◆ PARALLAX

I photograph my own sky every morning before work, same spot, same fence post, and I am telling you the Willamette Valley sky is not the sky I grew up under. Ten years ago a jet left a line that was gone before your coffee. Now they spread into a haze that sits all day. I have the dates and the pictures.

I am not a scientist. I just know what changed because I am the one standing in the same spot every morning. Something is being done to the sky over Oregon and I would like to know what and why.

Brenda you are seeing it because it is REAL and the papers are selling you a line. And here is the part the "experts" will not tell you: it is the same crowd. The people spraying your sky are the people who invented global warming to tax you for the privilege of being sprayed. There is no warming. There is a STORY about warming, and the planes are how they keep the story going. Wake up Oregon.

And there it goes, three posts in. Ned, I am going to disappoint everyone by defending two things at once.

ONE: Brenda is seeing something real and mundane. Persistent spreading contrails are about humidity at altitude, not a change in what comes out of the engine. More air traffic plus the right upper-air moisture equals trails that linger and spread. Her 1994-vs-2002 comparison is most likely more flights and a humid morning, and that is genuinely worth logging -- contrail climatology is real science.

TWO: the greenhouse effect is also real, separately, and is not a "story." You can hold "that haze is mostly water and traffic" and "the planet is warming from CO2" in the same head at the same time, because they are different questions. The fact that you need them to be the same conspiracy is YOUR problem, not the atmosphere's.

"Contrail climatology." Listen to yourself. You have a degree in making the obvious sound boring so people stop looking. CO2 is plant food. The medieval warm period. The ice age they promised us in the seventies. I have heard every act of this play. You are paid to stand exactly where you are standing.

Ned, you do this in every thread and it is exhausting. I am about as anti-authority as they come -- I build my own gear specifically so nobody can tell me what frequency to think on -- and even I can see you have welded two unrelated arguments together because one props the other up. If the sky-spraying is real it does not NEED the warming hoax, and if the warming is a hoax it does not NEED the spraying. You only fused them so that anyone who doubts half of it has to swallow all of it. That is not how you find the truth. That is how you build a cult with two doctrines.

Brenda, ignore the food fight your good thread started, it is not your fault. Here is something useful: keep your morning log, but add two columns -- dewpoint and the contrail-favourable level, both of which the local airport puts out for free in the METAR/upper-air data. If your "haze days" line up with high humidity aloft, you have shown yourself the mechanism with your own data. If they do not, you have found something genuinely odd and I will eat my words and help you chase it. Either result is a win. That is what a log is FOR.

Thank you Wendy, that is the first time anyone has told me how to TEST it instead of just telling me what to think. I will add the columns. I still think something is off but I would rather be the person with the spreadsheet than the person shouting. Ned, I do not know about your warming thing and I did not come here for it. I came here about my own sky.

Brenda, if you want the log to be useful later, write down boring things the same way every time: date, time, wind at ground, visible cloud type, approximate trail count, whether trails spread or vanish, and any airport report you can get for temperature and humidity aloft. Do not change the categories halfway through or you will only make a scrapbook with numbers in it.

And before Ned clips half of that sentence and tapes it to his refrigerator: none of this says warming is fake. The climate signal is not disproved by a morning sky log in Oregon. What Brenda can test is whether her worst haze mornings line up with ordinary contrail conditions and traffic. That is a smaller question, which is why it can actually be answered.