Car horns, cow bells and classic rock cut through the wind and snow on the corner of Albert Street and Victoria Avenue in Regina. Three people wave signs, pointing to a chain link fence adorned with messages that read “climate engineering is agro-terrorism” and “aerosol sky poisoning, look up, wake up.”
One of the people holding a sign, who identified himself only as Bill, says he is raising awareness about the alleged dangers of chemtrails, which experts readily dismiss as misinformation.
“We are demonstrating against geoengineering. It is aeroplanes that have been changing the weather for many, many decades, and they are filling the air with poison. Allium, barium, strontium, and forever plastics,” said Bill.
“They have been doing this for a real long time,” he continued. “To prove all this you can go to a site called ‘geoengineeringwatch.org,’ on the site you’ll find a man called Dane Wigington. He’s been ringing the warning bell for many, many decades. You’ll find everything you need to know about weather manipulation there.”
Wigington is a conspiracy theorist from California. In 2022 his defamation lawsuit against Climate Scientist Fact Checker was dismissed in federal court.
When asked about the “they” he was referring to Bill said, “It’s the American army, because they have the biggest fleet of planes.”
A person that Bill identified as his partner but asked to not be named said, “We have been advocating against this since Covid, we are tired of the people in power putting money first and people second.”
When asked if their group was responsible for the chalk messages that are often seen along the walking paths around Wascana Lake, Bill’s partner said, “Yes that is us, we do those.”
Mark Cote is an instructor at the University of Regina, he has studied atmospheric science for 45 years. He says the atmosphere engine is something we as humans can’t control.
“There is too much energy involved for us to have any significant impact in terms of climate. We have been changing atmospheric composition over the last couple hundred years or so. But again, it takes a long time to see the impacts of that, which we are really only seeing now.”
He added that, “We try to control the environment to a certain extent, and we have had some success. It’s comfortable in my office for example, it depends on the scale. Over continents or even the size of a city, it’s really difficult.”
To end his point Cote described a calculation that he often assigns his students.
“I ask them to calculate the energy in a typical prairie thunderstorm, and they often think they have made an error when they reach a total that equals hundreds of megatons of TNT. However they are right. One of those storms can create enough energy to equal most of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.” He added that “the average temperature of a single bolt of lighting is 30,000 C, which is five times hotter than the surface of the sun.”
When asked if there is evidence of increased levels of allium and other chemicals described by Bill, Cote said,
“We do monitor these things, Canada has the CAPMoN, which is the Canadian Air Pollution and Precipitation Monitoring Network. In general, air quality in Canada has increased. Especially over the last 40 years.”
