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Reply 1:
Hi Ed,
* There's just no convincing some folks when they have their minds made up about stuff they don't understand in the first place. However, we'll do what we can.
* There is absolutely no way the HAARP experiments can control weather, or earthquakes, or even peoples' minds, as has also been alleged. Still, even the wildest notions may be derived from some small grain of truth... "grabbing the wrong end of the stick and beating about the bush with it," as it was once expressed in a Monty Python sketch. The grain of truth that's being distorted out of shape in this case, ironically, is that HAARP very likely does have some effect on the weather.
* According to recent mathematical understandings of chaos theory, applied to the field of meteorology, almost any activity that alters temperature or wind flow anywhere on earth will have effects later. (This is the "butterfly effect," named for the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo may affect the amount of rainfall in New York five to seven days later. The essence of the principle is that the weather is so sensitive to microvariables that detailed long-range forecasts are inherently impossible.)
* The very intent of HAARP is to cause plasma heating, so it could have some small effect on weather. The key point, though: there's no way to predict what the effects will be; hence, it's not a way to control the weather. Now, some would argue that's why the experiments are being done...to find out what results could be had. But this doesn't really make sense, because the effect is too small to discern reliably. HAARP involves multi-megawatts of pulsed energy, but that's nothing compared to the gigawatts of charged particles and radiation continuously pouring in from the sun.
* Any medium-to-long term measurable effects of HAARP are swamped by daily fluctuations of solar energy in the ionosphere. The antenna farm at the HAARP site may be a rather large "butterfly," but compared to the energies it's competing with at the edge of space, its effects on weather would be just as hard to define as the butterfly in Tokyo. There will probably be some effect, in other words, but there's no way to tell what it is.
* Let's say you have a huge quantity of TV sets, VCRs, and stereos at home, and an equally huge bunch of very young children who perpetually play with all the different remote controls. As a result, appliances throughout the house are turning on and off, switching channels, and changing volume every few seconds. You're sitting in your chair with an unfamiliar remote control that has no labels on its buttons, trying to tune the TV set in front of you to a particular channel. You try every promising looking button on the control, and every once in a while, something happens with the TV--but you don't know if you did it, or if the kids did it, and you're not entirely sure which button it was in case you want to reproduce the result. That's kind of a bizarre analogy, but it's very similar to the notion of using HAARP to "control" the weather. There are way too many variables, all larger than what humans can bring to bear.
* As for earthquakes, there have been observations suggesting electric fields from fault lines can affect the upper atmosphere; but so far, there has been no apparent indication of a reverse causality.
* Factual information on HAARP is available right from the horse's mouth (or the Navy's, actually) at the HAARP home page. Either of these URLs should take you there:
www.lwca.org
potrzebie