Debunked: Clifford Carnicom's "Contrail Physics"

[Mick]

In this article, Clifford Carnicom make some bold claims:

http://www.carnicominstitute.org/articles/model1.htm

Bunk from external source:

1. Contrails composed of water vapor routinely dissipate, as the physics and
chemistry of this model will demonstrate. As a separate and distinct
set of events, clouds may form if temperature, relative humidity, and
aerosol conditions are favorable to their development. If "contrails"
by appearance transform into "clouds", it can be concluded that the
material of composition is not water vapor.

2.The conditions under consideration show that the ice crystals
within a contrail can warm to the melting point and subsequently melt
with the heat provided by solar radiation.

3. As demonstrated both by historical observation and this model, the
time expected for contrail dissipation is relatively short, e.g., 2
minutes or less. This assumes the contrail is composed essentially
of water vapor, per the classic definition (condensed trail).

If we give Carnicom the benefit of the doubt and assume most of this science is correct, then the conclusion he reaches is that:

- First the water vapor freezes, because it's so cold
- Then it melts and evaporates, because the sun is so hot

So why doesn't is just freeze again, because it's so cold? The condensation nuclei still exist, and are now considerably cooler than when they exited the engine.

He also makes the distinction between clouds and contrails, saying clouds form on smaller condensation nuclei (0.1 to 0.2 microns). To suport this he quotes Goethe MB - Ground Based Passive Remote Sensing of Ice Clouds with Scattered Solar Radiation in the Near Infrared - Max Planck Inst Meteorol, which gives a particle size of 30-200 microns. However that Goethe study is not measuring nuclei (the tiny seed at the heart of an ice crystal), it's measuring the actual fully grown ice crystals.

The condensation nuclei for contrails that come from the exhaust are basically soot and other byproducts of combustion, having a size of 0.1 microns or less.

Hence they will behave exactly the same as clouds. If carnicom has proven here that contrails cannot persist and spread, then, since clouds must start out small and spread to a larger size, he has also proven that cirrus clouds cannot even exist at all.

Then in a second article, The RH Deception
http://www.carnicom.com/rh1.htm

He claims that if the relative humidity is between 70% and 100% then contrails should dissipate in about ten seconds, because at 10% relative humidity it would dissipate in two seconds.

Bunk from external source:

Even at a relative humidity level of 70%, which must be considered quite high for the commercial flight domain, a factor of 3.3 against the maximum evaporation rate of a completely arid environment must be considered as relatively minor. Most of us would have a difficult case of making the argument of a persistent vapor trail within a moisture-free environment, and more realistically we would expect dissipation within a matter of seconds (disregarding deliberate aerosol injections). To multiply a few seconds by a factor of 3.3 leads to no real world change in the situation at hand

This is nonsense for two reasons.
1) Evaporation or melting time does not scale like that. It's as if he claimed that since ice melts in ten seconds at 100 degrees, and in five seconds at 50 degrees, then it should melt in about two seconds at zero degrees. Of course it's not actually going to melt at all.
2) If Relative Humidity with respect to water is between 70% and 100% then relative humidity with respect to ice is always above 100%. In that environment ice cannot sublimate. In fact it will always accrete more ice, and the ice crystals will grow bigger, causing the contrail to spread.

[Jay Reynolds]

In the first Carnicom webpage Mick cited, Carnicom is admitting that the ice crystals will form from the water vapor from combustion at flight altitudes of around -50 degrees C.

Then he proceeds to claim that solar radiation at a certain intensity would melt the ice crystal.

Next, he calulates the intensity of solar radiation that he would expect, and applys it to the ice crystal.

However, he treats the ice crystal not as if it remained exposed to the -50 degree air, but as if it were in an imaginary "thermos bottle", with no contact to the continuing cooling effect of the -50C air.

The problem with his "model" is that it doesn't account for the fact that the ice crystals of contrails are not inside an imaginary "thermos bottle", insulated from the outside air, instead they are in the real world, still in contact with the cooling effect of the -50C air, and thus do not melt.

Here is an example of what he is saying-

Carnicom's world:
1- Take an ice cube, then place it in a pan and heat it until it melts.
2- Place the resulting water in a thermos bottle and come back to see if it turns back to ice.

Of course it won't re-freeze, since it isn't exposed to anything that would refreeze it.

Real world:
3. Take another ice cube and melt it.
4. Place the pan in your freezer.

Of course, it will re-freeze, because the freezer is cold enough that the heat you put into the ice is drawn away from the melted ice cube.

[Jay Reynolds]

This is nonsense for two reasons.
1) Evaporation or melting time does not scale like that. It's as if he claimed that since ice melts in ten seconds at 100 degrees, and in five seconds at 50 degrees, then it should melt in about two seconds at zero degrees. Of course it's not actually going to melt at all.
2) If Relative Humidity with respect to water is between 70% and 100% then relative humidity with respect to ice is always above 100%. In that environment ice cannot sublimate. In fact it will always accrete more ice, and the ice crystals will grow bigger, causing the contrail to spread.

In this Carnicom webpage, first of all, he assumes that his previous claim were true, but it was false.

His biggest problem in this second study was that Carnicom hadn't yet realized that there was a difference between RH with respect to water which is used on the ground, and relative humidity with respect to ice, which is what applies at the -40C temperatures at flight levels for contrails.

First of all, Carnicom based his assumptions on data regarding flight levels of 65,000 feet in the stratosphere, twice that of the commercial jets he had documented photographically at around 30-39,000 feet.

This is not the case for upper regions of the atmosphere, which is the favored domain of jet aircraft traffic. As a case in point, during congressional hearings regarding the environmental effects of projected supersonic flight traffic at 65,000 ft., the expert testimony explained that "persistent contrails" would not be a factor as the relative humidity at that level commonly is approximately 5%.

The history of this claim by Carnicom is interesting. He put out his "RH Deception", and that's what it really was, in May of 2001.

At that time, there were two main forums which discussed the chemtrails subject, Carnicom's own forum, and chemtrailcentral.com.

Here is Carnicom making his false claims in August 2000. He judges that since there is 36% relative humidity at flight levels, there should be no contrails, or the associated cirrus clouds. He gets confronted by a pilot who explains to him the amount of ordinary air traffic and advises him to track the flights using a tracking program. The pilot is responded to by A.C Griffith, who says:

Continuous debate is non-productive and a waste of time http://chemtrails.yuku.com/topic/1142/A-Contradiction

What is interesting is that Carnicom had already stumbled upon the facts about ice supersaturation in August, 2000:

Re: The Contradiction Remains
(09/09/0014:53:32)
Now five sources:
"Data from a wave cloud at temperatures below -60 C showed that nucleation of ice began at approximately 80% relative humidity with respect to water (~125-130 % saturation with respect to ice), consistent with earlier observations of Heymsfield and Larry Miloshevich in wave clouds at temperatures of -55 C."
www.mmm.ucar.edu/asr96/part_h.html
Clifford E Carnicom
http://chemtrails.yuku.com/reply/104...ns#reply-10469

Meanwhile, over at chemtrailcentral.com, an actual PhD. Biochemist, a woman from Lubbock, Texas, who went by the screen name of 3T3L1, had begun to believe in chemtrails but examined Carnicom's paper and realized his errors:

Wow! Relative Humidity! I can tell already that this topic is going to be a popular one!
I got into this last night after reading Clifford Carnicom's material called "The RH [Relative Humidity] Deception." http://www.carnicom.com/rh1.htm

It contains equations (not my strong suit) but something about it didn't seem right. Clifford's table of "Persistence Factors" indicated that contrails should last on the order of minutes when the relative humidity is less than 90%. He implies that the only way contrails could last for hours is when the Persistence Factor is near infinity, i.e., when the relative humidity is near 100%, which almost never happens in the upper atmosphere. (As a general approximation, clouds form when the relative humidity is about 70%.)
http://www.chemtrailcentral.com/ubb/...ML/000006.html

3T3L1 by September of 2000, with much of the help coming from Dr. Patrick Minnis, probably the most qualified contrail expert in the world, who posted at Carnicom's forum as "Dogbreath", and eventually at chemtrailcentral as Canex (canine exhalations).

3T3L1 eventually got it all figured out and much of what the chemmies understood at that time had been established by October.

Carnicom, however, had his papers reviewed by "dogbreath"(Minnis) who tried to straighten him out at the Carnicom messageboard.
Carnicom banned Minnis and deleted all traces that the top contrails scientist in the world had tried to talk sense to him, and Carnicom hasn't changed his website to reflect what even he himself found out in August 2000, twelve years ago, which is that there is a difference between ordinary "relative humidity" and "relative humidity with respect to ice".