Tilting at windmills: the lawsuit fighting a myth

The Geofight is a legal campaign aiming to take on those trails in the sky. There’s just one little problem…

Geofight lawyers file suit against contrails. (Illustration based on original by Gustave Doré / Héliodore Pisan, public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

IN MIGUEL DE CERVANTES’ epic 17th-century novel Don Quixote, the hero of the title is a man obsessed with the idea of chivalry and adventure. Fuelled by old romance novels, he dreams up a mythical land populated by giants, imagines his old workhorse as a noble knight’s steed, and sets out on a quest with his pal Sancho Panza.

In the book’s most famous scene, Don Quixote spots a group of windmills and mistakes them for giants with outstretched arms. Despite Sancho Panza’s warnings, he charges at a mill and is knocked from his horse by the turning sails. The phrase “tilting at windmills” has entered the language to mean picking foolish battles against imaginary enemies. To be “quixotic” is to be idealistic but misguided.

Some 400 years later, we have a new quixotic hero — or rather, three of them. Tom Renz, Blake Horwitz and Nicole Pearson are three American lawyers who created a campaign called The Geofight, which aims to “Protect Our Skies”. The campaign website says:

“Governments, corporations, and academic institutions are actively pursuing weather modification, Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) and Solar Radiation Management (SRM) programs. Growing evidence confirms the disbursement of hazardous particulate matter into the atmosphere that contaminates the air we breathe, our soil, water, the food we eat and ultimately negatively impacts all forms of life.”

The problem? Like Quixote’s giants, these enemies don’t exist, or at least not in the way the combatants imagine. The Geofight is tilting at windmills — and, like Don Quixote failing to pay heed to Sancho Panza, its lawyers don’t want to be told that they are wrong.

What’s the Geofight about?

That’s a very good question. And it’s one that I am fairly sure the lead lawyers would be unable to answer clearly. According to its website, its aim is to “Stop Geoengineering & Weather Modification: Protect Our Skies”. In reality, it’s another chemtrail campaign based on the same, long-debunked claims that chemtrail proponents have been pushing for many years.

Renz, Horwitz and Pearson have all made bizarre claims about “trails in the sky” and a poisoning campaign by unspecified “bad actors”. Tellingly, when challenged on their false claims, they are extremely quick to block people on social media. (I have been blocked by all three of them.)

The Geofight claims:

The lead lawyers claim that harmful chemicals are being sprayed into the sky in the name of geoengineering and weather modification, and that the evidence can be seen in the form of aircraft trails in the sky and “contamination” on the ground.

The website asks people to take photographs of aircraft trails in the sky, and to collect air and soil samples. (One of the lawyers, Nicole Pearson, even asked people to send air samples to them by email!)

Please submit air samples by email

The reality:

The campaign conflates several different things. Essentially it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the contrails we see in the sky, and combines that with misinformation about geoengineering and weather modification.

Weather modification

Weather modification is a real technique. It’s essentially a synonym for cloud seeding, which was first developed in the 1940s and has been carried out quite openly for decades. Several US states currently have active cloud seeding projects. These involve releasing silver iodide particles in the form of smoke, either from flares on the wing of light aircraft, or from ground-based burners.

Cloud seeding flares on the wing of a light aircraft. Fair use for illustration, photograph © WMO

These particles target existing rain clouds, where they act as seeds for raindrops to grow. Cloud seeding cannot produce lingering trails or new clouds in the sky.

Geoengineering

Geoengineering is a proposed (and controversial) technique aimed at tackling climate change. It is also known as solar radiation management (SRM) or stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). The idea is to release particles high into the atmosphere where they would reflect a very small amount of incoming sunlight into space, thus reducing the amount of heat reaching the Earth.

The idea was first developed in the 1960s and over the years various methods and materials have been proposed. One of these involved using particles of aluminium oxide, but in recent years research has focused on the idea of using sulfates.

The concept of solar geoengineering is actually inspired by volcanic eruptions. Large eruptions, like that of Krakatoa or Mount Pinatubo, release huge amounts of sulfur dioxide high into the atmosphere, and have a prolonged cooling effect on the Earth. SRM/SAI proposals would try to mimic this by releasing sulfur dioxide high into the stratosphere, about 60,000–70,000 feet (18–21 km) above the ground. This is about twice as high as commercial aircraft fly. Sulfur dioxide is an invisible gas, and geoengineering could not produce visible trials or clouds. The stratosphere is extremely dry and does not support cloud formation.

A Make Sunsets balloon launch. The current state of the art in solar geoengineering. Fair use for illustration, photograph © Make Sunsets

To date, there has been no deployment or even testing of SAI/SRM involving aircraft. The only outdoor releases have been carried out using weather balloons. A private company, Make Sunsets, has been carrying out its own “SRM”, paid for by investors, since February 2023. So far (as of March 2026) it has released 240 kilograms of sulfur into the stratosphere. For comparison, in 2025 alone, coal-fired power plants in the US released 705,000,000 kg of sulfur, or about 22kg per second. In other words, in three years, the total sulfur released by “geoengineering” was as much as power stations emitted every 11 seconds.

“Cooling credits” delivered into the stratosphere each month by Make Sunsets since launch in February 2003 (source). One cooling credit equals one gram of sulfur dioxide (source)

Is it a scam?

The Geofight website, like many chemtrail websites, asks for donations. When the site was first set up, it stated that these donations would be channelled to For God Family Country (4GFC), a non-profit operated by Tom Renz. At some point during March, that changed and the donations are now earmarked for “Greater Chicago Affordable Legal Services, NFP, the fiscal sponsor of the GeoFight, a registered 501(c)(3), with EIN number 33–3468109, pursuing legal accountability for geoengineering and weather modification programs”. That does appear to be a legitimate organisation offering affordable legal representation.

However, the donation policy states:

“Donations do not guarantee that litigation will be filed or that any specific legal, research, or advocacy action will be taken. Fund allocation is determined by organizational leadership based on strategic priorities and available resources.”

In other words, there is no obligation for the lawyers to file a suit, and they can choose what to do with any money they receive.

Nicole Pearson, appearing on the America Out Loud show with Clayton Baker earlier this month, stated:

“We are going up against a multi-trillion dollar machine against demons, to be honest with you. It is an evil enterprise to poison innocent civilians, men, women, and children. So we are going to need millions of dollars to pursue this for however long it needs.”

There appears to be no public disclosure of how much money is being donated to this cause, and as noted above, there is no accountability for where it is spent. Are the Geofight lawyers just modern-day Don Quixotes, misguided but with good intentions, or is it simply a way to monetise fears over “chemtrails”?

Hanlon’s razor says we should “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”. There may not be malice here, although the speed which the lead lawyers attempt to shut down any discussion of their claims suggests to me that there is). But it is certainly true that there is a vast level of, if not stupidity, at least incompetence and wilful refusal to listen to reason.

Ignorance at every level

It’s clear that the whole concept of the Geofight stems from misunderstandings. In a “round table on geoengineering” in February, Tom Renz began by saying:

“It’s amazing to me, when we look up at the sky and we see trail after trail after trail, we see criss-crossing trails, we see zig-zagging trails, we see all these trails and you can watch these trails — you can watch these things spread into clouds and to form cloud cover — we’re seeing it all over yet there’s still people who just can’t believe this is happening. There’s still just discussion that these are natural contrails. For anyone that’s as old as me, you probably remember looking up at the sky as a kid, and we had contrails when I was a kid. But they lasted about 5 minutes and then they were gone. You could see them disappear behind the jet. They didn’t turn into clouds and they weren’t there all day.”

This is pretty much the standard chemtrail script: the idea that contrails used to disappear rapidly and not spread out into clouds. The reality, of course, is that contrails have always persisted for hours in humid air. Decades of weather books and articles describe and explain this behaviour.

A 1957 book explaining how contrails can spread into clouds. Source: Cloud Study: A Pictorial Guide by F.H. Ludlum and R.S. Scorer, via Metabunk

This false memory is the basis of the whole chemtrail idea: if these are not real contrails, what are they? And that is where they get the idea of geoengineering and weather modification, even though there is no way in which any of these things could produce lasting trails or clouds.

The extent to which Tom Renz misunderstands geoengineering was further illustrated in an X post on March 17 when he offered as “proof” a series of screenshots of companies and organisations involved in geotechnical engineering: in other words, the study and management of soil mechanics for civil engineering projects! Pointing out his mistake is what got me blocked.

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Nicole Pearson’s interview with Clayton Baker again talked about the creation of trails and clouds, as well as the bizarre idea that such clouds could be controlled using “electromagnetic frequencies”:

“That’s where you get this persistent cloud cover, this what I call wet diaper clouds over our heads every single day, blotting out the sun.And also these high particulate count clouds can be easily manipulated by these electromagnetic frequencies. It may sound science fiction-y, it is science, but it is not fiction, and it is highly toxic.”

Blake Horwitz also spoke to Clayton Baker the week after Pearson’s appearance and talked about trails being evidence:

“There are planes that are at 11,000 feet, 15,000 feet. And guess what? It is not cold enough for these planes to be emitting tremendous trails and contaminating our sky and blocking the sun.”

I have asked him to share the evidence of these planes at low altitudes. So far I have had no response, but I will update this article if he provides it.

Another thing that Horwitz talked about on Baker’s show is pollution from jet exhaust:

“The air around airports is profoundly contaminated. And what the articles that you have demonstrate is that particulate matter, small little particles, about one one thousandth of a meter, very small particles are emitted from the airplanes, and the result is that the there’s tremendous air pollution around airports, and that causes substantial disease, as you stated, including dementia. So the incidence of disease around airports is not a secret.”

This is interesting because the idea being shared by Renz and Pearson is that the trails are deliberate spraying, and nothing to do with jet exhaust. Horwitz, meanwhile, is focusing on pollution from jet exhaust, which is of course real but is also nothing to do with the claims of his fellow lawyers!

Between their disagreements and fundamental lack of understanding, I cannot see how the Geofight can ever succeed. They seem unable to answer the most basic questions:

1) What are you actually fighting?

2) What evidence do you have that it is happening?

3) Who are you taking action against?

On the evidence so far, I feel pretty sure that the windmills will claim three more victims (not to mention those who have given them their money).

I have approached the Geofight team for comment and will post any responses here.