Does the Air Force Own the Weather in 2025? Origins of the Chemtrail Theory
March 19th, 2025 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Fig. 1. “Study of Cirrus Clouds”, painting by John Constable, circa 1822. Cirrus as a cloud type was first defined by Luke Howard in 1802.
2025 isn’t just the current year, or a Heritage Foundation project of conservative principles for political action for the new Republican President. In the 1990s it was also the result of an Air Force directive to “examine the concepts, capabilities, and technologies the United States will require to remain the dominant air and space force in the future“.
As a partial response to that directive, several students at the Air War College in 1996 produced a document, largely theoretical in content, entitled Weather As a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025. That document, which was declassified in 1998, seems to have provided sufficient evidence some people needed to claim that our government has been secretly modifying the weather, altering the atmosphere, poisoning us with chemicals, or whatever else you can think of.
Now, as a general rule, I’m not against conspiracy theories. For example, it has become clear that experts knew early on that the COVID-19 virus likely did indeed come from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, and one might reasonably conclude there was a conspiracy to hide such evidence. Even the New York Times says we were misled. Conspiracies exist.
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2025/03/does-the-air-force-own-the-weather-in-2025-origins-of-the-chemtrail-theory/
