The felling of diseased trees across an area the size of around 300 football pitches is taking place at Wales' largest ancient woodland.

Larch trees at Wentwood Forest, near Newport, have become infected with the fungal disease Phytophthora ramorum.

The infection can kill trees and has spread across the UK after being found in south west England four years ago.

The Woodland Trust, which owns most of the forest, said the felling of the trees was essential.

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In some ways, it will actually accelerate the work to plant native trees”

Rory Francis
Woodland Trust
"This is the most serious and devastating action we've had to take on our estate," said the trust's head of woodland management, Andrew Sharkey.

"It again highlights both the need to tackle tree disease and the importance of restoring as much of our damaged ancient woodland to make it more resilient in decades to come."

Felling the infected conifers across an area of 200 hectares (500 acres) will leave the Woodland Trust with a £35,000 bill for replanting in the forest.

It also hits restoration work that has been taking place since the trust bought 352 hectares (869 acres) of Wentwood in 2006.

"Our aim was to prevent clear felling at Wentwood from happening. However, there is no alternative," explained Rory Francis, also from the trust.


Rory Francis, Woodland Trust: "We don't want to see this disease spreading any further"
"We are hoping that the action will slow down the spread of the infection or perhaps halt it."

Wentwood Forest is the remains of the ancient tree cover that stretched from the River Wye to the River Usk.

Conifers were first introduced to the wood in 1880, and much of the forest cleared to provide timber for trenches in World War I.

When it was replanted in the 1950s and 1960s, the once abundant broadleaf trees were replaced with imported conifers, ultimately damaging the forest floor and its natural formation.

The forest is spread out over 400 hectares (1,000 acres) and is home to 75 species of birds, including turtle doves, nightjars and spotted flycatchers, and is a habitat for dormice, otters, and pipistrelle bats.

It is also a home to wild bluebells, wood sorrel and wild daffodils.

.they're putting it in the air we breathe

Which brings me to the point I always come to with chemtrails, they are also spraying the air they breathe.

oioioi wrote:
Inoculations?
Ever considered this is a long term plan and has nothing to do with our lifetime?
Just throwing it out there.

Jane

Inoculations against whatever it is is the most obvious explanation but would require a huge scale conspiracy, on the scale that stops it being conspiracy.

First, let’s take the visible phenomenon itself that is claimed to be evidence of “chemtrails.” Believers point to the fact that some contrails from high-flying aircraft evaporate quickly, while others persist and grow into expansive sheets of cirrus clouds. It’s the latter they claim are chemtrails.

From a meteorologist’s perspective, there is absolutely no mystery about this. The lifetime and behavior of contrails depend on the environmental conditions in which they form. Growing contrails result when the humidity at high altitudes is at or above the saturation point with respect to ice. So when condensation is injected in the atmosphere at those altitudes, the microscopic particles of ice don’t simply evaporate, they persist and even grow, and they are spread by the winds into broader patches of cirrus cloud. There have been many scientific journal articles that delve into exactly the hows and whys of persistent contrails.

An analogous phenomenon can be observed at the surface at temperatures below -40 degrees, such as in Fairbanks, Alaska, in the dead of winter. Normally, in a non-urban setting, the arctic air is very dry. When you breath or drive a car generating exhaust, the resulting plume of fog dissipates rather quickly. But if the humidity is higher, perhaps partly as the result of emission from lots of other people and/or vehicles in your neighborhood, the fog plume persists, and eventually the whole area is blanketed in persistent, annoying ice fog. Just ask anyone who has spent a winter in Fairbanks. Persistent contrails at high altitudes are essentially the same phenomenon.

So are persistent contrails more common today than they used to be? Probably yes, for two reasons: (1) More aircraft are flying around making them in the first place, (2) stratospheric humidity is higher overall due in part to residual moisture left by previous aircraft and other anthropogenic sources of water vapor and hydrocarbons (see Fairbanks analogy, above).

So if there is a well-understood physical basis for persistent contrails, what is the evidence that compels chemtrail believers to insist that they are really something more sinister?

Well, there’s the assertions of toxic heavy metal contamination and resulting health effects that are prominent in the first article linked to above. So let’s assume that the measurements of these toxins and documentation of the health effects are valid. If they are, then yes, we have a problem with toxic pollution of some kind. But are chemtrails to blame? Heavy metal pollution is a known problem of coal-fired power plants, among many other industrial sources. But chemtrail believers are convinced the pollution is coming not from ground-level sources but rather from high-altitude aircraft, and they base this, apparently, on ground-level measurements of pollutants made immediately after a visible episode of persistent contrails.

Now, I don’t know whether similar measurements were also made when there was NO immediately preceding episode of persistent contrails, but I strongly suspect that in areas where ground-level pollution is being detected, careful systematic measurements would reveal that there is NO statistical correlation with episodes of persistent contrails; that is, that pollution is equally likely with or without observed contrails. And here’s why I believe that:

High-altitude aircraft generating visible contrails are almost invariably flying in the stratosphere at altitudes of 30,000 to 40,000 feet (about 9 to 13 km). Meteorologists have known for many decades that air in the stratosphere does not readily mix down to lower altitudes, and vice versa. Stuff put into the stratosphere tends to STAY THERE for many months to a year or longer UNLESS the particles are large enough to fall with a significant speed.

A large snowflake, for example, falls about one meter per second, which still means it would take about THREE HOURS to fall from 10 km to ground level if it didn’t evaporate first. But in those three hours, it’s usually also experiencing strong horizontal winds aloft (e.g., the jet stream), meaning that that fast-falling snowflake could still easily wind up 50-100 miles or more DOWNWIND of where it was deposited in the stratosphere. Snowflakes falling from jetliners over Madison would probably reach the surface over Lake Michigan or beyond.

Now here’s the important point: Contrail particles are MUCH, MUCH smaller than snowflakes, and fall MUCH, MUCH more slowly. You can tell this because they remain mainly in flat sheets in the sky, with little hint of visible “fall streaks”. An aircraft spraying aerosols at 10 km altitude over Madison cannot possibly have a significant local effect on the air quality in Madison or even Wisconsin or Michigan. In fact, it’s very likely that that substance, whatever it is, would disperse over an extremely large area and become extremely dilute before reaching the surface at all, probably weeks later. And it would be basically impossible to TARGET any specific region of the surface — 70% of what you sprayed would probably wind up in the ocean.

So let’s review the main tangible evidence chemtrail believers have for their existence: (1) Persistent contrails, and (2) locally elevated measurements of ground-level pollution. The first bit has a well-understood meteorological explanation; the second is far more readily explained by ground-level pollution sources — e.g., power plants and other industrial activities.

Now for some other weak links in the chemtrail case:

1) Motive: Why would someone spray toxins in the air at high altitude? There are various theories about mind-controlling drugs, but if that’s the goal, drinking water would be far more cost-effective. Or even trucks driving around cities spraying something out the back as they go. But aircraft flying at 30,000 feet is an absolutely terrible and stupid way to deliver anything to a ground population unless your goal is to blanket the entire earth with the stuff. For what? And at what cost?

Another theory is climate control. And yes, it’s true that there have been proposals to mitigate the effects of greenhouse warming by creating artificial clouds in the stratosphere. But I can also tell you that (a) most climate scientists agree this would be a very risky thing to do, (b) it would be EXCEEDINGLY expensive to do deliberately on a scale that would make a difference, and (c) there is no government agency with either the budget or the incentive to try to geoengineer the climate secretly. In short, I am quite certain that DELIBERATE geoengineering of this kind is not currently occurring. At the same time, it has long been known that contrails from commercial jets can possibly have INADVERTENT effects on climate as a BYPRODUCT of burning fossil fuels at high altitude – but that has nothing to do with chemtrails.

2) Opportunity: The vast majority of high-altitude aircraft creating contrails — including persistent contrails — can easily be observed with binoculars to be civilian airliners owned by a variety of private airlines. Where would the stuff be stored on these aircraft that is supposed to be sprayed? What would their incentive be to carry this stuff around and spray it, especially given the added cost of transporting every pound of unneeded weight? How would the countless civilian workers who maintain aircraft, manufacture jet fuel, etc., etc., not stumble across this vast conspiracy to spray toxins at high altitudes by civilian aircraft for unknown purposes?

To summarize, the tangible evidence that chemtrails are more than an urban legend is exceedingly weak – everything I have seen cited in support of the chemtrail theory falls apart in light of far more plausible and mundane explanations.

My conclusion: If you continue to believe in chemtrails after considering the actual available evidence, it’s not because the evidence for them is compelling or even strongly suggestive but rather because you simply prefer to believe in them.

Eh?

I meant if they are spraying us to get rid of us there is a required number needed to survive, and it's not a small number. Unless we really are dealing with mad professors who intend to reduce the population to a 4 figure number and start again it requires mass compliance.

Plenty of folk have already done that Andy. They are recording excesses of metals like barium, strontium and aluminium.
That is not to say that the data has been collected empirically. In the manner the scientists would accept.

dont you ninja me jhado

hey, how did this whole chemtrails thing start? when and why did ppl start saying hmm those arent contrails, they are poison clouds from air craft. i'll look into it, but if anyone knows clue me in.

batou wrote:
That's an excellent question, hot stuff.

For most people, I think it's just a gradual realisation that the skies look a lot different from when 'we' were younger. At first, you could be forgiven that this is some kind of 'rose tinted' phenomena, but when you actually start to look into it you realise that you are far from alone and there is actually quite a bit of 'evidence' to suggest something is not quite right.

Personally, I started noticing them after thinking about how much more miserable and grey the skies appeared to be generally. I wasn't even aware of chems at this point. Then I noticed, when the skies over here were a bit clearer, they were always, always, always criss-crossed with this crap. At that point, I started looking into it properly.

It may sound daft, but I also remember watching films from years back and noticing that many of them had scenes in them with perfectly clear, blue horizons.

It is argued that increased air traffic is one cause, but I don't buy this either, as I know folks who live miles from any flight paths who have also started to notice. I saw it for myself a few years ago when staying with a friend in Yorkshire. We had a week of beautiful, clear skies and then in the space of two days it happened. The criss-crossing took about a day and then the next...grey blanket as far as the eye could see. I watched it all from the same window.