You’re Watching the Wrong Altitude
A company just raised $60 million to spray the stratosphere. It plans to do it at 59,000 feet. Everybody’s staring at 35,000.
Let me start with the part nobody expects me to say.
In October 2025, a startup called Stardust Solutions closed a $60 million venture round led by Lowercarbon Capital. The company was founded in 2023 by Israeli physicists — one of them a former deputy chief scientist at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. It’s incorporated in Delaware. It has a proprietary reflective particle it refuses to fully disclose, and it’s seeking patents on it. It has been testing dispersal hardware outdoors since 2024. And it announced plans to begin releasing particles from a modified aircraft in outdoor trials starting in 2026, at an altitude of roughly 18 kilometers.
Eighteen kilometers is 59,000 feet.
That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a press release. Meanwhile, Make Sunsets is still launching sulfur dioxide balloons and selling “cooling credits” for the privilege. Overall funding for solar radiation management research roughly tripled in 2025. The Simons Foundation put up $50 million. This is happening in the open, with named people, dated filings, and a business model.
So here’s my problem, and I want you to sit with it for a second.
For thirty years, we have been trained to point our cameras at airliners cruising at 35,000 feet. And in that same window, an actual, funded, private stratospheric aerosol injection program got built at 59,000 feet — and almost nobody in the movement can name the CEO.
I’ve spent fifteen years on this. I want to show you how to tell the difference. Not because I need you to agree with me. Because I need you looking at the right part of the sky.
Who’s paying me
Let’s get this out of the way, because it’s the first comment every time.
I’m a sheriff’s deputy in Sumter, South Carolina. I work forty hours a week and build this website at night, badly, one page at a time. The only people paying me are the meager donations I receive and the generous paying subscribers of this Substack and my Patreon. If somebody were paying me, my other four websites would be finished and I certainly wouldn’t be working 40 hours a week.
More to the point: I used to believe every bit of it. I was scared to go outside. I looked up and saw an attack. What changed my mind wasn’t a scientist telling me to trust the science — I don’t trust the science, and after the last five years I don’t think anybody should hand institutions that kind of blank check. What changed my mind was learning to check the sky myself and discovering the answer was always sitting there in public data, free, twice a day, for anybody willing to look.
And here’s the part that should matter to you more than my biography: I am about to hand you the tools to prove me wrong.
That’s not a rhetorical flourish. A shill tells you to trust him. I’m telling you the opposite. Everything below is a falsifiable claim with a free, public instrument attached to it. If I’m lying, these tools will catch me, and they’ll catch me in front of everyone. I’m publishing the method and the way to break it. Ask yourself when the people selling you fear last did that.
The sky answers two questions, not one
Here’s the thing that took me an embarrassingly long time to understand, and I think it’s the source of ninety percent of the confusion.
Two planes can be in what looks like the same sky, and one leaves a stub that vanishes in three seconds while the other lays down a white ribbon that spreads until it covers the whole horizon. That looks impossible. It looks like proof. If it’s the same sky and the same jet fuel, how can they behave differently?
They can’t — because it isn’t the same sky. Altitude is a different world every few thousand feet, and the atmosphere is answering two separate questions about every aircraft.
Question one: does a trail form at all?
This is the Schmidt–Appleman Criterion, worked out in the 1940s and 50s, long before anybody had a motive to lie to you about it. Jet exhaust is hot and wet. As it mixes with cold ambient air, the mixture traces a line on a temperature-humidity graph. If that mixing line touches water saturation before it cools to ambient, droplets condense and instantly freeze. You get a contrail. If it never touches saturation, you get nothing. No trail. Not because the plane isn’t “spraying” — because the physics of mixing didn’t close.
Question two: does it stick around?
This one is separate, and it’s the one people miss. A contrail can form and then evaporate in seconds, because ice sublimates in air that’s undersaturated with respect to ice. But there are patches of the upper troposphere called Ice Supersaturated Regions — ISSRs — where relative humidity with respect to ice exceeds 100%. In those patches, the ice crystals in the contrail don’t just survive. They grow, feeding on ambient vapor, spreading, sinking, and turning into cirrus.
That’s contrail cirrus. Aviation-induced cloudiness. That’s your “chemtrail.” It is a real, physical, sky-covering phenomenon and I am not telling you it isn’t there. I’m telling you what it’s made of, and I’m about to show you how to predict it before it happens.
Two questions, four outcomes:
SAC fails → no trail
SAC passes, no ISSR → short trail, disappears
SAC passes, weak ISSR → long trail, lingers, eventually fades
SAC passes, strong ISSR → persistent contrail spreading into cirrus
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
The instrument panel
Now the part where you stop taking my word for it.
1. Find your target. Flightradar24 or ADS-B Exchange. Click any aircraft overhead. Read the altitude. In the video I tracked the same plane on both sites and got 24,225 and 24,300 feet — two independent sources, same aircraft, within a hundred feet. That’s your cross-check that the data isn’t fabricated.
2. Ask what the air is doing up there. Install the Contrail Finder plugin on Windy. Click anywhere on Earth and it gives you a column: every thousand feet of cruise altitude, with the temperature, the relative humidity, and a verdict — no contrails, minimal, short contrails possible, long, possibly persistent.
Layer high clouds and barometric pressure underneath it and click along the edges of existing cirrus. Watch the verdict change as you cross the boundary. That’s the ISSR edge, and it’s visible from space.
3. Go to the raw measurement. This is where it stops being a forecast model and starts being a physical object.
Twice a day, at 00Z and 12Z, weather services worldwide release radiosondes — weather balloons carrying instruments that measure temperature, humidity and pressure on the way up. Right now, as you read this, hundreds of them are in the air. You can watch them on SondeHub, including the chase cars driving out to recover the ones that land in a field.
I’m going to say that again, because it matters more than anything else on this page: there is no model here. A physical instrument on a physical balloon measured the actual air over your actual head this morning, and the numbers are free.
Read them at College of DuPage, the University of Wyoming sounding archive, or UCAR. You’ll get a Skew-T plot: red line is temperature, blue line is dewpoint. Where the lines squeeze together, the air is nearly saturated — cloud-making air. Where they splay far apart, it’s bone dry, and nothing you release into it will hang around.
The line that actually matters
Now here’s where this stops being about airplanes and becomes about the thing I actually care about.
Scroll down the DuPage numeric output to the row marked TRP. That’s the tropopause — the ceiling of the weather-making layer, the boundary where the troposphere ends and the stratosphere begins.
For the Ontario sounding behind my infographic, the tropopause sat at 12,583 meters. That’s 41,283 feet. UCAR put it at 11,942 meters — 39,180 feet — a couple hours off and a slightly different algorithm. Elsewhere in the same session I pulled 13,293 meters: 43,600 feet. Over the deep tropics it can push past 55,000.
It moves. It moves by latitude, by season, by day. And you can look up where it is right now, for free, over your own house.
Why does that matter? Because every serious proposal for stratospheric aerosol injection depends on getting particles above that line. That’s the entire point of the word “stratospheric.” Below the tropopause, the air convects and it rains — anything you put there washes out in days to weeks. Above it, the air is stably stratified and effectively dry, and particles can persist for a year or two and get carried around the globe. That’s the difference between a stunt and a climate intervention. It’s exactly why Stardust is talking about 18 kilometers and not 11.
An airliner at 35,000 feet, in the troposphere, on a scheduled route, is in the wrong layer to do the thing people accuse it of doing.
And I’ll give you the strongest counterargument to my own point, because I’d rather you hear it from me: at high latitudes in winter, the tropopause can drop to 28,000 or 30,000 feet, which means airliners on polar routes genuinely do fly in the lower stratosphere sometimes. That’s true. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. But material released just above a collapsed polar tropopause doesn’t get the residence time or the global spread you’d get from tropical injection at 20 kilometers — it descends back into the troposphere and rains out. The physics of where still rules out the accusation, even when the altitude occasionally lines up.
That’s what an honest argument looks like. I’ll take the hit on the edge case rather than have you find it later and conclude I was hiding it.
The Contrail Challenge
So here’s my offer, and I mean it completely.
If chemtrails are real, this is the easiest proof in the history of the movement. You don’t need a whistleblower. You don’t need a leaked document. You need a phone and about four minutes.
Film all three of these in one unbroken take:
The sky. Point the camera at the aircraft laying down the trail.
The tracker. Cut to Flightradar24 or ADS-B Exchange showing that aircraft’s altitude.
The atmosphere. Cut to the Contrail Finder for your location — or better, the radiosonde sounding — showing that at that altitude, the Schmidt–Appleman Criterion is not met and there is no ice supersaturation.
One cut. No edits between. Timestamps visible.
If you can do that, you haven’t just won an argument. You have a persistent, spreading trail existing in air that physically cannot sustain it. That’s an anomaly no atmospheric scientist on Earth can explain, and it would be the single most important piece of evidence anyone has produced in thirty years. You’d have found Bigfoot on video.
Send it to me. jim@climateviewer.com. I will publish it. I will put it at the top of the page. I have said this publicly for years and I’m saying it again in writing: if the conditions do not fit, you must not acquit.
Nobody has done it yet. Not once. But the burden of proof belongs to the person making the extraordinary claim, and I’ve just handed you the lab equipment.
Run it the other way too, though — because that’s the honest version of the test. Check it on a day the sky is clear and everyone’s calling it a “no spray day.” Then check it again on a day the whole horizon goes white and everybody’s screaming that they’re spraying us like bugs. I’ve done this for fifteen years. The forecast knew. Every single time. The trails follow the humidity, not the headlines.
What we lost while we were arguing
Thirty-seven states have now introduced legislation to ban geoengineering. Tennessee got there first in 2024, Florida followed in 2025, Louisiana after that. Montana and Texas passed versions with carve-outs for cloud seeding.
I want to be careful here, because this cuts both ways and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Some of those laws were written by people who believe airliners are poisoning them. Some were written broadly enough to catch legitimate research. But some of them are the only real check that exists on private companies with nine figures of venture money and a stated plan to put particles in the stratosphere without asking anybody. I’d rather have a messy law than none.
What I won’t accept is spending another decade pointed at the wrong altitude.
Because here is what the fear economy actually costs. Every hour spent filming a Boeing at 35,000 feet is an hour not spent on a company that raised $60 million to release undisclosed particles at 59,000 feet, that won’t publish its formulation, that is patenting the sky, and that told the press it would start trials this year. Most people in this movement can’t name David Keith or Ken Caldeira. They can name six podcasters.
That’s not an accident. Fear is a business model, and the people running it have never once handed you a tool that could prove them wrong. Notice that. Notice who gives you tests and who gives you dread.
I’m a Christian, and I take fear not seriously — not as a platitude, but as a discipline. Fear makes you a worse observer, a worse citizen, and an easier mark. I know, because I was one.
So go check my work. Install the plugin. Pull the sounding. Find the tropopause over your own house tonight. Try to catch me lying — I’d genuinely rather you tried and failed than took my word for it, because a person who verified something owns it in a way a person who was told something never will.
And when you’re done, come help me fight the real one. It’s at 59,000 feet, it has a Delaware incorporation and a term sheet, and it isn’t waiting for us to finish arguing.
Attack ideas, not people.
— Jim Lee, ClimateViewer News
Verify everything above: chemtrailfacts.com · Flightradar24 · ADS-B Exchange · Windy Contrail Finder · SondeHub Tracker · College of DuPage soundings · University of Wyoming Atmospheric Science Radiosonde Archive · UCAR Upper-Air page: RAL Real-Time Weather
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You’re Watching the Wrong Altitude
https://www.climateviewer.news/p/youre-watching-the-wrong-altitude
A company just raised $60 million to spray the stratosphere. It plans to do it at 59,000 feet. Everybody’s staring at 35,000.
TAKE THE CHEMTRAIL CHALLENGE!
I DARE YOU.
#chemtrails #geoengineering
Thank you, Jim, for your dedication, tireless research and for disclosing your vital findings to the public and for you integrity in doing so.