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Category: Technology
THE POLITICS OF WEATHER: LOCAL AND GLOBAL
`Owning’ the weather??PART IX
By Rahnuma Ahmed
Does something lie behind the global warming agenda, behind the UN Summit at Copenhagen where world leaders had met to agree on how to tackle global climate change? Has weather warfare, as Michel Chossudovsky, director, Global Research (Canada), asks us, already started?
Some observers think, climate wars, caused by uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions, are the future. That the world will be ravaged by wars over land, food and water, forcing countries to use the military to barricade borders.
This scenario?climate wars caused by global warming?is distinct from the weather warfare one, which is related to planned projections of `owning’ the weather, of developing technologies which `weaponise’ the weather (`Weather as a Force Multiplier. Owning the Weather in 2025,’ US Air Force commissioned study, 1996). This is real, admittedly so, by top-ranking US policy makers. By Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US National Security Advisor, “techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm” (1970). By William Cohen, former US secretary of defence, “alter[ing] the climate, set[ting] off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electro-magnetic waves…It’s real” (1997). By US Admiral Pier Saint-Armand, “We regard the weather as a weapon” (US Senate, 1972).
A reality further attested to by the ratification of an international Convention by the UN General Assembly, the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (Geneva: 18 May 1977), one to which both the US and Soviet Union were signatories.
I find it interesting that both global warming and ENMOD are assumed to lead to similar environmental disasters?droughts, storms, hurricanes, earthquakes?and thereby, to untold human suffering, but that global summits and international meetings express an orchestrated alarm over only set of anthropogenic activities, i.e., CO2 emissions. No mention of warfare. Of depleted uranium. Or CO2 emissions caused by warfare in Iraq. The Pentagon’s daily fuel consumption. Or, for that matter, HAARP.
Many scientists and climatologists have repeatedly pointed out that climate change is a misnomer because climates do change. Should change. That change, for God’s sake, is natural. Climate science, they say, is in its infancy. We know very little. In such a situation, to commit the whole planet to policies that are extensive and far-reaching?and in reality, are based on shaky scientific findings, the result of computer modelling, simulation exercises, anecdotal evidence, and worse still, what we now know post-CRU, that the data was forced to fit a pre-determined theory, that the raw data of temperature records was not stored but (horror of horrors) deleted?is downright stupid.
And close on the heels of Climategate were a series of other `gates,’ Glaciergate, Amazongate, Pachaurigate. Okay, we should have learnt our lesson, no rush. Calm down. Go slow.
But, as Andrew Orlowski points out, Climategate raises far more questions than it answers. How did such a small group of scientists, backing a new theory, in an infant field, come to have such a huge effect on global policy making? Why is the climate debate beset with “a sense of crisis and urgency, and the ascendancy of a quite specific and narrow set of policy options”? Why has it become the “Rosetta stone” of a whole political and business movement? Does the answer lie (only) in the billions to be made from carbon trading, predicted to become the world’s largest commodity market 5 years from now, worth $10 trillion?
There was another leak at Copenhagen in December 2009, the Danish text leak. Taken together with the CRU e-mail, close watchers are more convinced than ever that these are the acts of whistle-blowers, of dissident insiders. An idea difficult to stomach for those who think that dissidence belongs to the Cold War era. To people yearning to be free of the Iron Curtain. To flock to the `free world.’
Developing countries reacted furiously to the leaked draft agreement. It proposed to hand more power to rich nations. To sideline the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations. To abandon the Kyoto protocol, the only legally binding treaty on emissions reductions. It “force[d] developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement.” It proposed a green fund, to be run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (a partnership of 10 agencies including the WB and the UN Environmental Programme). It sought to put “constraints on developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks.”? According to a diplomat, “being done in secret” it is effectively “the end of the UN process” (Guardian, December 8, 2010).
Pray, to be replaced by what? The UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon spoke of a global governance structure. ?The new EU president Herman van Rompuy said, it was another step towards the global management of our planet. Global governance and global agreements, said Al Gore. at 1:14 mts
Billed by the UN as possibly the most important meeting in the history of the world, the leaks, says Alex Jones (an American talk radio host and filmmaker, violently anti-communist he describes himself as an “aggressive constitutionalist”) discredited the globalists. It exposed the conspiracy of the international elite, a group of industrialists and bankers, to secretly institute a regime of global authority and global rule by an unelected bureaucracy. To scare the “world population into relinquishing their rights and turning it over to an IMF-World Bank elected government that taxes the West, then takes that money, and turns it back to third world and first world nations and then makes those nations agree to a list of demands to destroy their industrial capacity which will result in a death sentence.” To institute a system of climate colonialism. To conceal the fact that while the World Bank chief revels in biofuels having boosted food prices, ethanol production in the US took a third of grain production out, causing an additional 10 million people to starve to death in 2008. The Copenhagen summit, says Jones, was undoubtedly a massive failure. The conspiracy to coopt national sovereignty and elected governments, to force the people of the world to live under structures like the European Union which has forced Europeans to lose their sovereignty to “unelected bureaucrats in Brussels” was successfully resisted. But these elites will try again, this year. In Mexico. The fight against the usurpation of civil liberties and sovereignty, says Jones, must go on.
Has weather warfare really started? Some HAARP-watchers think that the earthquake in Sichuan province in China, which killed 68,000 people, was not natural. They cite the observance of luminous, glowing cloud-like phenomena in the sky 30 minutes before the earthquake took place on May 12, 2008 (recorded by cellphone in Gansu province 450 km northeast of epicenter). According to Epoch Times, several weeks after the quake, high-level Chinese military sources secretly disclosed that it had destroyed the Chinese army’s largest armory, new weapons test bases, and part of nuclear facilities including several nuclear warheads. Initial calls for help were reportedly ignored by the Chinese authorities for the first 72 hours because they did not want “potential spies from the outside world” snooping around. The presence of concrete debris, including concrete slabs and blocks, reported by witnesses, have led some experts to think that a nuclear explosion had occurred near the epicenter, that the concrete belonged to the concrete cover of underground military bases. News of nuclear explosion has raised questions about cause-and-effect: whether a nuclear explosion caused the earthquake or the earthquake caused the explosion. A nuclear accident was also said to have occurred, 2,700 chemical workers were sent to parts of the earthquake-hit area to help cleanup.
Picture showing how the mountain area in the earthquake region [May 12, 2008 Sichuan province looks like after a big explosion. Local villagers said the explosion was so huge that the big mountain seemed to be cut in the middle. (Photo provided by mainland Chinese Internet Users) “
On May 23, 2008, a chemical defense troop of the Chinese army was deployed to Chenjiaba Township, Beichuan County. (The Epoch Times)
Benjamin Fulford, a Japan-based journalist, claimed in early 2007 that while interviewing Heizo Takenaka, a former finance minister in Japan, he confronted Takenaka, and accused him of “having sold the Japanese financial system over to the Rockefellers and Rothschilds.” According to Fulford, Takenaka’s response had been that a group representing ?American and European oligarchs? had used the threat of manmade earthquakes in an attempt to pressure the Japanese government to ?hand over control of the Japanese financial system.? Japan had intially refused, only to relent after the July 17, 2007 Niigata earthquakes. I have not come across any refutation or rejoinder of Fulford’s claims/allegations by any Japanese government spokesperson. Fulford further says, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake had coincided with the BRIC meeting [Brazil-Russia-India-China]. Two days before it took place, a Taiwanese satellite had reportedly “detected a 50% drop in the amount of electric energy in the ionosphere above the earthquake zone.?
Working on the Weather series, and writing it has not been easy. Least of all, because as I explained to Anu Mohammed, who had called to tell me that he was eagerly reading each instalment, But Anu, I am not into weather and climate and such stuff. I’d only thought of writing about the earthquake in Haiti. But what I don’t understand is what on earth are our climate activists doing? The people on whom we rely to inform and educate us, to tell us what the score is, so that we can create well-informed demands in our struggle for social justice. I will skip what Anu replied. Shireen Huq, another friend said, I’m sure our climate activists have contacted you… No Shireen, I replied, no one has. I don’t expect anyone to, either.
I think they are too busy regurgitating what’s said at international conferences and seminars. But I want to be proven wrong. There’s too much at stake.
Published in New Age 29 March 2009
THE POLITICS OF GLOBAL WARMING
`Owning’ the weather? PART VIII
By Rahnuma Ahmed
Ten years from now, no, five years from now, you’ll feel ashamed for having written this. Definitely. He hung up.
This was last Monday, the day `Global Warming, Or The Greatest Scientific Fraud’ was published (New Age, 15 March 2010).
It had been an early morning call. Speak to my son, said my friend. Oh, so he’s in Dhaka now, I thought, since I know he lives and works in the US. Do you know what you’ve written? Do you know that 90% scientists agree on global warming? Do you know that you’re writing absolutely reactionary stuff, that you’re speaking in the interests of the oil industry, in the interests of the powers-that-be?
Hey, hold on, what about the suppression of data? What about the lies, the fraudulent methods employed by global warming scientists?
I’m more concerned about your journalistic methods, sensationalising… I’m shocked. You should look at the bigger picture. There’s no need to blow these e-mails out of proportion.
I invited him to write a rebuttal. He refused. I was being condescending, he said.
I’d thought of concluding the weather series today, but I’ve changed my mind.
First, a quick look at some of the headlines of the last few months, to recap how Climategate has been unfolding:
– ClimateGate: Phil Jones, UK climate scientist, temporarily steps down, The Huffington Post,?1 December 2009–
‘Climategate’ professor Phil Jones awarded ?13 million in research grants, Global Research,?5 December 2009
– Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after ‘Danish text’ leak, The Guardian, 8 December 2009
– IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri to face independent inquiry, The Telegraph, 26 February 2010
– Climategate scientist questioned in Parliament, New Scientist, 2 March 2010
– UK government rebuked on climate change ads, Miami Herald, 15 March 2010
That the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory (AGW, caused by humans) was based on, if nothing else, bad science, is pretty clear. A matter of concern, if not, downright alarm, for scientific associations. The Institute of Physics (IP, 36,000 physicists) in its response to a House of Commons inquiry has said, the Climate Research Unit’s (CRU) leaked e-mails, if not forged, “provide prima facie evidence” of refusing to comply with honourable scientific traditions and the freedom of information law.?The Royal Society of Chemistry (46,000 members) says, a “lack of willingness” to make scientific data available implies that the results are not sufficiently “robust.” The IP had added, a “wider inquiry” is needed. Hadn’t other scientists, at other leading institutions helped CRU formulate IPCC’s conclusions on climate change? If so, the “circle of complicity” was bigger.
Okay, admittedly, AGW science is a bit dodgy. But if it’s a good cause, a progressive cause, does it’s being a bad science really matter? And, it does have millions of supporters. Ranging from environment-conscious people at the grassroots level to influential proponents?both individuals and institutions. Al Gore, David Rockefeller, George Soros, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Greenpeace, the New York Times, Washington Post, Times, Guardian, BBC, ABC (in Australia), Nature, Scientific American. Many many others. Even if it’s scientific basis is a bit unsound, surely, we should still support the movement? In the interests of saving our planet?
But rushing headlong into the issue in such a manner, pre-empts the possibility of raising critical questions. Of asking whether the AGW cause (or, climate change, as it later became known) best represents, in the sense of problematising, formulating, tabling?the environmental issue. I don’t think so, unlike my caller. And that, precisely, is where the problem lies.
As the extent of AGW scare-mongering becomes increasingly clear?the polar bear population has increased nearly-four times more instead of decreasing (22,000), the Himalayan glaciers are not melting, etc.,?questions centring around inequality and social justice, return centre-stage. Ever stronger.
For developing countries, to agree to carbon reduction means basically agreeing to remain poor. An examination of world energy statistics reveals that the combined energy consumption of 5 of the 6 most populous countries (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan) equals that of the 6th (US). In a situation characterised by stark wealth inequalities, would it be wise, asks Robert Bryce, for any of the Big Five leaders to agree to CO2 reduction? As Rajendra Prachauri, the now-disgraced IPCC chief had pointed out, 400 million Indians (40%) do not have a light bulb in their homes. “You cannot, in a democracy, ignore some of these realities.”
And neither can it be ignored that western leaders have recently dreamt up hoaxes to create a climate of fear, to scare their (complicit?) citizenry into consenting to military invasion, to the occupation of resource-rich developing countries. George Bush: Saddam Hussein had links with al-Qaeda. Tony Blair: Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Ring a bell? And no, it’s not over yet. Obama: Enriching uraniums. Iran. (According to a Haaretz news report, America is transporting 387 bunker-buster bombs to its Diego Garcia air base, for possible Iran strike, 18 March 2010). Progressive politics? Who, what, where? Did I miss something?
There are other aspects, too. Will international treaties?Kyoto Protocol, and the new one to replace it in 2012?reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions? Help save the planet? Unlikely. The leaders of the rich world, write Johann Hari, are enacting a giant fraud (Independent, 11 December 2009). A rich country can “cut” its emissions while not actually reducing them. How? By paying a poor country to emit less. Well, since it’s the same atmosphere, that’s okay, isn’t it? Actually, no. A system which can sell emission cuts among countries becomes extremely complex, writes Hari. Very soon, and deliberately, it “becomes so technical that nobody can follow it?no concerned citizen, no journalist, and barely even full-time environmental groups.” Tricks abound. For instance: by storing carbon, forests mitigate global warming, right? But Canadian, Swedish and Finnish logging companies have pressurised their governments to agree to inserting the clause that “sustainable forest management” i.e., cutting down almost all trees?doesn’t lead to losing credit. The cap-and-trade system, says Hari, laced with Enron-style accounting tricks is Kafkaesque. No real cuts. Only tamasha cuts.
If Bart Chilton (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) is right, five years from now the carbon trading market will become the world’s largest commodity market, worth $2 trillion. Richard L. Sandor, chairman and chief executive officer of Climate Exchange Plc thinks it’ll be larger, $10 trillion. Bigger than oil. As billionaire hedge fund operator Soros puts it, carbon markets present “financial opportunities.” Al Gore is known as a carbon billionaire. Barack Obama’s name has popped up, too: as the board member of a Chicago-based charity, Obama had agreed to a proposal aimed at devising a carbon dioxide emissions trading market. This led to the setting-up of Climate Exchange, headed by Sandor, “one of the most successful investors trying to profit from rising environmental awareness” (Wall Street Journal). The initial idea behind granting Sandor the award in 2000 was to have “a carbon trading system ready to implement” with the signing of the Kyoto Protocol.
The oil industry doesn’t seem unduly worried either, having “effortlessly recalibrated” their stance:? CRU’s financial supporters in 2008 included Shell and British Petroleum (Alexander Cockburn). Recently, Rockefeller family shareholders of Exxon Mobil urged the board to adjust to the “changing world.” To focus on the “environmental crisis facing all of us.”
Can solutions proposed by Kyoto, Copenhagen based on global warming/climate change theory accomplish what Banyacya, the Hopi interpreter, had urged: “Its up to all of us, as children of Mother Earth, to clean up this mess before it’s too late.” The “mess” list is a long one. Deforestation. Desertification. Species extinction. The urgent need to preserve biodiversity. Develop sustainable agriculture. Dismantle corporate attempts to privatise water…
Can solutions that ignore the “worst polluter” of CO2 and other toxic emissions on the planet, work? Such as, the Pentagon. Such as, depleted uranium (DU).
During Kyoto negotiations, the US had demanded its own military operations, and those with UN and/or NATO, be completely “exempted” from all climate treaties and agreements. After the others agreed, Bush administration went ahead and refused to sign the accords. Obama has not revoked the blanket exemption either. Officially, the US military uses 320,000 barrels of oil per day, this excludes fuel consumed by contractors, or in leased and privatised facilities (Sara Flounders, Global Research). Since 1991, the U.S. has released radioactive atomicity equalling at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs or, 40,000 Hiroshima bombs, into the global atmosphere.
There is another, equally critical, silence: CO2 emissions caused by warfare. Total CO2 emissions from invading Iraq roughly equal UK’s total emission for a year. Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR) say, the environmental effects of invading Iraq are major. Local air pollution. Climate change due to burning oil wells. Groundwater pollution from leaking oil wells.
Compounded by another silence: depleted uranium (radioactive) is used in the manufacture of armaments. Tank cartridges. Bombs. Rockets. Missiles. Both DU and white phosphorus munitions inflict long term damage to the environment. In a letter to the president of the UN General Assembly, Iraq’s minister for women’s affairs wrote, young women in Fallujah are now terrified of having children. No head. Two heads. A single eye in the forehead. Scaly bodies. Missing limbs. Cancer. Leukemia. Similar in Afghanistan. DU causes v-e-r-y long term damage, measured in billions of years. The global atmosphere, writes William Bowles, has been permanently contaminated by the US with radioactive pollution having a half-life of 2.5 billion years.
Naivete among Americans, of whatever colour, is inexcusable. I am ashamed. Already.
[concluding piece, next week]
Published in New Age 22 March 2010
GLOBAL WARMING OR, THE GREATEST SCIENTIFIC FRAUD?
`Owning’ the weather? PART VII
By Rahnuma Ahmed
The theory of global warming, a `theory’ which we know to be `real,’ according to which the temperature of the Earth’s near-surface air and that of its oceans has been rising since the middle of the last century, an increase caused by human activity, by burning fossil fuel and deforestation, one which is likely to cause sea levels to rise, deserts to expand, glaciers to retreat, an impending disaster of such magnitude that world leaders were compelled to agree to stabilise the climate by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, to draft and implement the Kyoto Protocol (2005), to meet yet again in Copenhagen last December to thrash out stricter emission controls, to try and resolve whether China and India should be given `a free ride’ as was enjoyed by the rich countries during their 150 years of industrialisation … well, serious doubts are now being raised about the scientific knowledge which underlies global warming theory. Scientists and researchers, it seems, have faked the data. It is a discovery that has led the unfolding scandal?dubbed Climategate a la Watergate by the western media?to be called `the greatest scientific fraud in human history’
The controversy is largely unknown in Bangladesh, except for scattered news items. I have not come across any commentary either, one which is both informative and reviews what is at stake. Given the significance for Bangladesh?on the `frontline’ of climate change, tops the list of `most vulnerable’ countries, and the predictions?one-third of Bangladesh likely to be inundated by a 3 feet rise in sea level in the next 50 years, 25 million-30 million people to be uprooted, surely, one would have assumed that news of Climategate, as it unfolded, would be one of the top public interest issues in Bangladesh? That researchers and activists working on climate change in Bangladesh would have felt obliged to inform the public?
On 19 November last year, thousands of emails and communications between some of the world’s leading climate scientists, over a 13-year period dating from 1996, totalling 61 MB, was stolen by hackers from servers at Britain’s University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). The files were leaked, first on a Russian server, but soon enough these became viral, and spread worldwide. Climategate was quickly followed by a series of other gates: Glaciergate, Amazongate, Pachaurigate. According to intelligent guesses, the Russian secret service might well be behind the hacking.
The United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and world governments rely on four sets of temperature data of which the set maintained by professor Phil Jones, the director of CRU, at the University of East Anglia, is the most important . Climate scientists at the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, and at CRU, maintain the global climate record for the World Meterological Organization (WMO). Professor Jones data set, as Christopher Booker points out, is the most important “not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it” (Telegraph, 28 November 2009).
What do the hacked e-mails reveal? First, that top scientists conspired to falsify data when faced with declining global temperatures (yes, it seems that the world is cooling) in order to insist that rising temperatures are caused by human activity (Anthropogenic Global Warming, AGW). Second, they coordinated a campaign of ostracising climate skeptics to prevent dissenting work from being published in peer-reviewed journals. Third, they avoided compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests.
Instances of falsifying data: Professor Jones wrote, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” Climate skeptics insist that `real’ temperatures mean what global warmers want them to be, that hiding the decline means evidence of cooling, whereas UEA authorities and “warmists” insist that `trick’ refers not to deception but to statistical measures to correct data divergence.
Another instance of data falsification, say climate skeptics, is provided by the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) controversy. One e-mail says, “We know the file starts at yr 440, but we want nothing till 1400.” This, say the skeptics, means that CRU has temperature data going back to 440 and 1070, but is using only the data after the Medieval Warm Period, so as not to undermine the global-warming-is-man-made hypothesis. Data fudging over the MWP gains credence when one looks at what Keith Briffa, deputy director, CRU wrote: “I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”
The requests of climate change skeptics, also reputable scientists and climatologists, to CRU data, was repeatedly denied. In one set of e-mail exchanges, Professors Jones and Mann discuss how to circumvent US and UK Freedom Of Information Act requests. Jones writes: [McIntyre and McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom Of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.” In his reply, Mann hints that he’ll claim intellectual property rights. Mann, whose full name is Michael E Mann (at Penn State University and director, Earth System Science Center), is famous for the hockey stick graph, so called because it depicts a slow cooling trend from 1000 to 1900 which looks like a long handle, and an upward warming curve from 1900 to 1999, which looks like the blade of a hockey stick. Both the MWP, and the Little Ice Age (LIA) which occurred 300 years ago, are major problems for the man-made/warmists. Mann’s hockey stick graph, by eliminating these, became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.
While warmists have attempted to brush aside emails that celebrate as “cheering news” the death of a climate change skeptic, that wants to “beat the crap out of” all skeptics, by saying that scientists too, in their everyday lives, are normal people with normal emotions, it is difficult to extend the same logic to those emails which talk of preventing dissenting opinion from being published in peer-reviewed journals. “I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?” And, another: ?I will be emailing the journal to tell them I?m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.?
Dissatisfaction with the peer review process does not seem to be confined to scientists at CRU only, but to extend to, and include, the IPCC. Dr Benjamin Santer, lead author of Chapter 8, 1995 IPCC Report, allegedly deleted the following passages which had been approved by the scientists, and should have been included in the supposedly peer-reviewed published version:
‘None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed?[climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.’
‘No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date]?to anthropogenic [man-made] causes.'”
Since the email leak, other disturbing news has come to light. An essentially flat temperature chart in both Australia and New Zealand was turned into a graph to show “temperatures steadily rising.” The manipulation in both cases, as Booker points out, was carried out under the influence of CRU. Whereas Russian climate data, according to a report of the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis, were probably tampered with. The Hadley Centre for Climate Change, it seems, used temperature data from only those Russian metereological stations which highlighted the global warming process.
Other `gates’ have occurred too, since. Glaciergate: the 2007 IPCC report had warned that the Himalayan glaciers would, in all likelihood, disappear by 2035 due to global warming. When this was challenged in an Indian government report, Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, chairman IPCC, had dismissed it as “voodoo science”. However, it now turns out that the IPCC’s projection was based not on peer-reviewed evidence but on a speculative comment made a decade ago by a glaciologist, who later began working in an Indian research group led by Dr Pachauri. Amazongate: according to another IPCC scare story, climate change could endanger 40% of the Amazon rain forest. This was based on a publication of WWF, an environmentalist pressure group, but it turns out that the original article (published in Nature) had dealt not with global warming, but logging.
If global warming is a scam, the biggest scientific fraud ever, the big question of course, is, why? What lies behind it?
[Concluding instalment, next week]
Undisclosed Clouds Over Western Skies
`Owning’ the weather? PART VI
By Rahnuma Ahmed
“Our goals are not to gain political control, monetary wealth nor military power, but rather to pray and to promote the welfare of all living beings and to preserve the world in a natural way… For many years there has been great fear and danger of World War Three…This is now a time to weigh the choices for our future. We do have a choice. If you, the nations of this Earth, create another great war, the Hopi believe we humans will burn ourselves to death with ashes.”
— Banyacya, Interpreter for Hopi Traditional Elders, in his address to the UN General Assembly in New York, International Year of the Indigenous People, December 10, 1992
The weaponisation of weather has led to the creation of new distinctions in our understanding of phenomena which was unhesitatingly termed natural, previously. Readers must have noted this, that some researchers and activists now distinguish `earth-quakes’ from `HAARP-quakes.’
A somewhat similar distinction has emerged in recent years as heated arguments occur over `contrails’ and `chemtrails.’ The controversy centres around the trails left by planes in the sky. Are these trails `contrails,’ short for condensation trails i.e., do these artificial clouds form because “water vapour condenses and freezes around small particles (aerosols) that exist in aircraft exhaust” (Science Directorate at National Space and Aeronautics Administration, NASA)? Or, are they, as investigative reporter and author William Thomas has insisted for over a decade, `chemtrails’ (`chem’ short for chemical)?
Chemtrails look like contrails, but are usually much thicker, and extend across the sky. They are laid down in varying patterns of Xs, grids, checker boards and parallel lines. Unlike contrails, they do not dissipate but open into fluffy formations which join together, forming a thin white or milky veil, or, a “fake cirrus-type cloud” which persists for hours.
`Strange’ contrails were first reported on 20 February 1999 by `concerned citizens’ of Long Island, New York who took photos. William Thomas, the first reporter to draw national attention to the issue, dubbed these `chemtrails.‘ These, he alleged, were caused by aerosol spraying by government aircrafts. Early sightings in the first quarter of 1999 were accompanied by reports of sudden and unexplained illness in local newspapers: “a wave of respiratory illnesses” (in Berlin, New Jersey), “everyone is coming down with something” (San Francisco), “a new bacteria” (Castle Rock, Colorado), “flu-type symptoms” (7 counties in Kentucky), “throat, lung, and upper respiratory ailments” (in Akron, Ohio), “totally packed” hospitals (in Chandler, Arizona).
A former Raytheon Missile Systems engineering technician “positively identified” two of the aircrafts most often involved in aerial spraying incidents, Boeing KC-135, Boeing KC-10, both used by the US Air Force for air-to-air re-fueling. When most of the KC-135s were grounded for repair and maintenance, wrote Thomas, chemtrail sightings dropped, only to pick up after the aircrafts resumed flying. The US government, he says, is purposely spraying something in attempts to modify the weather, an allegation that is denied by the government.
Increasing numbers of people and activist social networks, both physical and virtual (i.e., on the internet) are convinced that the US government, and other western ones too, are spraying the skies. Some term it an “aerosol weapon.” They argue that its deployment?for purposes other than dusting, cloud seeding, or aerial firefighting within national borders, to further common goals?constitutes an “aerial crime.” Close watchers of chemtrails allege that spraying steadily increased throughout the 1980s; since 1998, it is conducted on a nearly daily basis with an average of 1 “clear” day per week; most areas in the US, Canada, England and Europe have been sprayed intensely, including areas which have no commercial flight paths overhead. In recent years, they claim, chemtrail spraying has been extended to Australia, Mexico, South Africa, Bahamas, Puerto Rico and Croatia.
“The air we breathe,” writes Amy Worthington, is laden with “asbestos-sized synthetic fibers and toxic metals, including barium salts, aluminum, and reportedly, radioactive thorium” (Chemtrails: aerosol and electromagnetic weapons in the age of nuclear war, Global Research, 1 June 2004). Particles and polymers which are spewed into the atmosphere “bypass lung filters and enter the blood stream” causing radical changes in the endocrine and nervous systems (may trigger high blood pressure, cause heart attack). These give rise to increased asthma, allergy and serious skin lesions (including itchy skin with crawling, biting sensations, white granules from skin and hair follicles, chronic fatigue, fibrous material coming from skin, a disease dubbed as `Morgellons’ by its sufferers).
Like other accounts that challenge the US government’s version of reality, `chemtrail theory’ has been dubbed a conspiracy theory?a pseudoscience, the work of nutters, rightwingers, feverish speculators?by mainstream media, and by ruling class’ ideologues. These include government officials, experts and scientists. Also, website and blog-owners. Of course, not all ideologues are equally dismissive and slanderous; some seem good-hearted but atrociously naive. I come across a blogger who provides evidence of chemtrail-like cloud formations from scanned images of clouds from a 1905 book. He insists, like many others, that it is increased jet flights which lead to grids in the sky.
But I am not persuaded. Chemtrail debunkers rest their case?bolstered no doubt by evidence?on the unvoiced assumption that until the US government admits to spraying in the skies, it isn’t true. It can’t be true. They choose to forget the 1977 Senate hearings. Between 1949-1969, 239 populated areas had been contaminated with biological agents. They forget the 1994 Rockefeller report. Hundreds of thousands of American military personnel had been subjected to secret biological experiments over the last 60 years. They seem blinded by their unwavering? belief in science, in scientific findings as neutral and impartial. Not politically-driven (unlike social science, of course). Nor corporate-motivated. Not even as climategate unfolds exposing climate science (as practised), and global warming theory, to be a sham. To be the “greatest scientific fraud in this history of mankind.” But that’s next week’s story. Back to chemtrail.
Why should aerosol be released into the atmosphere over America? Dr Stephen D McKay, who has researched on this for 6 years, thinks that it is aimed at setting up an electrical and chemical environment that supports radio frequency (RF) ducting from point A to point B for the RFMP/VTRPE warfare system. It enables the system to work over land masses, to visually see the battlefield terrain in 3-dimensions (3-D) on a TV screen. The Radio Frequency Mission Planner/Variable Terrain Radio Parabolic Equation is the US Navy’s most secretive programme. The mixture of barium salts in the atmosphere, by supporting moisture, lends itself to another project, a weather control project, which utilises Nikola Tesla’s concepts of radio frequency radiation (HAARP). A. C. Griffith, a whistle-blower, earlier associated with CIA operations, who had enjoyed top secret clearance, says the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Environmental Quality “have been told to keep their nose out” of the aerosol programme. When it comes to air quality and aerosol, they are instructed to talk about the “ozone level” instead. “The pilots probably do not know what they are doing, the crews that put it there they have no idea what it was for. We believe that it was sold to governments as global warming fix.”
Banyacya, the last of four Hopi messengers selected by Hopi Elders in 1948 to deliver an urgent prophetic message to all people, had suffered 7 years of federal imprisonment for having refused to register for WW II. “No Hopis or other original native peoples should be forced to go to war against another people and land. It invites even greater destruction.” While addressing the UN General Assembly, he had said, As children of Mother Earth, we should clean up this mess before it’s too late. The nations of the world must be stopped from moving towards self-destruction.
The skies had been clear the night before. The evening after his presentation, a strong winter storm, with hurricane-force wind gusts, lashed New York City. Tidewaters rose, there were “transportation shutdowns, power failures, and extensive flooding” including the lower subfloors of the UN building. UN personnel were asked to go home. Banyacya, in a meeting with UN representatives and other native peoples, spontaneously called on all to form a great circle?the circle of unity?and to pray. No further storm damage occurred. Soon the storm itself abated.
Did the world’s leaders listen to the Hopi prophecy? Did American leaders?the nation with the most capable military, the highest defence budget, the largest number of military bases etc etc?listen to the Hopis, who are, to them nothing more than a defeated nation? And, of all things, to a prophecy? Obviously not. But not because they thought, as you might expect, that the paranormal belongs to the realm of occultism and voodooo. After all, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) had investigated paranormal phenomena during the Cold World to search ways of how it might give the Americans a military edge over the Soviets. The leaders didn’t listen because it’d have dampened political control, monetary wealth, military power…
And what lies ahead? If one messes with Mother Nature, said the Hopi Elders, nothing short of self-destruction.
Published in New Age 8 March 2010
`Owning' the weather? PART V Katrina and Haiti
By Rahnuma Ahmed
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present?and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower, US President (1953-61), and five-star general in US army
Jerry E Smith thinks there is a “scientific-technological elite” in the US. Precisely the kind of elite which Eisenhower had spoken of in his farewell address to the nation, nearly half a century ago (17 January 1961). One to which, not only American public policies, but global ones too, have become captive.
Smith, a writer, editor and activist for over three decades, is the author of Weather Warfare: The Military’s Plan to Draft Mother Nature (2006), and HAARP. The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy (1998).
In a conference organised by Adventures Unlimited titled, `HAARP and the ultimate weapon of the conspiracy,’ Smith speaks of war and how changing weaponries through human history have impacted on the way war is fought: “Whenever you change the way fundamentally that war is fought, it’s called Revolution in Military Affairs, an RMA, and I believe we are in the 7th or 8th one in recorded history. The invention of gunpowder or the realisation that gunpowder could be used in warfare, created an RMA. The development of bows and arrows created an RMA and so forth. We stand now on a new RMA, in fact right after the fall of the Soviet Union, RMA was the hot topic in military intelligentsia circles. The war college circles and so forth were cranking out a large number of papers on this subject. One of the aspects of this that I find most disturbing, we went from weapons that could target individuals, swords, bows, guns, to weapons that could target groups of individuals, Greek fire, artillery. [We then went] to weapons that could target whole battlefields, i.e., the chemical weapons. And then we went on to those that could target whole cultures, whole ethnicities, i.e., the biological weapons; the atomic weapons are somewhat in-between. Now we are at the point where with the electromagnetic weapons we can target the whole planet. We can target whole continents, whole hemispheres.
“The guys at the Strategic Studies Institute who wrote this paper, titled:
Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Electromagnetic Weapons.
The Revolution in Military Affairs and Conflicts Short of War
came up with a very interesting realisation… that the kinds of technologies we were developing, the kinds of weapons they were working on, were contrary to American morals and beliefs. And so, what was their contention, what did they say? [Did they say] Oh my gosh, this is immoral, we can’t do this? No. [Instead] they said, how do we change America, so that America will be willing to accept us playing with these toys. This is the tail wagging the dog. And this is that aspect [which I find most disturbing], we are being fed a world of disinformation on a continuing basis, because the military planners are re-designing our thinking to let them go forward in playing with these toys.”
As I watch and transcribe Smith’s lecture on You Tube, I think, so, is the `war on terror’ part of this re-design? Listening to Smith talking of `disinformation’ leads me to musing about why a scientist as brilliant as Nikola Tesla, is so unknown. Tesla, after all, had not only invented fluorescent lighting, the Tesla induction motor, the `Tesla’ coil (still used in radio, TV sets, other electronic equipment), the alternating current (AC) electrical supply system, 3-phase electricity,?but also the modern radio (no, not Marconi). Further, he is said to have invented a particle beam weapon, which some call a ?peace ray,? while others, a “death ray” . In theory, it was capable of generating an intense, targeted beam of energy and sending it across great distances to demolish warplanes, foreign armies. He is also said to have invented a doomsday device which could disrupt all communication systems on Earth, an idea long kept secret by the US government.
Most probably, I think, it was because of his invention of `free energy.’ If this line of research had been pursued, writes Ken Adachi on the basis of Dr Peter Lindemann’s meticulous research, “Unlimited electricity could be made available anywhere and at any time, by merely pushing a rod into the ground and turning on the electrical appliance.” (The Free Energy Secrets of Cold Electricity, lecture, 2000).
Free energy, derived from nature. For all. But surely initiating that kind of a revolution wouldn’t have appealed to the scientific-technological elite, would it?
Climate and weather are two different things, says Smith. Climate is what one expects, while weather is what one gets. Mainstream science recognises that human beings have the ability to alter the weather intentionally, only on a limited scale, and unintentionally, on a vastly larger scale. But the fact is, says Smith, “what can be done intentionally is far greater than what the mainstream is willing to or able to admit.” ?And there are, as Smith points out, a lot of intentional players around: academic, commercial and military. Who have a lot of intended objectives: financial, militaristic and political. To be acheived irrespective of the human costs involved. But no, actually, from the perspective of the scientific-technological elite, it is this wondrous humanity that is the problem. After all, as former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger had put it, the world’s population needs to be decreased by 50 percent. Population increases, he had asserted, harm US national security interests. ?(He too had received the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1973).
In Weather Warfare, Smith provides instances of “earthquakes on demand”: (a) the development of a “tsunami bomb” during World War II (revealed in documents recently declassified by the New Zealand government) (b) Project Faultless, which had caused a massive earthquake in the Nevada desert after a high yield atom bomb was intentionally detonated on a fault line. Smith also provides evidence of human initiation of several major quakes, and the 2004 Christmas tsunami, with “scalar” or other electromagnetic waves.
“There was nothing natural about the disaster that befell New Orleans in Katrina’s aftermath,” writes James Ridgeway (Mother Jones, 28 August 2009). Four years later, “confronted with images of corpses floating in the blackened floodwaters or baking in the sun on abandoned highways,” it increasingly becomes clear that what had taken place in this devastated American city was “no less than a war” where the victims were treated as enemies of the state. Their only crime was being black. Being poor.
“Every 30 or 40 minutes someone was dying,” recollects Marc Creswell, an Acadian medic. The company sent in outside doctors and nurses. FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) rejected the help. “When the doctors asked why they couldn’t help these critically ill people lying there unattended, the FEMA people kept saying, ‘You’re not federalized.’ ” I scan through headlines reporting FEMA failures, in the major media:
FEMA refuses hundreds of personnel, dozens of vehicles – Chicago Tribune, 9/2/05
FEMA won’t let Red Cross deliver food – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9/3/05
FEMA fails to utilize Navy ship with 600-bed hospital on board – Chicago Tribune, 9/4/05
FEMA turns away state-of-the-art mobile hospital from Univ. of North Carolina – CNN, 9/5/05
FEMA won’t accept Amtrak’s help in evacuations – Financial Times, 9/5/05
FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks – New York Times, 9/6/05
FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel – New York Times, 9/6/05
FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid – News Sentinel, 9/8/05
FEMA asks media not to take pictures of dead – Washington Post, 9/8/05
FEMA turns back German government plane loaded with 15 tons of food – Spiegel, 9/12/05
While civilian aid for victims was made scarce, private security forces already had boots on the ground. As Jeremy Scahill reported in The Nation, Blackwater (re-named Xe) had set up an HQ in downtown New Orleans. Members of this private militia company were armed, and operated, as in Iraq: automatic rifles, guns strapped to legs, pockets overflowing with ammo, driving around in SUVs and unmarked cars with no license plates. When asked one of them replied: We’re on contract with the Department of Homeland Security. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem it necessary.
And the US government’s response to the earthquake in Haiti, on Jan 12 this year? A massive deployment of military hardware and personnel. Nine to ten thousand troops, including 2000 marines. Overall humanitarian operation led by the Pentagon. Dominant decision making role entrusted to US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). The US, as the French cooperation minister remarked before being quickly shushed-up, seemed to be `occupying’ rather than helping Haiti. But why on earth would the US want to occupy a poor, impoverished nation like Haiti?
Haiti, according to recent revelations, has oil reserves which in comparison to Venezuela’s are like an Olympic swimming pool is to a glass of water. The US, according to Haitian scholar Dr. Georges Michel, has known of Haiti’s oil and natural gas reserves since 1908. After completing their explorations in the 1950s, they locked up what had been discovered, as “strategic reserves for the US.” To be tapped only when Middle Eastern oil becomes less available. Other Haitian scholars add, not only oil, but also Haiti’s strategic position, cheap labor, deep water ports, mineral resources (iridium, gold, copper, uranium, diamond, gas reserves, zyconium deposits), lands, waterfronts, offshore resources for privatization or the exclusive use of the world’s wealthy oligarchs and US big oil monopolies.
As I come across news reports, the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez says the US was playing God by testing weapon that caused Haiti quake (Russia TV), I cannot help but trace parallels in the US government’s response to the disasters in Katrina and Haiti. The former seems to have been a dress rehearsal for the latter. Re-designing our thinking. The project of domination, as Eisenhower had put it.
Published in New Age 1 March 2010
`Owning' the weather? PART IV: More on HAARP
By Rahnuma Ahmed
It all began with the Haiti earthquake.
I must write about it, I thought. Soon after I began researching, I came across HAARP. And then, across a 1996 report for the US Air Force which looked forward to the idea of `owning the weather’ by 2025. Through capitalising on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications.., so it read.
Readers know the rest. I have already written three instalments, with several more to follow. The more I read, the more I uncover connections. More stories need to be told, I tell myself.
When I began writing this series?one which promises to be longer than the one on Pakistan, `The Unfolding Crisis in Pakistan,’ 4 parts, New Age, 11-19 May 2009?I had not been able to foresee the number of pieces I’d be writing. Now, midway through the series, I’ve become worried about the absence of sub-titles as it might make it difficult for readers to trace what lies in individual pieces. Hence I backtrack, I want to give Part I a sub-title, `Laying the Groundwork,’ to Part II, `Weather Warfare,’ and to Part III, `HAARP and weaponising the ionosphere.’ The sub-title of today’s instalment, Part IV, is `More on HAARP.’
Earthquakes, as Jason Jeffrey points out in a piece in New Dawn, a journal of alternative news and information, are not only natural, i.e., those caused by the movement of tectonic plates over the Earth’s mantle, but can also be the result of human effort.
Officially-speaking, earthquakes can be induced by:
(a) fluid injection into the Earth. For instance, Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a chemical weapons manufacturing centre operated by the US Army in Colorado where a deep injection well had been constructed for testing purposes; the periods and amounts of injected waste coincided with the frequency and magnitude of quakes in the Denver area, 1962-65
(b) fluid extraction from the Earth e.g., at certain geothermal power plants
(c) mining or quarrying for e.g., removal of natural gas from subsurface deposits, such as, in northern Netherlands where 10 quakes have occurred since gas drilling began in 1986
(d) nuclear testing e.g., the detonation of a 50 megaton bomb code-named Ivan in the Soviet Union in 1961; it produced a seismic shock so powerful that it was measurable even on its third passage around the Earth, and
(e) the construction of dams and reservoirs for e.g., the 128 meter high Kariba dam in Zambia; since its construction the Kariba reservoir, which is located in a tectonically active area, has caused numerous earthquakes, 20 of them larger than 5 on the Richter scale.
Earthquakes can also be induced, as part of weather warfare. According to critics of HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program), the physics of HAARP and the political agenda behind the programme suggest that weather and earthquake manipulation is “both possible and likely.”
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), Serbian inventor and engineer ?Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine.?
- Bernard Eastlund, the patent holder of HAARP, 2nd from left (others are, Scott Stevens, Richard Heene and Barb Slusser). November 4, 2007, Saint Louis in Missouri, USA.
But its defenders, disagree. The amount of energy at the project’s disposal is “miniscule compared to the colossal energies dumped into the atmosphere by solar radiation and thunderstorms.” Ionospheric heating cannot be performed while the sun illuminates the ionosphere. There is “no serious scientific evidence” to support the accusation (or, others equally “exotic”) that the 2003 North America blackout had been caused by HAARP. Supporters further say, aeronomers and space-physicists, who have “a solid understanding of the accusations levelled against HAARP” reject the criticisms as “utter nonsense.” As they do Dr Nick Begich Jr.’s book, Angels Don’t Play HAARP (1995), which, I read in a website, is distributed and privately “ridiculed”. HAARP enthusiasts add, the scientific community does not feel called upon to defend the programme since those who do so lack a “sufficient understanding of science to criticize HAARP competently.”
As I crawl through various websites, I muse to myself, if teacher, author, activist, executive director of the Lay Institute of Technology Inc., Dr Nick Begich Jr.,? who has a doctorate in traditional medicine (also, is the son of a US Congressman) can be subjected to “ridicule” for daring to criticise HAARP, how can I, and others like me, venture to discuss high tech weapons of weather warfare, we, who are not scientists?
But, I think, surely a social science background provides one with the intellectual resources to raise questions from the other end, to seek answers which will aid in gaining a more total understanding of things: such as, who are these HAARP supporters?these scientists with a solid understanding?in a social sense? What economic backgrounds do they come from, what networks of power are they embedded in? I may not understand science, but surely, I understand politics? At least, sufficiently, to know that when questions such as those that are being raised about HAARP and weather warfare are dismissed straightaway and labelled “exotic” by solid scientists?without taking the politics, both past and present, of the military-industrial complex (or, military-industrial-media-entertainment complex, as recent analysts say) that the US has become?it is, by the standards of solid social science, strange. It is suspect. Like others who are close observers of contemporary politics, I know that it is important to delve not only into history but also into the philosophy of science, into issues of epistemology and ethics, into the culture of science (a rapidly-burgeoning field within anthropology). And of course, being interested in the culture of science would also mean being interested in issues to do with hierarchies within the scientific profession. The ideologies of scientific practice. The politics of research funding. And in matters such as these, as international relations theorist Steve Smith reminds us, the stakes are “high.” Those who swim outside “safe waters” risk more than simply the judgment that their theories are wrong. Their entire ethical or moral stance may be ridiculed. Or, seen as dangerous. (Interestingly enough, Dr Nick Begich Jr’s Wikipedia Biography has been deleted).
Nikola Tesla, it is said, is one of the 20th century’s greatest scientists. But Tesla had never gained the recognition that he deserved, not even to this day, because his scientific breakthroughs were considered to be too sensitive by corporate and government forces. Fascinated with the power of resonance, Tesla had built mechanical vibrators to test their powers. Once, in his Manhattan lab, he attached a powerful little vibrator driven by compressed air to a steel pillar, and went out on some work. “A violent quaking built up, shaking down plaster, bursting plumbing, cracking windows, and breaking heavy machinery off its anchorages.” It seems that Tesla had set off a small earthquake, and soon, his building started to quake. When the police broke into his lab they found him? smashing his own device with a sledge hammer. It was the only way he could promptly stop it.
Tesla?s ?experiments in transmitting mechanical vibrations through the Earth… were roughly described by the scientists as a sort of controlled earthquake? (?Tesla?s Controlled Earthquakes,’ New York American , July 11, 1935). An article published in Specula magazine described an incredibly profound phenomenon that could be produced within the Earth, as the ?Tesla Effect? (January 1978). Tesla himself, it is said, expressed grave concerns about the effects of this technology. Once it begins vibrating within the Earth, it is the type of thing which could easily get out of control. His worry was that it could actually cause the Earth to vibrate to pieces.
The key technology behind HAARP is the brainchild of American physicist Bernard J Eastlund (1938-2007); the major inspiration for Eastlund?s ionospheric heater was Tesla as is stated in his patent, “Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth’s Atmosphere, Ionosphere; and/or Magnetosphere” (U.S. Patent # 4,686,605), which was sealed for a year under a government Secrecy Order.
Published in New Age, 23 February 2010
(more, next week)
`Owning' the weather? Part III
By Rahnuma Ahmed
“Primarily the work is aimed at giving the US Navy and the other armed forces, if they should care to use it, the capability of modifying the environment, to their own advantage, or to the disadvantage of an enemy. We regard the weather as a weapon. Anything one can use his way is a weapon and the weather is as good a one as any” (emphasis added).
— Admiral Pier Saint-Amand, Naval Ordinance Laboratory in China Lake, California?(conducted research on cloud seeding; applied in Vietnam, Cambodia).?Quoted in US Senate, Subcommittee on Oceans and International Environment, 26 July 1972.
“If the Americans cannot stop such hostile weather from devastating their own country, it will be naive to think they can play God to control the nature. By writing about controlling weather, Rahnuma Ahmed is giving Americans supernatural powers they cannot even dream of,” thus concluded Mahmood Elahi in his letter, published in New Age on 10 February 2010.
A serious allegation, indeed. It is my act of writing that is to blame, it is this which makes Americans powerful… In earlier times, those who delivered bad news were beheaded. I should surely consider myself fortunate.
But I couldn’t help thinking, all those days and weeks spent in researching, in poring over official reports, cross-checking news items, watching videos, transcripting?all in vain. There was no need to engage, neither with what key US policy-makers and high-up administration officials have written or said, such as, Zbigniew Brzezinski and William Cohen. Nor with the European parliament’s concerns over HAARP. Nor the evidence advanced by a host of keen observers including reputable academics like Michel Chossudovsky.
But before responding to Mr Elahi’s comments I would like to thank him for having read my piece, for having taken the trouble to comment. Acknowledging this, before pointing out areas of disagreement, is important.
Elahi writes, blizzards, floods and hurricanes?the likes of some have never been seen before?have caused devastation in the US this year. Interestingly enough, this observation matches what Chossudovsky says when he writes, extreme and unusual weather patterns have ravaged not only the US, but every major region of the world over the last couple of years (`Owning’ the Weather?, Part 1, February 1, 2010). Based on a close and careful scrutiny of evidence, Chossudovsky goes on to argue that both the US and Russia have developed capabilities to `manipulate the World’s climate.’ That weather warfare, in all probability, has already started. That although global warming is important, it is highly unlikely that it is the one and only cause for these disturbances.
Elahi assumes that I am writing about `control’ rather than `ownership’ (the two are separate concepts); from this mistaken assumption, he quickly dismisses the possibility that weather modification techniques exist. If they did, surely the Americans would have deployed them to prevent devastation in Washington DC, California, Nevada, Dakota, and southern California? Controlling nature is an act of God; for me to think otherwise?that human beings have devised techniques to control weather?is nothing short of naivete.
If careful research is countered with an incredulous disbelief based on common-sensical thinking, surely Americans, surely God… what else can I do but point out how some had insisted, many moons ago, if God had intended people to fly, He would surely have given them wings. But later, as we all know, aeroplanes were invented. People did fly. They still do. As for the `surely Americans’ argument, the idea that Americans are undivided, that both rulers and ruled work in concert for their common good… well, even stalwart supporters of the US regime have recently struggled exceedingly hard to maintain this myth. The federal bailout of Wall Street?according to Troubled Asset Relief Program estimates, $23.7 trillion?has led to immiseration and impoverishment of the majority, and to multi-million dollar bonuses for (failed)/bank executives. Surely `the’ Americans could have acted to prevent their country’s economic ruin?
But I am not done with God. Not yet. HAARP watchers and analysts are persuaded that the idea that (only) God can control nature, provides the perfect cover for HAARP. In this context, some even cite former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s assertion, expressed in policy documents: “depopulation” should be the highest in US foreign policy priorities towards third world countries. Population increases harm US “national security” interests; they need to be decreased by 50%. “Progress… must be made,” Kissinger asserts, in Bangladesh and in 12 other countries where “population moderation” must be assisted (National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests, 1974).
To persuade skeptics, HAARP watchers argue: if what the former US secretary of defence William Cohen had said was true, that eco-terrorists can alter the climate, that they can remotely set off earthquakes and volcanoes through the use of electromagnetic waves, it is difficult to believe that the American government, more so, the American military has stayed away from developing these techniques. The US armed forces, in the words of Admiral Pier Saint-Amand quoted above, regards “the weather as a weapon.”
The idea of weaponising weather was enabled through patenting technology invented by Bernard Eastlund, a physicist, in the 1980s, of which has been said, “when eventually disclosed, [it] will render many of Albert Einstein’s innovations obsolete.” Eastlund’s patents have been sealed under a US Secrecy Order. His discovery involves beaming High Frequency (HF) and Extremely High Frequency (EHF) waves, of extremely high power, directly at a point on the ionosphere which becomes heated as a result of the accumulating electrical energy. One might think of it as “cooking” the ionosphere.
How does HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) work? The most easily understood explanation that I have come across, developed for lay persons, describes it thus: The site, officially located in Gakona, Alaska, consists of a collection of antennae, arranged in a computer-controlled grid, known as a “phased array” which has the ability to focus radio signals in a precise direction, without turning the antennae. The phased array is not a radar but it uses some of the same extremely high frequencies (EHF) to focus a powerful radio beam to specific locations in the Earth’s ionosphere. The latter is a highly charged layer of atmosphere (particles or `ions’) about 60 miles above surface which reflects short wave radio waves. EHF waves are much shorter than short waves, they are said to propagate along the “line of sight,” retaining their strength over long distances, much like the antenna of a satellite TV dish, which as we know needs to be pointed in the direction of the satellite. (http://www.viewzone.com/haarp11.html)
At the Gakona site, High Frequency transmitting antenna are located in environmentally protected domes. Thousands of antennae focus billions of watt into a pencil thin stream that is steered by computers and aimed at the sky. The following three phases, helps to describe how weather is modified to turn into a weapon of warfare:
-
- Heating Radio waves cause the ionosphere to increase in height and to be better able to absorb and store the energy.?A small area of the ionosphere is heated with HF radio waves.?Bilions of watts heat the ionosphere to form a bubble
- Random pulsing The bubble accumulates and amplifies enormous energy.?Phased array systems like the one that is operational in Alaska are computer controlled and focus their powerful radio beams on the atmosphere over the target area.
- Discharge This energy is discharged in a nuclear sized explosion on earth.?Within minutes a nuclear size explosion can be snapped to earth with no radiation danger.?A minimum of twelve installations in carefully chosen locations around the world will give the system the potential to attack anywhere and anytime without any warning.
According to some scientists, the reckless use of these power levels in our natural shield? the ionosphere?could be cataclysmic. Dr. Nick Begich and Jeane Manning, authors of The Military’s Pandora’s Box, quote one such scientist Paul Schaefer who says, “Unless we desire the death of our planet we must end the production of unstable particles which are generating the earth’s fever. A first priority to prevent this disaster would be to shut down all nuclear power plants and end the testing of atomic weapons, electronic warfare and ‘Star Wars’.”
But what does the US (and presumably, also the Russian) military do? It builds its biggest ionospheric heater in Gakona, to deliberately create more instabilities in the ionosphere. After all, anything one can use his way is a weapon. Even if it leads to the death of the planet.
(more, next week)
Published in New Age, 15 February 2010
`Owning' the weather? PART II
By Rahnuma Ahmed
“Technology will make available to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised… techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm.”
–????????? Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US National Security advisor, Between Two Ages (1970)
Weather modification technology is being perfected by the US under the High Frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP). From the military point of view, it is, as I had written last week, citing Professor Michel Chossudovsky (editor, Centre for Research on Globalization and visiting professor of economics, University of Ottawa)?a weapon of mass destruction.
According to keen observers, HAARP has the ability to trigger floods and hurricanes. To produce, as Brzezinski forecasts above, “prolonged periods of drought or storm.” To set off, as former US secretary of defense William Cohen had said, earthquakes and volcanoes. He, of course, had blamed `others’ for plotting these acts of terror. The baddies. The enemies of civilisation. I quote in full: “Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves? So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations? It’s real, and that’s the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts” (1997).
The US government presents HAARP to the public as a harmless programme. As scientific and academic research aimed at further advancing “our knowledge of the physical and electrical properties of the Earth’s ionosphere which can affect our military and civilian communication and navigation systems” . A view endlessly regurgitated in mainstream media by a host of administration officials, defence and security experts, journalists and writers. Any questioning of the government version, interestingly enough, is met with ridicule, is immediately dubbed a `conspiracy theory.’ There are nutters, one comes across scores of them spooking away on the web, as is only to be expected, but it’s interesting to see how serious and well-founded questioning of the official versions of events, whether 9/11, or HAARP, immediately get labelled as `conspiratorial.’ At how this catch-all phrase is continuously employed to block off any critical inquiry in the public domain about America’s rulers, and their ways of ruling. To provide an instance in the case of HAARP, `Strange new Air Force facility energizes ionosphere, fans conspiracy flames’ (Noah Shachtman, Wired magazine, 20 July 2009). A title that is complicit in the all-powerful Western myth: `others’ wreak terror. `Others’ possess WMDs.
And what if the West’s `others’ don’t? What if a western leader who took his country to war on make-believe grounds, is finally forced to admit it publicly? As was former British prime minister Tony Blair who testified before the Chilcot inquiry last week. Reverting to, what seemed to me, amazing English bedtime story-speak, Blair responded: but Saddam was still a “monster.” And therefore he had to be removed. The world had to be made “safer.” So what if in that process, 1,366,350 Iraqis died? Blair insisted, he had no “regrets.” Like the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright. When pressed about the death of 567,000 Iraqi children due to the 1990s US sanctions, she responded, “We think the price is worth it.”
In February 1998, in response to a report tabled by Mrs. Maj. Britt Theorin, Swedish MEP and longtime peace advocate on the “potential use of military-related resources for environmental strategies,” the European parliament’s committee on Environment, Security and Foreign Affairs called the HAARP project a matter of global concern because of “its far-reaching impact on the environment.” It passed a resolution calling for its “legal, ecological and ethical implications to be examined by an international independent body before any further research
HAARP’s array can beam up to 3.6 megawatts of energy into the sky. Photo Joao Canziani
and testing” was conducted. It also expressed regrets at the “repeated refusal of the United States Administration to send anyone in person to give evidence to the public hearing [held by the committee in Brussels] or any subsequent meeting held by its competent committee into the environmental and public risks connected with the HAARP programme currently being funded in Alaska.” Despite all this, as an excellent documentary on HAARP made by CBC, Canada’s public broadcasting network points out, officials at HAARP still insist that “the project is nothing more sinister than a radio science research facility.”
The United Nations, on the other hand, inspite of a vast body of scientific knowledge, never includes in its climate change agenda the “issue of deliberate climatic manipulations for military use.” Even though, writes Chossudovsky, the UN 1977 Convention explicitly states that “military or any other hostile use of such techniques could have effects extremely harmful to human welfare,” a convention to which both US and Soviet Union were signatories. (Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, United Nations, Geneva, 1977).
The issue of “weather warfare” or “environmental modification techniques” (ENMOD) is not, as Chossudovsky points out, raised either by governments or environmental action groups. Even though both Americans and Russians have developed capabilities to manipulate the World’s climate. The publicly shared consensus is that greenhous gas emissions constitute the “sole cause” of climate instability. But in reality, the manipulation of climate for military use is potentially “a greater threat to humanity” than CO2 emissions. Military analysts are silent, metereologists do not investigate the matter, while environmentalists keep harping on global warming and the Kyoto protocol. It is a situation which, by being “narrowly confined to greenhouse gases,” serves Washington’s strategic and defense objectives.
Another documentary on HAARP, made by the History Channel, says: “Electromagnetic weapons … pack an invisible wallop hundreds of times more powerful than the electrical current in a lightning bolt. One can blast enemy missiles out of the sky, another could be used to blind soldiers on the battlefield, still another to control an unruly crowd by burning the surface of their skin. If detonated over a large city, an electromagnetic weapon could destroy all electronics in seconds. They all use directed energy to create a powerful electromagnetic pulse.” And also, this: “Directed energy is such a powerful technology it could be used to heat the ionosphere to turn weather into a weapon of war. Imagine using a flood to destroy a city or tornadoes to decimate an approaching army in the desert. The military has spent a huge amount of time on weather modification as a concept for battle environments. If an electromagnetic pulse went off over a city, basically all the electronic things in your home would wink and go out, and they would be permanently destroyed.” (WantToKnow.info team website).
With president Obama proposing a $548.9 billlion outlay for defence, a budget that boosts the Defence department’s outlay by 3.4% over the 2010 enacted level, does the HAARP official site’s answer to the Frequently Asked Question, Can I Visit HAARP?? “The HAARP Research Station does not employ sufficient on-site staff… as a result, we hold an annual open house at which any and all are invited”?sound convincing? (italics mine).
Unconvinced too, is Louise Lindley, who runs the coffee shop and trading post in the village that is HAARP’s closest neighbour. In response to the question, You have been here since the beginning. What do you? think they are doing down there? she replies, “They tell us we’re up here doing research on HAARP, we’re studying the northern lights, you don’t study the northern lights for 25 years, come on.” (Jesse Ventura exposes HAARP conspiracy, truTV).
(more, next week).
First published in New Age on 8th February 2010
`Owning' the weather? Part I
By Rahnuma Ahmed
“In 2025, US aerospace forces can ?own the weather? by capitalizing on emerging technologies?and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications…?weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options?to defeat or coerce an adversary.”
— Col Tamzy J. House et. al., Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025
`Owning’ the weather? You must be thinking, What a preposterous idea!
Apparently not, for those who wrote the report from which I’ve quoted above (August 1996). It was a study commissioned by the chief of staff of the US Air Force to examine the “concepts, capabilities, and technologies the United States will require to remain the dominant air and space force in the future.” One which was reviewed by security and policy review authorities, and cleared for public release.
As I read the report, I cannot help but wonder at what is contained in those documents which have not been revealed to the public, ones that are classified. Neither can I help but marvel at the devotion and hard work that has gone into imagining, drawing-up and detailing such a scheme of mass murder. At the colossal criminality involved. An issue that the authors hurriedly traverse?”[weather-modification techniques] offers a dilemma,” it is a “controversial issue,” “some segments of society” are reluctant?lest they have any second thoughts, lest they develop any moral qualms over the matter.
Of course, as is only to be expected, all the necessary disclaimers are there. The views expressed are those of the authors. They do not reflect the official policy or position of the US Air Force. Or, the Department of Defense. Least of all, the US government. Representations of future scenarios are fictional. Any similarity to real people, to real events, why, to reality itself?is unintentional.
Weather modification, write the authors, has “tremendous military capabilities” (see table). Rainfall can be enhanced to flood the enemy’s lines of communication. To reduce the effectivity of precision guided missiles (PGM). Rainfall can be prevented too. To deny the enemy access to fresh water. To induce drought and wreck food cultivation. Fogs and clouds can be generated, or removed. Friendly forces merit generation, to enhance their ability to conceal themselves. While enemy forces shall suffer from fog/cloud removal, to deny concealment. To smoke ’em out?
To develop an integrated weather-modification system, technological advancements are necessary in five areas: (1) advanced nonlinear modeling techniques (2) computational capability (3) information gathering and transmission (4) a global sensor array, and (5) weather intervention techniques. Some of these “intervention tools” already exist, we are told. Others may be developed. May be refined. For future use. To develop and refine technologies of mass murder….?
Current weather-modification technologies which will mature over the next 30 years, will?in all likelihood?become “a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications.” A policy that could be pursued at “various levels”: NATO. UN. Coalition. And, if the national security strategy in 2025 includes weather-modification, “its use in our national military strategy will naturally follow.” Its benefit? It’ll “deter and counter potential adversaries.” It’s “appropriate application… can provide battlespace dominance to a degree never before imagined.” The executive summary ends on this ominous note: ?The technology is?there, waiting for us to pull it all together;? in 2025 we can ?Own the Weather.?
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The current military and civilian worldwide weather data network will evolve and expand to become a Global Weather Network (GWN). One which will be a super high-speed, expanded bandwidth, communication network by 2025. By then, weather-prediction models will prove to be “highly accurate in stringent measurement trials against empirical data.” And the “brains” of these models? “Advanced software and hardware capabilities which can rapidly ingest trillions of environmental data points, merge them into usable data bases, process the data through the weather prediction models, and disseminate the weather information over the GWN in near-real-time” (see Figure).
Although “extreme and controversial” examples of weather modification, such as, the creation of made-to-order weather, large-scale climate modification, creation and/or control (or ?steering?) of severe storms, etc. were researched, “technical obstacles preventing their application appear insurmountable within 30 years.” And therefore, the authors write, these are only mentioned briefly.
Close observers are inclined to disagree. Weather warfare, they think, has already started.
“What are the underlying causes of extreme weather instability, which has ravaged every major region of the World in the course of the last few years?” writes professor Michel Chossudovsky, one of the keenest analysts.
He continues, “Hurricanes and tropical storms have ravaged the Caribbean. Central Asia and the Middle East are afflicted by drought. West Africa is facing the biggest swarm of locusts in more than a decade. Four destructive hurricanes and a tropical rain storm Alex, Ivan, Frances, Charley and Jeanne have occurred in a sequence, within a short period of time. Unprecedented in hurricane history in the Caribbean, the island of Grenada was completely devastated: 37 people died and roughly two-thirds of the island’s 100,000 inhabitants have been left homeless; in Haiti, more than two thousand people have died and tens of thousands are homeless. The Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas and Florida have also been devastated. In the US, the damage in several Southern states including Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and the Carolinas is the highest in US history.”
While global warming is undoubtedly an important factor, writes Chossudovsky, it does not fully account for these extreme and unusual weather patterns.
In the 5 years since he wrote “The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction: “Owning the Weather” for Military Use” (Global Research, September 2004), many more natural disasters have occurred: the Asian tsunami which hit 14 countries; Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand most severly, killing nearly 230,000 (December 2004). Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana, 1,836 people lost their lives (August 2005). Great Sichuan earthquake in China, 68,000 died (May 2008). The recent earthquake in Haiti, 200,000 estimated dead (January 2010).
Both the Americans and the Russians have developed capabilities, says Chossudovsky, to “manipulate the World’s climate.”
In a 1997 article of The Wall Street Journal (Nov 13), Chen May Yee wrote about a memorandum of understanding to be signed soon between a Russian and a Malaysian company to create a hurricane that would create torrential rains, one that would be directed close enough to clear the smoke without actually coming on land to create a devastation. In an earlier piece The Wall Street Journal had reported that a Russian company, Elate Intelligent Technologies Inc., advertising under the slogan `Weather Made to Order’?sold weather control equipment. Elate is capable of fine tuning weather patterns over a 200 square mile area, for as little as $200 per day. Hurricane Andrew, which had occurred a year earlier and had caused damage worth $30 billion could have been turned into “a wimpy little squall,” according to Igor Pirogoff, a director of Elate. Doesn’t this mean that hurricane Katrina too, could have been diverted?
As I research on the internet, I come across another news item: “Entering a thunderstorm 10 miles off West Palm Beach, a B-57 Canberra jet bomber chartered for one million dollars releases some 9,000 pounds of improved Dyn-O-Gel capable of 10-times stronger water absorption. Miami’s Channel 5’s weather radar shows the huge thunderhead losing moisture. Within seconds, the buildup vanished as one side of the cloud collapsed ?like an avalanche?, according to a chase plane cameraman.” (Sun-Sentinel July 20/01).
As a weapon of war, the use of weather modification techniques was publicly described much earlier. On 20 March 1974, by the Pentagon. A 7 year cloud seeding effort in Vietnam and Cambodia, costing $21.6 million, had been initiated to increase rainfall in target areas, thereby “causing landslides and making unpaved roads muddy, hindering the movement of supplies.” ?That US forces had suffered a drastic defeat in Vietnam, and forced to leave in 1975, is now part of history.
At present, other countries, probably China and North Korea, are feverishly working to catch up. Early snow covered Beijing last November. According to the Chinese state media, it was the result of Chinese metereologists’ efforts to “make rain by injecting special chemicals into clouds,” a technique that often gets results (Agence France-Presse, 1 November 2009).
According to Chossudovsky, weather-modification technology is being perfected in the US under the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP), part of the (“Star Wars”) Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). Recent scientific evidence suggests that HAARP is fully operational. That it has the ability of potentially triggering floods, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes. That it is?from the military standpoint?a weapon of mass destruction…
(more, next week)
First Published in New Age on 1st February 2010