The British government and Google are about to spend £5 million over thirty months making sure the correct clouds stay in your sky.
They announced it on August 18th, 2026. It hit my inbox at five in the morning and I read it twice before I got out of bed, because the name on it is Operation Blue Skies.
That is not a program to give you blue skies. I want to be very clear about this before we go one paragraph further. That is a program to sort man-made clouds into two bins — the ones that warm and the ones that cool — throw out the warming ones, and keep the rest.
They named a cloud-retention program after the absence of clouds.
Well there you go.
The Document
The announcement went up on the Contrails.org Notebook, written by Puja Hazlehurst and Eóghain Mitchison, and simultaneously on Google’s blog under Paul Hodgson and Chaim Langermann.
Here is how Contrails.org describes what they’ve built:
“the world’s first oceanic airspace-scale contrail avoidance trial”
And here is Google, saying the quiet part with a hyphen in it:
“the world’s first state-backed trial to avoid contrails”
State-backed. Remember that phrase the next time somebody tells you governments aren’t involved in modifying the atmosphere with commercial aircraft.
The specifics, from the primary sources:
Where: Shanwick Oceanic airspace, the eastern half of the North Atlantic corridor, northwest of Ireland. Over 1,000 flights a day.
How much warming lives there: roughly 5% of global contrail warming, in that one box.
When: two four-month trial windows, winters of 2026–2027 and 2027–2028. That’s this winter. Not a proposal. Not a white paper. This winter.
How many flights: around 10,000 will pass through during trial hours each year. A small percentage get moved.
The intervention: altitude adjustments within normal flight operations, requested through standard air traffic control channels. The Ethicalist reports the nudges are up to 600 metres — about 2,000 feet — using the same procedures controllers already use for turbulence.
The money: £5 million total, with £2.65 million from the UK Department for Transport through the ATI Programme, per the University of Cambridge. Google UK is in for £1.4 million in-kind, pro bono.
Air traffic controllers will be trained. Pilots will be given instructions. Satellites will verify the result. Two universities will write the papers.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a press release.
There Was That Word Again: MORE
If you read Geoengineering with Contrails back in February 2024 like I told you to, you already know this part.
In 2010, DLR’s Ulrich Schumann — the man who built the Contrail Cirrus Prediction tool that this entire industry still runs on — laid out the objective as less soot, less warming, and more cooling contrails.
I could not get that phrase out of my head. So in 2017 I called the Federal Aviation Administration. Three phone calls to Dr. Rangasayi Halthore, then head of the FAA’s Aviation Climate Change Research Initiative, before he agreed to a written interview. I asked him plainly what Schumann meant.
His answer:
“We would like to have more CIC’s during day and none during night.”
More Contrail-Induced Cirrus clouds during the day. None at night.
MORE.
Not fewer. Not zero. A ratio. A dial. A preferred cloud schedule for the planet, stated in writing by the FAA’s own climate research lead, nine years ago, to a sheriff’s deputy from South Carolina who wouldn’t stop calling.
Now look at Operation Blue Skies and tell me what you see.
Clouds By Day, None By Night
Here is the ladder. Walk it with me.
What makes a contrail warm the planet? It traps outgoing longwave radiation — Earth’s own heat — on its way to space.
What makes a contrail cool the planet? It reflects incoming sunlight back to space before that sunlight reaches the ground.
When does a contrail only trap heat and never reflect anything? At night. No sun, no reflection, all blanket.
So which contrails are the “warming” ones? Overwhelmingly, the night ones.
And where does that matter most? The North Atlantic. A 2007 study in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics found that over parts of the North Atlantic flight corridor, 75% of air traffic and 84% of the contrail forcing occurs during local night. Nicola Stuber’s team at Reading found much the same in Nature in 2006 — evening and overnight flights, about a quarter of traffic, driving 60 to 80 percent of contrail warming.
So what does a program that eliminates warming contrails over the North Atlantic in winter actually eliminate?
Night contrails.
And what does it leave completely untouched?
Your daytime sky.
Contrails.org’s own post says trial maneuvers happen during “periods of lower air traffic.” The Ethicalist puts it less delicately and says the rerouting happens in the evening and at night, when the warming effect is greatest. Either way, the physics only points one direction.
Read Halthore’s sentence one more time. More during day and none during night.
Then read the trial design.
That is not me connecting dots. That is the same sentence, printed twice, nine years apart, once by a regulator in an email to me and once by a consortium in a press release to the world.
Who Is Behind This
Names, addresses, funders. Because They™ has a board of directors.
Google UK — the AI models that predict and avoid warming contrails, plus the satellite verification.
NATS — the UK’s air navigation service provider. Controller training, airspace operations, safety assessment. The actual hands on the actual radios.
Contrails.org — forecast assessment, trial parameters, data analysis. Contrails.org is part of Breakthrough Energy. Breakthrough Energy is Bill Gates. Its founding chief scientist was Ken Caldeira, formerly of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the most published solar geoengineering researchers alive. Ken will tell you he helped set it up and isn’t running it now. Fine. Once a geoengineer touches the thing and Gates funds the thing, I’m going to keep mentioning it.
UK Met Office — building a national contrail forecast capability. Note the word capability. That does not get dismantled when the trial ends.
Imperial College London & University of Cambridge — independent verification and the published papers afterward.
UK Department for Transport, via the Aerospace Technology Institute, the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, and Innovate UK.
Cambridge’s Professor Steven Barrett, on the record:
“Contrail avoidance could drastically reduce the global climate impact of aviation”
Imperial’s contribution builds on their own 2020 work showing that adjusting fewer than 2% of flights could cut contrail-related warming by 59%.
I want to be fair here, because being fair is the only reason anyone should trust a word I write: this consortium is not hiding. They published the map, the airspace, the funding split, the partner list, and the dates. Compared to the “subscale” cowboys launching balloons without telling anybody, that is real transparency and they deserve credit for it.
My objection is not that they’re sneaking. My objection is what they’re building.
They Cannot See What You Can See
This is the part nobody wants to talk about, and it’s in our EPA petition with 170 citations behind it.
The entire verification scheme runs on satellites. Google tracks and confirms impact with machine learning on satellite imagery. That’s the proof that the maneuver worked.
Except the satellites are half blind.
MIT engineers compared geostationary satellite imagery against low-Earth-orbit imagery of the same sky and found the geostationary birds — the ones this industry depends on — miss roughly 80% of the contrails that LEO satellites pick up. The ones they miss are the smaller, thinner, younger ones. The ones that just came out of an engine.
Our petition puts the number on current satellite-based ice-supersaturated-region prediction at a 50 to 80% error rate against in-situ measurement, which makes voluntary avoidance without onboard sensing operationally unreliable.
Translation for humans: you are standing in your driveway with your phone out, counting nine trails overhead, and their model can account for two of them.
So when the papers come out in 2029 declaring Operation Blue Skies a success, ask the only question that matters: compared to what baseline, measured with what instrument?
Put humidity sensors on the planes and I will take the numbers seriously. Until then it’s a model grading its own homework with a camera that can’t see.
What This Proves, and What It Does Not
Let’s separate these carefully, because this is where everybody else in this movement falls down a hole.
What is now established, on the record:
Aircraft make clouds, those clouds change Earth’s radiation balance, and this is not in dispute by anyone anywhere. Google’s own post puts warming contrails at roughly one third of aviation’s total climate impact.
Contrail formation is a controllable variable. Google and American Airlines proved it — 54% reduction across 70 flights in 2023, then AI forecasts built straight into American’s flight planning software across 2,400 transatlantic flights.
A national government is now funding the deliberate management of that variable across an entire oceanic airspace, with air traffic control issuing the instructions.
The stated objective is not fewer clouds. The stated objective is a better mix of clouds — warming ones out, cooling ones in.
Sorting the planet’s cloud cover by radiative effect, at airspace scale, with state funding, is climate engineering. There is no other honest word for it. Call it mitigation if it helps you sleep. The mechanism is identical.
What this does NOT prove, and I will not let you pretend otherwise:
It does not prove anybody is spraying anything out of a secret tank. There is no secret tank. There has never been a secret tank. The soot and sulfur come out of the engine as designed, at the sulfur levels the EPA legally permits.
It does not prove a depopulation agenda. Stop it.
It does not quantify how much heat contrail cirrus actually traps. Nobody has. Not a PhD, not an AI, not me. Anyone who gives you a confident number is selling something.
And here is my open question, flagged as a question: if the avoidance maneuver at these latitudes and in these winter months is sometimes upward, and the tropopause over the North Atlantic in winter sits lower than most people assume — what exactly is a jet depositing when it climbs out of the troposphere to dodge a cloud? Sulfur into the stratosphere is the textbook definition of stratospheric aerosol injection. I don’t know how often Blue Skies will climb versus descend. Neither do you. Somebody in that consortium does, and they should publish it.
The Bottom Line
Operation Blue Skies is real, funded, state-backed, and starts this winter over the North Atlantic.
Its purpose is to remove warming contrails while preserving cooling ones. Warming contrails are mostly night contrails. Cooling contrails are day contrails. Your daytime sky is not on the agenda.
The FAA’s own climate research lead told me the goal in 2017: more clouds by day, none by night. Blue Skies is that sentence with a budget.
Global air traffic keeps climbing, and contrail cirrus radiative forcing has been projected to potentially triple by 2050. Optimizing the mix does nothing about the total. More flights means more clouds. Sorted clouds, but more of them.
The verification instrument cannot see most of what it’s verifying.
#CirrusCloudsMatter
What You Do About It
This is why we filed. On May 4th, 2026, the American Clean Air Coalition submitted a Petition for Rulemaking to the EPA under Section 231 of the Clean Air Act. Lead petitioner Reinette Senum, myself as co-lead, alongside Michael Hogan of Missouri Clean Skies, Leslie Manookian of Health Freedom Defense Fund, Leah Wilson and Valerie Ferrell of Stand for Health Freedom, and Sayer Ji of Global Wellness Forum.
170 citations. Two years of work. Written so that lawmakers and scientists cannot wave it off, which is exactly why it’s a dry read. Read it anyway.
We ask for three things:
Cut jet fuel sulfur to 15 parts per million — the identical standard the EPA already enforces on the diesel in your truck. Current jet fuel is allowed up to 200 times more. We desulfurized diesel. We desulfurized gasoline. Then we looked up at a hundred thousand flights a day and decided that one didn’t count.
Mandatory contrail avoidance — binding, with onboard humidity sensing, for all persistent contrails. Not just the ones an industry model labels “warming.” The Clean Air Act has no exemption for pollution somebody claims is beneficial.
Limits on operational practices that intentionally promote contrail formation for atmospheric or radiative effect. That is the anti-geoengineering clause, and Operation Blue Skies is precisely why it’s in there.
The petition was received by the EPA on May 11th, 2026. As of this writing they still have not assigned it a docket number. That is the entire fight right now — not winning the argument, just getting the door opened.
This week, do these three things:
Go to americancleanaircoalition.org and sign the Citizen Petition demanding the EPA docket our Petition for Rulemaking and open it for public comment. Scroll to the bottom of the page.
Read the petition and the slide deck. Cite them. Do not cite me.
Send this article to one person who thinks this is about spray tanks, and one person who thinks it’s about nothing at all. Both of them are wrong in the same direction, and both of them are why this has gone unregulated for thirty years.
They want Operation Blue Skies. Fine. Then give us actual blue skies. Avoid every persistent contrail, not just the ones that inconvenience the climate models. Short trails that dissipate in ninety seconds, we can live with. A fire-breathing metal tube boiling its way across the sky and leaving a cloud that spreads for three hundred miles and shades my county until sunset — no.
Until then, Operation Blue Freaking Skies is a name, not a promise.
Stay tuned. I’m going to be watching Shanwick all winter, and I’ll be putting the William Thomas and early-chemtrail-era archives up at ChemtrailFacts.com so you can see for yourself that this conspiracy started out calling them contrails — before the grifters got hold of it.
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