As far as I've read, there were some unscientific testing using jet exhaust to seed high clouds for rain. But basically, they are exhaust from all manner of planes consisting of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and some oxides of nitrogen and world wide 20 years ago they were already estimated at 3% of pollution.
the only real issue so far is the number of planes has grown enormously and the exhaust creates artificial cirrus clouds as the trail spreads and is factually effecting cloud cover statistics used by nasa and noaa amongst others for weather forecasting. Chemtrails is a conspiracy name for the exhaust.