Normal Jet Contrails Send A Florida Congressman Into A Chemtrail Conspiracy Tizzy

The alleged chemtrails Rep. Greg Steube said were
over Florida "sky's" over the weekend. These 
are standard issue jet contrails, but I guess
weird conspiracy theories are moree fun. 

 I'm in an abusive mood today, so I'm going to pick on somebody you don't know, but it'll be worth it.

We're talking about Rep. Greg Steube (R-Florida), an esteemed member of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. 

We're going after Steube because over the weekend he took a short video of a beautiful blue sky streaked with a few jet contrails.

To most of us, those contrail streaks are bits of frozen water from the exhaust of passing jets. They are just long, streaky clouds. To Steube, the white streaks in the sky were the dreaded chemtrails. (insert ominous music notes here).

Steube, posted on X  three times on Saturday, with photos and a video of the sky.  Steube wrote the following on one of the post; "Was a clear sky this a.m., now this. Didn't Florida ban spraying chemicals in our sky's (sic). We need to ban it nationwide. There is no way that water vapor would stay that long in the sky." 

Um, then how do other clouds stay in the sky for hours or even days?

Most of the contrails in Streube's photos seemed to be heading in the same direction, suggesting an established flight path. So it shouldn't have been surprising to see contrails. The video included a jet leaving behind a fresh contrail, which I guess to Steube was "proof" of the chemtrail attack. 

To illustrate how ridiculous the post was, a community note was added to it, noting chemtrails are just a conspiracy theory, and what Steube saw in the sky was standard issue contrails.  

Chemtrails don't exist, no matter how often some people insist otherwise  A few people who see the enemy everywhere think jet contrails are a secret government plot to spray chemicals into the air for some nefarious purpose. Mind control? Population control? Who knows?

The debunked conspiracy theory dates back to at least the 1990s. But with an ever-widening social media audience, people are still cranking out the idea that harmless ice crystals are out to kill us. 

Most of those posting about chemtrails probably know they don't exist, but spreading weird, scary false stories is great for clicks and views, I suppose. 

Speaking of scary it's more than a little frightening that a U.S. Congressman believes in chemtrails.

As Raw Story tells us:

"Given the important role Steube plays as a sitting member of the influential House committee, that frequently receives highly classified briefings on national security threats, helps shape intelligence laws and policy and oversees intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI, his apparent reference to a decades-long debunked conspiracy theory alarmed some onlookers." 

Note in Steuben's X post that reference to Florida banning spray chemicals in, as Steube, put it, the "sky's."

Florida, and some other mostly Republican states, have passed laws banning or restricting geoengineering and weather modification. The impetus behind these laws is, surprise! chemtrails.

Around the time Florida passed its law, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier talked breathlessly of Florida being under attack from "toxic particulates being sprayed into our atmosphere."

The toxic particles beings sprayed into the atmosphere are thse chemtrail screamers. You'd think an allegedly educated politician would know better.

But apparently not.  

 

To The Trump Team, Climate Change Is "Benefitting" Mankind

Under the Trump administration, the Environmental
Protection Agency isn't protecting anything, 
except maybe the fossil fuel industry. 

 In the Trump world, up is down, down is up and everything is half ass backwards. 

E&E News By Politico has the deets:

"President Trump has long rejected climate science.

Now, his administration is grappling with how to assemble a body of federal climate research to show a warming world is benefitting humanity. The claims would be highly misleading and ignore decades of scientific research that shows climate change will have increasingly dire effects."

As I previously reported, the Trump administration has scrubbed climate information from a variety of web sites and fired numerous climate scientists. 

Also, as I have noted before, the Trumpers want to remove something called an endangerment finding from the EPA.  That document requires the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

As E&E News reports, legal experts think the federal courts would frown on getting rid of that endangerment finding. The Supreme Court has rejected three challenges to the endangerment finding. 

To get around that, Trump and the EPA would just come up with a new document, one that falsely says that climate change is a bunch of hooey,  

They could do that by finding "experts" who falsely claim that climate change is not a biggie.  Or they can pick apart existing U.S. and international climate reports, offering dubious counter arguments to those reports.  

And they could produce a new National Climate Assessment written by unqualified Trump minions and fossil fuel industry hacks. 

Of course, these morons would be up against a continued onslaught of new reports and findings describing why climate change is bad. I mean, every time I turn around, there's some new study that says climate change will worsen X, Y and Z.  

I never hear any serious person say climate change is going to create more joy, happiness, rainbows and puppy dogs.  But, that doesn't matter. All the climate deniers have to do is go before a Trump-appointed "judge" who's a total suck up to Dear Leader. From there, all bets are off. Such a "judge" could well go along with the Trump fantasy narrative. 

That fantasy narrative has already taken shape. 

David Legates, who was briefly a NOAA mucky muck during the first Trump administration, has these revisionist thoughts on greenhouse gases. 

"I'm pretty certain that what we're going to conclude from what we know now is that carbon dioxide is not an evil gas......Rather, it's a gas beneficial to life on Earth. It'll increase temperatures slightly, and warmer temperatures are certainly better than colder temperatures."

Spoken like a dude who's sick of winter where he lives but has no idea how science works.  

So let's do Science 101 for this guy. 

Fine, it's true, we need carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, since as those of you who went through Grade School science know, plants need CO2 to survive. Since us humans need plants to survive, a certain amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is truly a good thing.

Also, it's basic physics that if you increase CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, you're going to increase the temperature of said atmosphere. 

Teasing apart Legate's words, it appears he also thinks climate change is good because fewer people would die of cold weather. Which might actually be true. But what about all the extra people that keep dying of heat related causes because heat waves keep getting hotter?

I guess they don't count. 

As you'd expect, serious climate scientists are appalled by all this.  E&E News got this quote from the ever-reliable (and smart and relatable) climate scientist Michael Mann:

"What the Trump administration is trying to do amounts to nothing more than trying to pollute the process with ideologically-motivated antiscoience.,....It means the U.S. federal government is now at war with humanity."

We know, of course, despite any criticism, the Trump gang will soldier on. 

While climate change keeps biting us "little people" in the ass, our billionaire overlords can rest easy, protecting in their little cocoons as they keep raking in blood money from the fossil fuel industry.  

DeSantis Other Right Wingers Moving Climate Denying Curricula Into Public Schools. Keep 'em Dumb I Guess

A right wing group is having some success introducing
dangerous climate misinformation into school classrooms
with the cooperation of ignorant politicians. 

 In his ongoing war against whatever he considers "woke," whatever that means, the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to flood school kids with misinformation about climate change.

Not that we should be surprised by that. 

At issue is videos produced by something called Prager University Foundation.  That sounds like a legit institute of higher education, no? 

No. Hell no. 

As Scientific American points out bluntly - and accurately  - describes Prager as "a conservative group that produces videos that distort science, history, gender and other topics."

If you watch the Prager videos on climate, Scientific American reports, you will "learn":

"Climate activists are like Nazis....Wind and solar power pollute the Earth and make life miserable....Recent global and local heat records reflect natural temperature cycles."

None of this is true, of course.  Hard core conservatives love to talk about how supposed "liberal" institutions are "indoctrinating" youth, but talk about calling the kettle black!

From Prager's standpoint, the videos are supposedly meant to rebalance schools that have been "hijacked from the left," according the organizations CEO, Marissa Streit.  

'Young kids are being taught climate hysteria.....They're hearing that the world is coming to an end, and we think that there needs to be a healthy balance."

She then went into the usual spiel from climate deniers that the climate is always changing, blah, blah, blah. 

(To spell it out, yes the climate is always changing, but not remotely near the pace it's now changing because of our burning of fossil fuels).

The PragerU videos are insidious in their depiction of climate denial as honorable, standing up for what's right in the face of scorching (pardon the pun) opposition. 

As Scientific American describes it, a PragerU video depicts a Polish teenager named Ania who is concerned about climate change because of what she learned in school. She tells her parents, who Stepford Wife-like, recite verbatim the fossil fuel industry talking points. (Basically, the climate has always warmed and cooled, and China and India should cut emissions before we do, etc.).

Of course, the mean old teacher and classmates pretty much bully Ania for repeating her parents' talking points (because of course people who are worried about climate change are just hideous).  This leaves Ania sad.  Poor girl. 

But then it's Ania's grandfather to the rescue! Grandpa tells Ania what it was like living under Nazism in World War II and tells Ania "fighting oppression always takes courage."

See? In PragerU's worldview, climate activists and scientists are not trying to warn the world of dangerous, deadly climate change, and are not trying to save lives from future climate disasters. They're supposedly just as bad and murderous as the Nazis, who killed 6 million Jews because they found them distasteful. 

Climate scientists are actively trying to ruin little Ania's life by, um, discouraging her from rolling coal. 

Scientific American's August article said that "education advocates fear that the nation's third-largest state has granted a stamp of approval that will spread videos to classrooms in other states."

Sure enough, 

Oklahoma added PragerU videos to the state's school curriculum, with state education officials describing the content as pro-American, whatever that means. 

The teachers' union, Oklahoma Education Association, quickly clapped back with this statement:

"OEA continues to believe that curriculum offered in Oklahoma classrooms should meet the high standards set by our local education professionals. PragerU isn't a legitimate accredited education organization; it is a media organization, whose creator has admitted PragerU material 'indoctrinates' kids."

The union pointed out that parents and guardians can opt out of their children receiving PragerU content. 

By the way, this  blog is a climate and weather publication, so I'm not really getting into other videos by PragerU that are just as insidious. There's videos from this outfit that basically say racism no longer exists, and that men and women should stick strictly to "traditional" gender roles that went out the window for most of us decades ago. 

Bottom line: Beware of what your children are being taught, especially in states where far right politicians have a serious and dangerous agenda.