Don't like the weather? Change it...Project Popeye...
Vngelis
The weird science of weather modification makes a comeback
Strange weather
Pop-up Strange weather
GLOBAL COOLING: To counteract global warming, John Latham of the
National Center for Atmospheric Research has proposed a system of
enormous eggbeater-like turbines that would stir up seawater,
thickening the cloud cover to reflect more of the sun's energy back
into space. (Photo / Stephen Salter)
By Drake Bennett | July 3, 2005
In the summer of 1930, George Ambrosius Immanuel Morrison Sykes, a
self-professed ''minister of Zoroastrianism" and flat-earther (his
calculations put the sun's distance from Earth at 3,300 miles), was
hired by the Westchester Racing Association to ensure good weather for
the horse races at Belmont Park. As described by historian Clark C.
Spence in ''The Rainmakers" (1980), the contract promised Sykes $1,000
for every dry day during a week in early September, but required him
to pay back twice that for every wet one.
For seven days Sykes's device--a jalopic pile of wire, antennae, jars
of colored water, old radio sets, a vase, an electric heater and a toy
propeller--was blessed by sun. But the following Saturday, after his
contract was extended, the rains came. And when Sykes, looking to
outwit fate, promised more rain two days later, the appointed day
instead passed dry.
At press time, the National Weather Service was predicting a sunny
July 4th in Boston, with temperatures in the low 80s. Still, it would
be nice to be sure, wouldn't it? Seventy-five years after Doc Sykes's
Belmost lucky streak ended in disgrace, the weather still resists our
best efforts at prediction, much less control.
Not that this has stopped us from trying. Recent years have seen a
growing interest not merely in forecasting, but in the seemingly
fanciful prospect of customizing the weather. In 2003 the National
Academy of Sciences recommended ''a coordinated national program" to
''conduct a sustained research effort" into weather modification.
Politicians in Western and Southwestern states are funding attempts to
tickle more moisture out of the clouds, and this March, Senator Kay
Bailey Hutchison of Texas introduced a bill to create a national
Weather Modification Operations and Research Board.
Last fall, a meteorologist named Ross Hoffman suggested in Scientific
American that a network of microwave-beaming satellites could
literally take the wind out of hurricanes. In some of the driest parts
of Mexico, a Bedford-based company called Ionogenics is testing a
rainmaking apparatus that uses an array of steel poles to ionize the
air. China, a country with widespread cloud seeding, has announced
plans to engineer clear weather in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.
Meanwhile, deepening concern over the possibly cataclysmic effects of
climate change has spurred a number of recent proposals, some sketched
out in considerable detail, to engineer a measure of counteractive
cooling. John Latham, an atmospheric physicist at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., has proposed increasing
the reflectivity of the cloud cover by stirring up water vapor from
the ocean with a fleet of giant egg-beater-like turbines. A few years
ago, a team led by the late Edward Teller suggested creating a similar
effect by launching a million tons of tiny aluminum balloons into the
atmosphere. The Teller team also revived a proposal, last explored in
the early 1990s, to build an adjustable 2,000-kilometer-wide mirror in
space to deflect some of the sun's energy before it reaches
us.Continued...
July 3, 2005
In the summer of 1930, George Ambrosius Immanuel Morrison Sykes, a
self-professed ''minister of Zoroastrianism" and flat-earther (his
calculations put the sun's distance from Earth at 3,300 miles), was
hired by the Westchester Racing Association to ensure good weather for
the horse races at Belmont Park. As described by historian Clark C.
Spence in ''The Rainmakers" (1980), the contract promised Sykes $1,000
for every dry day during a week in early September, but required him
to pay back twice that for every wet one.
For seven days Sykes's device--a jalopic pile of wire, antennae, jars
of colored water, old radio sets, a vase, an electric heater and a toy
propeller--was blessed by sun. But the following Saturday, after his
contract was extended, the rains came. And when Sykes, looking to
outwit fate, promised more rain two days later, the appointed day
instead passed dry.
At press time, the National Weather Service was predicting a sunny
July 4th in Boston, with temperatures in the low 80s. Still, it would
be nice to be sure, wouldn't it? Seventy-five years after Doc Sykes's
Belmost lucky streak ended in disgrace, the weather still resists our
best efforts at prediction, much less control.
Not that this has stopped us from trying. Recent years have seen a
growing interest not merely in forecasting, but in the seemingly
fanciful prospect of customizing the weather. In 2003 the National
Academy of Sciences recommended ''a coordinated national program" to
''conduct a sustained research effort" into weather modification.
Politicians in Western and Southwestern states are funding attempts to
tickle more moisture out of the clouds, and this March, Senator Kay
Bailey Hutchison of Texas introduced a bill to create a national
Weather Modification Operations and Research Board.
Last fall, a meteorologist named Ross Hoffman suggested in Scientific
American that a network of microwave-beaming satellites could
literally take the wind out of hurricanes. In some of the driest parts
of Mexico, a Bedford-based company called Ionogenics is testing a
rainmaking apparatus that uses an array of steel poles to ionize the
air. China, a country with widespread cloud seeding, has announced
plans to engineer clear weather in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.
Meanwhile, deepening concern over the possibly cataclysmic effects of
climate change has spurred a number of recent proposals, some sketched
out in considerable detail, to engineer a measure of counteractive
cooling. John Latham, an atmospheric physicist at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., has proposed increasing
the reflectivity of the cloud cover by stirring up water vapor from
the ocean with a fleet of giant egg-beater-like turbines. A few years
ago, a team led by the late Edward Teller suggested creating a similar
effect by launching a million tons of tiny aluminum balloons into the
atmosphere. The Teller team also revived a proposal, last explored in
the early 1990s, to build an adjustable 2,000-kilometer-wide mirror in
space to deflect some of the sun's energy before it reaches us.
Page 2 of 4 --
To be sure, within the meteorological establishment the enthusiasm for
weather modification is far from universal. And climate engineering--
the alteration of global, rather than local, weather systems--remains
purely theoretical. Still, after decades of disfavor, such ideas are
getting a second look. As our ability to comprehend the weather
improves and as the threat of climate change looms larger, some
scientists are ready to brave the uncertainty and tangled ethics of
tinkering with the skies.
In 1946, over Mount Greylock in western Massachusetts, a General
Electric research chemist named Vincent Schaefer scattered three
pounds of crushed dry ice out of an airplane into a cloud and set off
a snow flurry. It was the world's first successful cloud seeding--
later that year, the meteorologist Bernard Vonnegut (brother to the
novelist) discovered that silver iodide smoke had a similar effect--
and weather modification emerged from the realm of con men and
eccentrics. Most meteorologists remained skeptical, but by 1951, 10
percent of the United States was under commercial cloud seeding.
''Intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters on any desired
scale" was only decades away, predicted John von Neumann, the
mathematician who helped invent and began programming the first
electronic computers to model the weather.
Over the next 30 years, the federal government spent hundreds of
millions of dollars on projects all over the country to increase
precipitation, to mitigate hailstorms (an age-old enemy of farmers),
and, most successfully, to clear the fog from around airports. Perhaps
the era's most ambitious endeavor was Project Stormfury, which sent up
airplanes to seed the eye walls of hurricanes with silver iodide to
weaken the winds before landfall.
The US military, unsurprisingly, was intrigued by the possibility of a
godlike meteorological arsenal. According to Spencer Weart, a
physicist and historian of science at the American Institute of
Physics, the thinking in the Defense Department was ''maybe we'll give
the Russians a real Cold War, or maybe they'll give us one, so we
should be ready." Pentagon money funded much of the era's climate
research, helping to create the weather models we now use in
forecasting. War gamers dreamed up climatological warfare scenarios
like laying down a blanket of fog over an airfield or visiting drought
upon an enemy's breadbasket.
One plan even made it off the drawing board. From 1966 to 1972, under
the code name Project Popeye, the US Air Force flew thousands of cloud-
seeding sorties over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, hoping to muddy it into
impassability. (While there's some evidence that rain did increase,
it's unclear what difference this made on the ground.) When the
details of the plan surfaced in the press, the public outcry led to an
international treaty banning ''Military or any other hostile use of
environmental modification techniques
July 3, 2005
In the summer of 1930, George Ambrosius Immanuel Morrison Sykes, a
self-professed ''minister of Zoroastrianism" and flat-earther (his
calculations put the sun's distance from Earth at 3,300 miles), was
hired by the Westchester Racing Association to ensure good weather for
the horse races at Belmont Park. As described by historian Clark C.
Spence in ''The Rainmakers" (1980), the contract promised Sykes $1,000
for every dry day during a week in early September, but required him
to pay back twice that for every wet one.
For seven days Sykes's device--a jalopic pile of wire, antennae, jars
of colored water, old radio sets, a vase, an electric heater and a toy
propeller--was blessed by sun. But the following Saturday, after his
contract was extended, the rains came. And when Sykes, looking to
outwit fate, promised more rain two days later, the appointed day
instead passed dry.
At press time, the National Weather Service was predicting a sunny
July 4th in Boston, with temperatures in the low 80s. Still, it would
be nice to be sure, wouldn't it? Seventy-five years after Doc Sykes's
Belmost lucky streak ended in disgrace, the weather still resists our
best efforts at prediction, much less control.
Not that this has stopped us from trying. Recent years have seen a
growing interest not merely in forecasting, but in the seemingly
fanciful prospect of customizing the weather. In 2003 the National
Academy of Sciences recommended ''a coordinated national program" to
''conduct a sustained research effort" into weather modification.
Politicians in Western and Southwestern states are funding attempts to
tickle more moisture out of the clouds, and this March, Senator Kay
Bailey Hutchison of Texas introduced a bill to create a national
Weather Modification Operations and Research Board.
Last fall, a meteorologist named Ross Hoffman suggested in Scientific
American that a network of microwave-beaming satellites could
literally take the wind out of hurricanes. In some of the driest parts
of Mexico, a Bedford-based company called Ionogenics is testing a
rainmaking apparatus that uses an array of steel poles to ionize the
air. China, a country with widespread cloud seeding, has announced
plans to engineer clear weather in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.
Meanwhile, deepening concern over the possibly cataclysmic effects of
climate change has spurred a number of recent proposals, some sketched
out in considerable detail, to engineer a measure of counteractive
cooling. John Latham, an atmospheric physicist at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., has proposed increasing
the reflectivity of the cloud cover by stirring up water vapor from
the ocean with a fleet of giant egg-beater-like turbines. A few years
ago, a team led by the late Edward Teller suggested creating a similar
effect by launching a million tons of tiny aluminum balloons into the
atmosphere. The Teller team also revived a proposal, last explored in
the early 1990s, to build an adjustable 2,000-kilometer-wide mirror in
space to deflect some of the sun's energy before it reaches us.
To be sure, within the meteorological establishment the enthusiasm for
weather modification is far from universal. And climate engineering--
the alteration of global, rather than local, weather systems--remains
purely theoretical. Still, after decades of disfavor, such ideas are
getting a second look. As our ability to comprehend the weather
improves and as the threat of climate change looms larger, some
scientists are ready to brave the uncertainty and tangled ethics of
tinkering with the skies.
. . .
In 1946, over Mount Greylock in western Massachusetts, a General
Electric research chemist named Vincent Schaefer scattered three
pounds of crushed dry ice out of an airplane into a cloud and set off
a snow flurry. It was the world's first successful cloud seeding--
later that year, the meteorologist Bernard Vonnegut (brother to the
novelist) discovered that silver iodide smoke had a similar effect--
and weather modification emerged from the realm of con men and
eccentrics. Most meteorologists remained skeptical, but by 1951, 10
percent of the United States was under commercial cloud seeding.
''Intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters on any desired
scale" was only decades away, predicted John von Neumann, the
mathematician who helped invent and began programming the first
electronic computers to model the weather.
Over the next 30 years, the federal government spent hundreds of
millions of dollars on projects all over the country to increase
precipitation, to mitigate hailstorms (an age-old enemy of farmers),
and, most successfully, to clear the fog from around airports. Perhaps
the era's most ambitious endeavor was Project Stormfury, which sent up
airplanes to seed the eye walls of hurricanes with silver iodide to
weaken the winds before landfall.
The US military, unsurprisingly, was intrigued by the possibility of a
godlike meteorological arsenal. According to Spencer Weart, a
physicist and historian of science at the American Institute of
Physics, the thinking in the Defense Department was ''maybe we'll give
the Russians a real Cold War, or maybe they'll give us one, so we
should be ready." Pentagon money funded much of the era's climate
research, helping to create the weather models we now use in
forecasting. War gamers dreamed up climatological warfare scenarios
like laying down a blanket of fog over an airfield or visiting drought
upon an enemy's breadbasket.
One plan even made it off the drawing board. From 1966 to 1972, under
the code name Project Popeye, the US Air Force flew thousands of cloud-
seeding sorties over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, hoping to muddy it into
impassability. (While there's some evidence that rain did increase,
it's unclear what difference this made on the ground.) When the
details of the plan surfaced in the press, the public outcry led to an
international treaty banning ''Military or any other hostile use of
environmental modification techniques."
Page 3 of 4 --
But the grandest climate engineering schemes came from the Soviet
Union. The most Promethean among them was a late 1950s proposal to dam
the Bering Strait and, by pumping water from the Arctic Ocean into the
Pacific, draw warm water northward from the Atlantic to melt the polar
ice pack, making the Arctic Ocean navigable and warming Siberia. The
leading Soviet climatologist, Mikhail I. Budyko, cautioned against it,
arguing that the ultimate effects were too difficult to predict
(though he himself had played with the idea of warming the Arctic by
covering it in soot to decrease its reflectivity). John F. Kennedy, as
a presidential candidate, suggested the United States look into
collaborating on the project.
While the two countries continued desultory discussions of the Bering
Strait plan into the 1970s, the American government was by then losing
interest in the whole field of weather modification. After years of
increases, federal research money was cut sharply in 1973. Commercial
cloud seeding continued, and a few states maintained their own cloud
seeding programs, but over the next decade federal research funding
effectively dropped to zero.
The problem, in part, was that there was no consensus on the efficacy
of cloud seeding, the focus of almost all research up to that point.
Study after study had been inconclusive. ''The government had put a
lot of money into it and they hadn't been able to prove a damn thing,"
says Weart.
The change in the political climate, however, wasn't simply the result
of scientific failures. Chunglin Kwa, a historian of science at the
University of Amsterdam and one of the few scholars to study the
history of weather modification in depth, writes that, when it fell
out of public favor, the field had ''existed for most of its history
with little clear evidence that rainmaking and hurricane abatement
worked, but there was equally little clear evidence that it did not."
Many meteorologists, he notes, argued that research deserved further
funding.
What had changed, Kwa argues, were attitudes, especially American
ones, about technology, risk, and nature. ''There was the development
of an attitude to not mess with Mother Nature," he said in an
interview. With the growth of the environmental movement in the 1970s
and 1980s came a conviction that human beings were foolishly tempting
fate by trying to impose their will on nature, whether by damming up
rivers or tapping the clouds. Environmentalists enlisted mounting
signs of our unintentional weather modification--clear-cutting
forests, for example, decreases rainfall, while smokestacks increase
it--to argue that humanity was already disrupting the balance of
nature.
The threat, in other words, wasn't that weather modification would
fail but that it would work--a concern that still shapes the debate.
''There's a real sense that the climate system is complicated enough
that if you start messing around with it you're likely to get an
outcome you didn't expect," says Edward Boyle, a professor of ocean
geochemistry at MIT.
nada
The only seious weather mod program I saw that makes real sense is the
one floated,or should I say, 'sunk', by the US navy, developed FROM a
sci-fi book, that involes barge-based nuclear power plants. They sink
the plant and cause it to into a semi-meltdown mode. This warms a
section of the ocean, which is the only known way hurricanes pick up
energy. The run-away meltdown causes a super-storm and one that is
*stationary*. They actually pay people to come up with ways to do
this.
David
Vngelis
Critics point to our inability to understand even local cloud systems.
In 1972, a government cloud-seeding run in South Dakota was followed
by a violent deluge, and more than 200 people were killed in the
ensuing flood. Meteorologists disagreed over whether seeding was to
blame, but the incident became an ominous symbol for those who saw
weather modifiers as latter-day Pandoras.
Boyle's caution may be merited, but scientists are better equipped
today to understand and manipulate the weather than they were 30 years
ago. Roelof Bruintjes of the National Center for Atmospheric Research,
a leading cloud seeding researcher, says that new radar and sensor
technologies, better satellite imaging, and ever-increasing computer
power have greatly aided his work. Today, he says, ''We have new tools
to get the basic answers that we couldn't get in the '70s, '80s and
'90s."
Some scientists and engineers, such as Daniel Schrag, director of
Harvard's Laboratory for Geochemical Oceanography, point out that, in
light of the planet's growing thirst and rising temperature, even
Soviet-scale climate modification is attracting real consideration.
Boyle, who spoke at a joint MIT-Cambridge University conference on the
topic last year, readily concedes, ''There are very prominent, serious
scientists who are considering these things."
Such projects are inevitably presented as last-ditch protections
against an existential threat, but they nevertheless raise the issue
of what it would mean to take a more active role in shaping the
weather--not merely in the face of catastrophe but as a means of
lengthening the growing season, making rainfall more regular, or
blunting heat waves.
Pop-up GLOBE GRAPHIC: Strange weather
Message Board YOUR VIEW: Is it foolish and dangerous for humans to
tinker with the skies?
But controlling the weather, like controlling our genes, creates a
thicket of ethical thorns. For one thing, despite the international
ban, reliable weather modification could end up being weaponized. A
1996 Air Force report entitled ''Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning
the Weather in 2025," argued that ''the tremendous military
capabilities that could result from this field are ignored at our own
peril."
Even purely peaceful aims would lead to a cascade of seemingly zero-
sum conflicts. In the US, cloud seeding has set off several lawsuits
in which, for example, downwind farmers have accused a cloud-seeding
neighbor of ''stealing" their rain. Such issues only grow in
complexity along with the scale. Ideal weather for a farm isn't
necessarily ideal for a resort. (In 1950, the owner of an upstate
country club unsuccessfully sued New York City over its attempt to
alleviate a drought through cloud-seeding.) What once was, in
insurance parlance, an ''act of God" becomes something for which one
can assign blame.
For climate modification's more eager supporters, such worries are
premature. According to Joe Kaplinsky, a technology analyst in London,
''To raise these things before the technology has really gotten off
the ground is to deprive us of the potential benefits of any
technology, because any technology can be misused."
''Of course some people will benefit and some people will lose,"
Kaplinsky says, ''but there are social mechanisms for solving
disagreements, either through compensation or through democratic
debate." If a new technology provides a ''net gain," he says, ''the
losers can be compensated. And it's very clear that there's a
tremendous potential here for managing weather systems in a way that
would create tremendous net gain."
Some of the calculations, though, would verge on the Solomonic.
Suppose we could control hurricanes, posits Harvard's Schrag, ''but
stopping one requires an incredibly hot day in Africa that would burn
up all the crops. You've got one hell of a moral dilemma there."
''Let's say you have a mirror in space," he goes on. ''Think of two
summers ago when we were having this awful cold summer and Europe was
having this awful heat wave. Who gets to adjust the mirror?"
Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail
Vngelis
Theories about Russian agents steering Hurricane Katrina may be off
base, but research into weather manipulation has been going on for
decades
Pssst. Have you heard? Hurricane Katrina was intentionally steered to
hit New Orleans. The Russians -- a clique of KGB secret-police
hardliners who took over a secret weather-control weapon developed for
the old Soviet military -- did it. In fact, according to retired Army
Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Bearden, they've been dickering with U.S.
weather patterns since 1976.
Or maybe it was Japan's yakuza mobsters. In 1989, they supposedly
leased Russia's weather-control system. Did they make a financial
killing by shorting U.S. oil stocks, then shepherding Katrina to swamp
offshore oil rigs and onshore refineries?
There's no shortage of such conspiracy theories on the Internet.
Search for "weather warfare" on Google, and you'll get 68,000 hits. Or
take a gander at www.freedomdomain.com/weather.html and
www.gaiaguys.net/bearden.weathwars.htm.
POPEYE'S PROGRESS. To almost all scientists and weather
professionals, this sort of rationalization is ludicrous. But there's
no denying that technology capable of controlling the weather would be
a potent military and political weapon. One of the pillars of U.S.
science, mathematician and computer wizard John von Neumann, started
working on weather modification right after World War II. In the late
1940s, he convinced the Defense Dept. to invest in research that he
hoped could be used to vanquish Communism by causing droughts and
devastating crops in the Soviet Union.
Apparent early successes with cloud-seeding tactics that induced rain
spurred the Pentagon to fund modest efforts for some 20 years, and it
unleashed a concerted five-year assault during the Vietnam War,
starting in 1967. Dubbed Project Popeye, its goal was to prolong the
monsoon season and thus impede the movement of enemy troops and
supplies on muddy jungle trails.
By 1977, the military was spending $2.8 million a year on weather-
modification research. That year, partly in reaction to Popeye, the
United Nations passed a resolution banning the hostile use of all
environmental modification techniques. This led to a treaty that the
U.S. ratified in 1978. Although the treaty doesn't ban peaceful
applications, or so-called benign weather modification, the Pentagon
elected to eliminate all such research in 1979. The Kremlin continued
its weather-modification work, however.
BOMBARDED BY SUN SPOTS. In 1996, amid signs of significant progress
in Russian research, a group of seven Air Force and Army officers
suggested that, in their personal opinions, the Defense Dept. should
revive its efforts. In 30 years, they explained, weather-related and
computer technologies might advance to the point where "weather
modification can provide battle-space dominance to a degree never
before imagined." The group's treatise was titled, "Weather as a Force
Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025."
What alarmed the brass-hat seven were Russia's experiments at creating
layers of artificial ionization in the upper atmosphere. Such natural
layers act as mirrors for radio signals and enable long-range, over-
the-horizon radar and radio transmissions.
But as ham radio operators know well, nature's ionospheric mirrors are
fickle. They fluctuate, due mainly to solar flares and sun spots that
bombard Earth's atmosphere with high-energy x-rays (photons),
electrons, and other ionizing particles. Severe solar storms can
disrupt all radio signals, even satellite communications. They also
affect the weather.
If Russian researchers had found a way to match the power of the sun's
ionizing radiation, they could knock out satellite communications at
will -- blinding the spy satellites on which the U.S. military relies
so heavily. With microwave-energy beams of sufficient power, it might
even be possible to fry the electronic circuits in orbiting "birds"
and permanently knock out the entire U.S. satellite fleet.
HAARP: WEATHER TUNING? That's not all. Theoretically, such a weapon
could also create a layer in the ionosphere, which stretches upward
from 50 miles (80 kilometers), that would serve as a missile shield
over Russia. Ballistic missiles plunging down through this manmade
layer of ionizing energy could be zapped and rendered harmless.
In fact, a decade before the "Owning the Weather" report was written,
that sort of missile shield had been outlined by U.S. researcher
Bernard "Ben" Eastlund, president of Eastlund Scientific Enterprises
in San Diego. What spooked civilian conspiracy campers was that the
Pentagon in 1995 began operating what appeared to be a prototype of
Eastlund's missile-shield system.
Innocuously called the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program,
or HAARP, it had nowhere near the power that a missile shield would
need. But the weather-conspiracy worriers fretted that HAARP was being
used, or would be, to test potentially hostile weather-modification
schemes.
RADICAL CONCEPT. HAARP harkens back to the early 1980s, when Eastlund
was retained as a consultant by Atlantic Richfield Corp. (Arco). His
task, he recalls, was "to find some way of using the huge deposit of
natural gas they had discovered on the North Slope of Alaska." Arco
had initially considered a pipeline, like the Trans-Alaska Pipeline,
but rejected that as too costly.
What Eastlund concocted was a radical concept: An enormous field of
special antennas, covering 1,600 square miles, that could beam energy
produced from the natural gas into the sky. The beams would create
mirrors that would then bounce microwave energy back down to receiving
antennas in the lower 48 states or someplace else, where the energy
would be converted into electricity.
Eastlund reckoned that the energy could also be reflected down on top
of a thundercloud that was spawning a tornado. Twisters are formed by
warm air rising through a layer of cool air, creating a downdraft.
Computer simulations showed that injecting heat would stop the
downdraft, halting the formation of a tornado -- even swatting one
that was already whirling.
STAR WARS' HEYDAY. Both of those notions came to naught, however.
"Everybody lost interest because the power requirements were too
much," says Eastlund -- up to a million megawatts. But he continues to
refine his idea. He claims to have worked out a way to drop the power
required by a factor of 1,600, and still be able to untwist tornadoes.
He's also doing research on new technology for manipulating winds to
steer hurricanes.
Eastlund's approach is similar to the one envisioned by Ross Hoffman,
vice-president for research at weather-consulting firm Atmospheric &
Environmental Research in Lexington, Mass. (see BW, 10/24/05, "Herding
Hurricanes"). But instead of beaming down heat from solar-power
satellites, Eastlund thinks maybe an ionospheric mirror or rejiggering
the jet stream could turn the trick.
While Arco was twiddling its thumbs, physicist Eastlund briefed the
Pentagon on how his energy reflector could function as a missile
disrupter -- just the sort of missile shield depicted in "Owning the
Weather." His proposal was welcomed warmly. After all, it was the
mid-1980s, the heyday of President Ronald Reagan's Star Wars
initiative.
PERSISTENT ELF. In addition, Eastlund told the Defense brass that his
field of antennas could solve a long-standing problem for the U.S.
Navy: How to communicate with submarines while they're submerged for
months on end. The antennas would bounce energy off the ionosphere as
extremely low-frequency (ELF) radio waves. Unlike the radio
frequencies normally used for communications, which are quickly
absorbed or distorted in water, ELF signals can pierce the oceans for
great distances.
Generating ELF signals is HAARP's main mission. Located about 320
miles east of Anchorage, near Gakona, Alaska, HAARP had 18 antennas
and 360 kilowatts of transmitter power in 1995. Today, HAARP can strum
48 antennas and 960 kW of power -- and it may ultimately expand to 180
antennas and 3.6 megawatts of power. Even that is way short of the
thousands of antennas and hundreds of megawatts of power that Eastlund
figures would be needed for a missile shield or tornado buster.
But don't bother telling that to conspiracy addicts. They remain
convinced that HAARP is really bent on mucking with the weather. And
around 2020, maybe the Pentagon will start building a really, really
big antenna field.
Vngelis
So Project Popeye wasn't put into operation by the Pentagon in
Vietnam?
200 didn't die in a flash flood in South Dakota according to the
Boston Globe
There was no 1995 US air force report about weaponizing the weather?
Roelof says they have new tools to get the basic answers that we
couldn't get back in the 70-90's?
O assume Einde must be correct as after all weather modification
programmes and the science backing it is stuck in the era of the
Vietnam war?
TO date NONE of you have produced one IOTA of EVIDENCE to counterract
these public statements by US government officials in the imperialist
media.
Not that evidence was ever your strong point. But when you bring in
sci-fi, queers, psychosis as a way to avoid the issues then its clear
you have a hidden agenda, in justifying environmental intervention...
ie imperialist barbarism via the back door. First they blow up your
country then they want to come in to take over the spoils under guise
of ...feeding the poor and the hungry, the ultimate 'guilt trip' of
every globalist.
nada
The only 'evidence' you bring in is the very common-knowledge fact
that the US (and every country) has been interested in weather-mod for
decades. You haven't produced one IOTA (is "iota" in English the same
as it in Greek?) of evidence that proves: 1. The US (or any country in
the world) has a way of manipulating the weather beyond silver-iodine
seeding and 2. that the US (or any other country) has ever done it.
None. Just conjecture. In otherwords sicence fiction.
stephen
such as the nature of conspirativism, are pushed under the table, by
those lacking the courage to address fundamentals (and perhaps the
brains).
srd
Einde O'Callaghan
> Don't like the weather? Change it
> The weird science of weather modification makes a comeback
If you read the whole article through to teh end you'll see that even
though some scientists would like to be abloe to control teh weather and
make efforts to do so weatehr systems are so complex that even if some
aspects of weather control were feasible, i.e. certain effects could be
produced at will, the overall results would be totally unpredictable.
Do you actually read the stuff you post here or do you simply look at
the headline?
Einde O'Callaghan
Einde O'Callaghan
<snip>
>
> O assume Einde must be correct as after all weather modification
> programmes and the science backing it is stuck in the era of the
> Vietnam war?
>
I have not said that. What I've argued is that the leap from the
relatively low tech efforts with cloud seeding in the 60s and 70s
(incidentaloly this is the technology the Chinese want to use to prevent
rain in Beijing during the Olympics) to the type of technology required
to to create let alone steer a tropical storm is way too large.
If they had the technology to create such huge quantities of energy
there would be no problems concerning peak oil as the petroleum economy
would be technologically obsolete.
Einde O'Callaghan
Vngelis
Photographic evidence of weird weather formations prior to the
earthquake and strange animal behaviour...
vngelis
nada
The Chinese have noted wierd animal per-quake behavoir for a hundred
years. This is why they are the best predictors of earthquakes in the
world (one of the reasons). If you do a google search for china
earthquake prediction you'll come up with links for this. Absolutely
nothing new here. Care to try again?
David
Vngelis
You must have missed the weather formations or are you somewhat
dyslexic you only read what you want to?
The pictures of the skies and the video?
All normal run of the mill events or do they occur just prior to
earthquakes?
Care to try again?
vngelis
nada
> On May 19, 1:34 pm, nada <dwalters...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On May 19, 3:24 am, Vngelis <meberr...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > >http://pinewooddesign.co.uk/2008/05/12/earthquake-cloud-prediction/
>
> > > Photographic evidence of weird weather formations prior to the
> > > earthquake and strange animal behaviour...
>
> > > vngelis
>
> > The Chinese have noted wierd animal per-quake behavoir for a hundred
> > years. This is why they are the best predictors of earthquakes in the
> > world (one of the reasons). If you do a google search for china
> > earthquake prediction you'll come up with links for this. Absolutely
> > nothing new here. Care to try again?
>
> > David
>
> You must have missed the weather formations or are you somewhat
> dyslexic you only read what you want to?
Nice weather formations. See hight linear stratus clouds a few times a
year (without earth quakes).
> The pictures of the skies and the video?
Yes...unusual but not unique. The Chinese themselves find nothing odd
about it except that it forewarns of earth quakes.
> All normal run of the mill events or do they occur just prior to
> earthquakes?
You need to get checked out. I guess you know more about this than the
Chinese themselves who excel in earthquake prediction.
Vngelis
Well its funny you should say that as they have started to find these
funny weather patters since 1990 and have noted them to the Iranians
and the earthquakes they have had.
But prey you seem to know something yet you keep Project 2025 silent?
Now why would that be?
Your handlers dont like all the information to be revealed at once?
vngelis