HAARP

One such Lunatic Fringe theory -- only they ususally talk of such things as fact -- is that the US and Russia and maybe several other countries already have technology capapble of affecting the weather.

Once again, this is a subject near and dear to my heart.

People have no idea how big the atmosphere is. People have no idea what the scale of energy involved in a single summer afternoon with a light breeze in a city park would be. But people are afraid of what they don't know, and sometimes the thirst to "know" (so they can fear it less) is so great that they can be fed any logical sounding explanation. With no frame of reference to fit it into, the story stands alone and can't be rationally questioned by the listener. It "becomes" fact to that person.

The latest lunacy out is that --- Hurricane Katrina was "caused" by this technology. Some say it was the Russians. Some say it was some Japanese gang that leases "the device" from the Japanese Government for $1 billion a year (gangs come up with that kind of money annually all the time, right? Plus, as everyone knows it's always in a government's best interest to lease out extremely powerful and destructive equipment to unpredictible anti-social parties on its own soil). Some say that Bush caused it to help his oil buddies. Others say that "they used theirs, but then we used ours to try to steer it away from New Orleans".

These people are pur-a-dee nuts.

They have no clue. 1 single afternoon thunderstorm takes approximately the energy produced in a 1 megaton atom bomb. The energy released in a hurricane is about that much per second. Where in the hell do they think we can come up with enough energy to alter, let alone create something like that?

The device they point to is HAARP. Well, HAARP exists, for sure. People don't understand what it is or its purpose, so it becomes a perfect candidate for a conspiracy theorist detail. People don't know. They want to know. I will tell them. They will feel enlightened. And I will weave it into my story of international intrigue and deciet.

HAARP, since the department of the Navy is involved (fact), is a secret weapon (speculation). It emits energy and manipulates particles in the atmosphere (fact) and therefore it is meant to control the atmosphere (speculation) and since the weather is "what happens in the atmosphere" (fact), its purpose is to control the weather (speculation). Therefore, the US has or is developing a weapon to control the weather (wild-ass, off-the-charts speculation).

What is the scale of the energy we're talking about here? First, for those of you who didn't go read what HAARP is, it's basically a big radio transmitter antenna array made up of 180 antennas. This, in effect, makes one, big honkin' transmitter. When it's done, it will be able to transmit 3 microwatts (millionths of a watt) per cm². Tens of thousands of times less than the average we get from the sun at any given moment, and hundreds of times less than the random fluctuations in what we get from the sun at any given moment. In atmospheric science classes, we call that "negligible". On top of that, the stuff that will be negligibly altered over a very small portion of the earth's ionosphere's surface, doesn't affect the weather anyway.

Transmitted energy in the frequency ranges that will be used by HAARP is subject to negligible absorption in either the troposphere or the stratosphere - the two levels of the atmosphere that produce the earth's weather. Electromagnetic interactions only occur in the near-vacuum of the rarefied region above about 70 km known as the ionosphere.

The ionosphere is created and continuously replenished as the sun's radiation interacts with the highest levels of the Earth's atmosphere. The downward coupling from the ionosphere to the stratosphere/troposphere is extremely weak, and no association between natural ionospheric variability and surface weather and climate has been found, even at the extraordinarily high levels of ionospheric turbulence that the sun can produce during a geomagnetic storm. If the ionospheric storms caused by the sun itself don't affect the surface weather, there is no chance that HAARP can do so either.

--- HAARP Website

The antenna array covers 33 acres. Even if all the transmitted power from the IRI was absorbed by the ionosphere it would take more than 33,000 HAARP-scale IRIs, transmitting simultaneously to account for just 1 percent of the auroral ionosphere's energy budget. If anyone can build and power a mobile device 33,000 times the size of this device and manage to keep it hidden from the world -- they would have a really weak instrument that would still be incapable of intentionally altering the weather in any perceptible way.

Katrina wasn't caused or altered by HAARP, folks. It was a big hurricane. They've happened for millions of years, and they will continue to happen for millions more.