While handing out How to Vote cards, I was accosted and asked what’s to be done about con trails. I thought issues like the economy, immigration and cost of living were the issues of the day but not con trails. At that moment there just happened to be two aircraft flying overhead leaving con trails in their wake. This just added fuel to the fire. I was told that governments have been adding chemicals to make con trails into chem trails and that this is a way of controlling each and every one of us. I was instructed to ‘Look up and see what was happening right in front of my eyes’. One has to remember than a con trail conspiracist’s vote is worth the same as those of us who are more politically informed.

The claims of chemicals in contrails are correct. Burning of Jet A-1 fuel produces water vapour and carbon dioxide plus minute amounts of nitrogen and sulphur oxides and, if there is incomplete fuel combustion, then the exhaust may have black carbon particles. These are all chemicals and contrails and chemtrails have become synonyms.

For more than a century, it has been known that high altitude aircraft produce trails of long linear cirrus clouds. Cirrus clouds have little effect on incoming or outgoing radiation. Cumulus clouds and aerosols have a greater effect. At high altitude, temperature is less than minus 40 degrees and contrails can form, grow, disappear and reappear over a few hours depending upon the humidity, rate of air rise and winds. In high humidity areas, con trails form at the wing tips just before landing. Because of such variability, contrail conspiracists believe humans control the contrail variability. Humans do have an interest in contrails. There is considerable effort to eliminate contrails which could be used for targeting high-altitude military aircraft.

The latest fad is to create global solar dimming by adding sulphur dioxide aerosols to the atmosphere to cool the Earth because we have runaway global warming. This takes huge leaps of faith. The Earth has cooled since the time of Jesus, warmed since the Dark Ages, cooled since Medieval times and warmed since the zenith of the Little Ice Age 330 years ago. If the aim is cool the Earth in the post-Maunder Minimum warming, then it must be shown that this warming was human-induced and not natural. All the data suggests that the last 330 years of warming is natural. To even think about geoengineering to cool the Earth without looking at climate cycles and past aerosol cooling events is total madness.

The UK taxpayer is funding experiments on solar dimming. Why on Earth anyone would want to dim the Sun in a country lacking sunlight is beyond me. It is planned to blast sulphur dioxide aerosols into the atmosphere, measure solar dimming and extrapolate the effects of large-scale global solar dimming. What could possibly go wrong?  We are not told about the energy required for blasting aerosols high into the atmosphere, respiratory dangers of sulphur dioxide, acid rain, the global sulphur shortage and the fact that aerosols only stay in the atmosphere for a couple of years. What happens if the neighbouring countries don’t want to have the solar dimming or acid rain?  We have a huge amount of data on atmospheric aerosols, solar dimming and temperature reduction from volcanic eruptions, dust storms and aerosol pollution in cities.

The 1783-1784 Laki eruption in Iceland is a well-recorded natural example of solar dimming by aerosols. It led to famine, death and disease in much of Europe because of the decreased sunlight and sulphur dioxide aerosol. People choked to death on sulphur dioxide, there was acid rain and it took a few years for the skies to clear. The 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia produced the ‘year without a summer’ in the Northern Hemisphere and it was cool for two years.  Sulphur dioxide aerosols killed crops and people. The 1883 Krakatoa eruption in the Sunda Strait pulverised 30 cubic kilometres of rock into dust which produced solar dimming, acid rain and cooler weather for the following two years. The same occurred with the 1991 Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines when at least 17 megatonnes of sulphur dioxide was blasted into the atmosphere together with about 25 cubic kilometres of pulverised rock. For the following two years, there was cooler weather, solar dimming and acid rain. Volcanic ash and acid from sulphur dioxide aerosols are preserved in Greenland and Antarctic ice cores giving a window into hundreds of thousands of years of solar dimmings.

The Great Smog of London in December 1952 resulted from burning sulphur-rich coals during a period when there was an atmospheric high over London. Sulphur dioxide smog was not blown away and Londoners choked and died from sulphur dioxide during the solar dimming. The problem was solved by engineering and not ideology. So why even think of pumping sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere or is this another crazy scheme to destroy the planet in order to save it?

We once had cheap reliable electricity in Australia, it was generated from burning low-sulphur low-ash high calorific value coals and a grid system was constructed to carry the electricity to the consumers. Our electricity is now unreliable, expensive, generated in dispersed remote areas and dependent upon foreign companies and a hostile foreign power. Our top-quality coals are prized by other countries and burning does not create sulphur dioxide pollution yet coal is vilified by many in Australia. Colourless, odourless, tasteless plant food is released by burning coal. This gas, carbon dioxide, has been demonised hence any industry that emits carbon dioxide must be shut down. We have been repeatedly told that human emissions of carbon dioxide will produce global warming or global boiling yet the amount of carbon dioxide released in Australia is minuscule compared to other countries and it has yet to be shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming.

This is especially the case with the re-elected Labor government which, with less than a third of the votes, is rushing headlong into destroying productive industries and farmlands. It is a turpitude to cover farmlands with solar panels constructed by slave labour, to criss-cross farms with new high voltage power lines thereby reducing arable land, to destroy pristine forests for wind turbines and new power lines, to slice and dice bats and endangered bird species and to kill whales in the name of reducing the amount of plant food emitted during electricity generation. Furthermore, the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for the manufacture, transport, construction and maintenance of solar and wind facilities is far more than will be saved. Those affected by such environmental vandalism in rural areas are ignored, despised, pilloried and bulldozed. Our coal is being used to manufacture the energy systems that are destroying our economy and the environment.

If unions can strike for exorbitant wage rises, farmers can withhold food deliveries to the cities.