward the readily apparent phenomena of everyday life, however well-documented and alarming they may be. We may seldom have any more clear, sunny days, storms may be of mainly synthetic derivation and direction, and in less than a generation children could be developing Alzheimer’s by their late teens, but are these sufficient reasons to jeopardize one’s professional and social standing?
To broach the topic of weather control and geoengineering programs not only indicates an unhealthy lack of faith in overwhelmingly powerful yet poorly understood institutions and their guiding rationales. It also runs counter to that “good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.” Such dialogue suggests bad taste, especially when one can discuss Paul Krugman’s latest column or where to buy the best arugula. For these reasons I’ve tentatively resigned myself to a fate befitting a well-educated and properly conditioned member of the intellectual class. Realizing that my destiny and that of my loved ones can no longer be considered exclusively our own, I’ve finally learned to stop worrying and love chemtrails.
Notes
2. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, New York: Oxford University Press, 312.
12. Donna LaFramboise, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2011.
13. John Perkins, The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption, New York: Dutton, 271-272.
