Cuckoo Award.

We have another winner of the highly coveted Cuckoo Award!
In Tennessee their legislature passed a law banning modifying the atmosphere.  That wasn’t the what the award was given for but rather the discussion leading up to the passage of the bill.

Tennessee lawmakers vote to ban geoengineering, with allusions to 'chemtrails' conspiracy theory
The bill would prohibit technologies that could modify the atmosphere. But lawmakers’ comments about it toed a line between fact and fiction.
NBC News
By Evan Bush
April 1, 2024

The Tennessee state House of Representatives passed a bill Monday designed to prevent geoengineering, the practice of intentionally modifying the atmosphere to counteract global warming.

The bill, which had already passed in the state Senate, covers a variety of technological interventions. They include theoretical ideas about cooling the climate by an approach known as solar radiation modification, as well as more limited practices that affect the weather, like cloud seeding, a technique used to increase rain and snowfall.

Most geoengineering options are theoretical and untested. Federal researchers have taken only a few small steps toward studying their feasibility, and atmospheric scientists say there is no evidence of any large-scale programs.

Okay, here is what got them the Cuckoo Award,

However, lawmakers’ discussions of the proposal toed a line between fact and fiction, with several suggesting that solar geoengineering projects are already underway and others referring to fears and misunderstandings that appeared to stem from the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory.

“This will be my wife’s favorite bill of the year. She has worried about this, I bet, 10 years. It’s been going on a long, long time,” Republican Sen. Frank Niceley said at a hearing about the bill last month. “If you look up — one day, it’ll be clear. The next day they will look like some angels have been playing tic-tac-toe. They’re everywhere. I’ve got pictures on my phone with X's right over my house. For years they denied they were doing anything.”

Cuckoo, cuckoo!

In recent years, some chemtrails conspiracy theories have evolved, with believers suggesting that contrails are actually aerosols designed to control the weather or the climate. The Tennessee Lookout, a nonprofit news organization, reported that Republican Sen. Steve Southerland, one of the sponsors, referred to the chemtrails theory* when he presented his argument for the bill to a reporter.

Justin Mankin, a climate scientist at Dartmouth University, said: “It’s conspiratorial nonsense. The challenge here is that the whole chemtrails conspiracy has blurred and subsumed all these distinct technologies with distinct aims, which makes it challenging to disentangle.”

So it is a great honor to be awarded the Cuckoo Award for bring forth and passing a deranged law based on quack science.

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*For those who are wondering what are chemtrails they are really called contrails. The word contrails came from the combination of the words "condensation" and "trail."

What they are is the condensation of the airplane exhaust in the cold air. The dirtier the engine exhaust the bigger the contrail. Like all clouds, the moisture needs something to coalesce around, clouds need seed. Space.com writes,

Contrails are created when the hot water vapor emitted by a jet engine after combustion cools and condenses in Earth's atmosphere, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The atmosphere's temperature and humidity must be in just the right place for condensation to occur — the air must be cold with some humidity.

Contrails most commonly form at an airplane's cruising altitude, between about 32,000 and 42,000 feet (10,000 to 13,000 meters) in the upper troposphere, per the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), because that's where those conditions are found. Because the atmosphere is ever-changing, conditions might not be right for contrail formation at this altitude, which is why not all airplanes create contrails during every flight.

Water vapor needs a seed to form around and the carbon particles in the exhaust provides the seeds, the dirtier the engine the bigger the contrail. They were first noticed during World War II with high altitude bombers.