Editor:

Well, Barry, you've had your fun writing quasi-science columns over the last few years, but this time you've gone too far. Not only is your "Cool Contrails" (July 2) column not science, not even quasi-science, it's pure trash talk!

Contrails are a common phenomenon that most of us have observed and they generally dissipate in relatively short time spans. Chemtrails, on the other hand, remain in the sky over long periods of time, disperse and form a dirty cloud cover that persists for hours and sometimes even days.

Numerous inquiries to federal officials and agencies have resulted in the same kind of derisive response as appears in your column or have resulted in no response at all. In that kind of information vacuum, speculation usually runs rife and gives rise to legitimate questions as well as to the wildest speculations. You could have provided a valuable science lesson to our local populace by seriously looking into the chemtrail phenomenon by carefully perusing the available chemtrail data on the Internet, which isn't all hype as so ridiculously stated in your article, instead of dismissing it as a "nutty world of conspiracies."

Anyone who observes our local skies on a regular basis knows that chemtrails are real and possibly dangerous to human health and the planet's well-being. If done under the guise of GeoEngineering, chemtrails smack as the height of hubris. Instead of tinkering with nature's laws, we should be reducing our carbon footprint and increasing sustainability in every sense of that word.

SkyWatcher,

AKA Erich Franz Schimps, Arcata