When Was The Last Time?

This is a good question for anyone that lives outside of a smog filled city like LA. When was the last time you looked up into the sky and didn't see one darn cloud? Sure more people go "wow not a cloud in the sky today" but they are exaggerating. I have maybe seen a total for 200 days without a cloud my whole life that i can remember, most of which when i was a young big mikey. And if you think about it, 200 days out of 9,490 is not that good of a percentage.

It has been happening more and more lately over the past 10 years, more and more days with a cloud filled sky. Sure in the morning sometimes its less, but by noontime or late afternoon the sky is just littered with Contrails. That's right airplane contrails.

I was never a skeptic of the reasons behind some of these contrails,I've always been drawn to them. When I see one above, I like to run my eye along its length until I find the plane, a tiny silver toy. I like to wonder at the blank space between the plane and the start of the contrail—emptiness full of potential—and then to see the churning new cloud as it forms, a tumbling cascade. When the roiling slows and the newborn cloud settles into a contrail proper, I admire its perfection: a straight white line sharply etched against the blue. Even when numerous contrails made fat by the wind crisscross the sky, I didn't mind.

Well, I might now. After a lifetime of enjoying contrails, it came as a surprise to me to learn recently that something so ephemeral may not be a harmless by-product of the jet age but may in fact impact the climate. This is of particular concern in well-traveled air corridors, where contrails by the hundreds can spread into man-made cirrus clouds that can both block sunlight from reaching the Earth and trap radiated heat from escaping to space. Many believe that the government is putting Air Force Jets into the sky's with microscopic aluminum based particles in their contrails. And have been ever since they discovered that's the earth might be heating up. The theory is that the reflective particles in the contrails would bounce some of the radiation and harmful sunlight back into space so is to not heat the planet anymore.

My Opinion: I for one would like to see a blue sky every once and a while again. And its estimated that the air traffic will double by 2050, which means it doesn't matter what i want. I find it hard to believe that the government is doing this, if they were i think they would do something that at least has an effect and clearly running a program like this has failed horribly. I just think its good old fashioned pollution, its funny because all talk about how our cars exhaust goes into the atmosphere, but yet our planes are right there doing the same, and if not more. So next time you see a perfect blue sky sit back and enjoy, chances are in 5 mins a jet is going to come by laughing and ruin your day. haha