Russian Scholar Says US May Be Cooking Russia With Secret Ray

So now evil American scientists are apparently cooking the Russkies with our secret death ray. The US is not the only place that swims in the shallow waters of conspiracism, not by a long shot.

A June 30th article from Radio Free Europe, "Russian Scholar Warns Of 'Secret' U.S. Climate Change Weapon" by Ashley Cleek:

A Russian political scientist has claimed the United States may be using climate-change weapons to alter the temperatures and crop yields of Russia and other Central Asian countries.

In a recent article, Andrei Areshev, deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, wrote, "At the moment, climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries."

The article has been carried by publications throughout Russia, including "International Affairs," a journal published by the Foreign Ministry and by the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.

In an telephone interview with RFE/RL, Areshev appeared to back off from claims he made in the article, saying that he was merely positing a theory.

"First of all, I would like to say that what I wrote in that article, even the citations, does not in any way claim to a be final truth. It is, if you will, speculation, in other words, the definition of an hypothesis," Areshev said.

Moscow is currently sweltering under record temperatures. On July 29 Moscow suffered its hottest day ever, with temperatures hitting 39 degrees.

[snip]

In the article, Areshev voiced suspicions about the High-Frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP), funded by the U.S. Defense Department and the University of Alaska.

HAARP, which has long been the target of conspiracy theorists, analyzes the ionosphere and seeks to develop technologies to improve radio communications, surveillance, and missile detection.

Areshev writes, however, that its true aim is to create new weapons of mass destruction "in order to destabilize environmental and agricultural systems in local countries."

Areshev's article also references an unmanned spacecraft X-37B, an orbital test vehicle the Pentagon launched in April 2010. The Pentagon calls X-37B a prototype for a new "space plane" that could take people and equipment to and from space stations. Areshev, however, alleges that the X-378 carries "laser weaponry" and could be a key component in the Pentagon's climate-change arsenal.

The Pentagon was not immediately reachable for comment.

H.A.A.R.P. is the more manageable acronym for the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program facility near Gakona, Alaska. Constructed in the 1990’s, HAARP’s official purpose is to study the effects of electromagnetic energy on the ionosphere. The way it accomplishes this is to direct 3.6 million megawatts of electricity into a transmitter and pump it out of an antenna straight up into the atmosphere, and to take readings from satellites. The effect seems to be that the ionosphere gets toasted by the beam of energy, similar to the effects of solar flares, albeit in a very tiny way (since 3.6 million megawatts is a pinprick compared to the electromagnetic energy hitting the earth from the Sun). That’s the 10¢ explanation of the official mission.

Conspiracists say that the military designed HAARP with a far more sinister intent. It is claimed that the facility is a weapon being developed to knock out enemy satellite and radio communication by bombarding the atmosphere with massive electromagnetic waves. Or worse. Some have claimed that the 1993 power blackout in the northeast United States and Canada was triggered by a blast from HAARP.



In the 1980’s, physicist Bernard Eastland proposed technology similar to what was built at HAARP as part of the so-called “Star Wars” defense shield (known in military circles as the less Hollywood-ish Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI). Eastland built upon the theories of famed electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla and proposed a high frequency, electromagnetic “shield” that could be used to electronically jam incoming Soviet nuclear missiles and knock out enemy satellites. When the government actually built HAARP, they claimed Eastland’s patents were not used, in spite of the similarity of the basic principles.

That has not silenced critics who claim that HAARP is quietly sitting up in Alaska just waiting to be used by the military as a “death ray.” The belief is that the mild doses of electromagnetic pulses sent into the ionosphere are merely test firings, in anticipation of the really big jolt. A few of the very nervous have suggested that HAARP could direct its rays anywhere on Earth, and can be used to do anything from create major weather catastrophes on demand or cause earthquakes, to causing mass brain damage on a global scale by frying brain cells.

It should be noted that HAARP is not technically a U.S. military research site, and has a large complement of civilians working on the property. However, the project IS managed by a division of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Defense Department’s super high-tech “gee whiz” office that works with industry and universities to develop sophisticated technologies that might have a defense application (like the Internet, before Al Gore claimed it for himself).

Big Week for Global Warming & Climactic Change Carnival Barkers

It's been a big week for the perennially indignant Global Warming/Climate Change crowd.

Last weekend's "largest ever demonstration for civil disobedience over climate change" in Washington DC, featuring NASA scientist Jim ("Coal plants are factories of death") Hansen, along with hundr...thous...no, millions of protesters, was threatened by predictions of 12 inches of snow. Actually, less than a thousand showed up in the snowstorm to hear such working class heroes as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. call for energy company executives to be in jail "for all eternity." The protest was held at the gates of the Capitol Power Plant with the goal of "shutting down" their coal-fired boiler. The plant opened as usual Monday morning.

Columnist Christopher Booker reports that Britain's Met Office, which has been one of the UK's biggest sources of global warming hysterics for two decades, was forced to admit that this was Britain's coldest winter in 13 years. This after predicting that 2007 would be the warmest year on record globally (whereupon global temperatures plummeted 1° Celsius and wrecking all of those predictive computer models), and stubbornly sticking to their guns with a similar prediction for 2009.

Brendan O'Neill's column on Spiked-online.com reports:

This weekend, the University of West England is hosting a major conference on climate change denial. Strikingly, it’s being organised by the university’s Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. It will be a gathering of those from the top of society – ‘psychotherapists, social researchers, climate change activists, eco-psychologists’ – who will analyse those at the bottom of society, as if we were so many flitting, irrational amoeba under an eco-microscope. The organisers say the conference will explore how ‘denial’ is a product of both ‘addiction and consumption’ and is the ‘consequence of living in a perverse culture which encourages collusion, complacency and irresponsibility’. It is a testament to the dumbed-down, debate-phobic nature of the modern academy that a conference is being held not to explore ideas – to interrogate, analyse and fight over them – but to tag them as perverse.

Leading green writers have welcomed the West England get-together to study the denying masses. One eco-columnist says the conference might generate ideas for dealing with those who are ‘pathologically’ opposed to the environmental movement..

At the Wall Street Journal's California Economics conference, Nobel prize collector Al Gore refused to answer questions from reporters, but was questioned during his presentation by the audience. Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” asked for the opportunity to debate Gore over his many global warming claims of urgency to curb greenhouse gasses. Gore declined the offer.

“I want to be polite to you,” Mr. Gore responded. But, no. “The scientific community has gone through this chapter and verse. We have long since passed the time when we should pretend this is a ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ issue,” he said. “It’s not a matter of theory or conjecture, for goodness sake,” he added

.

How dare anyone question him? He wouldn't have become an ex-senator worth over $200 million and an investor in a private equity firm that stands to make billions on its environmental scare tactic investments if he didn't know what he was talking about!

What got very little press, unfortunately, was the Heartland Institute's 2009 International Conference on Climate Change this weekend in New York. It's theme was "Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis?" Eight hundred were expected to attend the conference, including more than 70 presenters:

•Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic and of the European Union. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he declared, “Environmentalism and the global warming alarmism is challenging our freedom. I’m afraid that the current crisis will be misused for radically constraining the functioning of the markets and market economy all around the world.”

•American astronaut Dr. Jack Schmitt--the last living man to walk on the moon--a geologist Ph.D. who has contended he has seen “too many of [my] colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming.”

•William Gray, Colorado State University, who claims global warming alarmists have hijacked the American Meteorological Society.

•Richard Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the world’s leading experts in dynamic meteorology, especially planetary waves.

•Stephen McIntyre, primary author of Climate Audit, a blog devoted to the analysis and discussion of climate data. He is a devastating critic of the temperature record of the past 1,000 years, particularly the work of Michael E. Mann, creator of the infamous “hockey stick” graph. That graph--thoroughly discredited in scientific circles--supposedly proved that mankind is responsible for a sharp increase in greenhouse gases.

•Arthur Robinson, curator of a global warming petition signed by more than 32,000 American scientists, including more than 10,000 with doctorate degrees, rejecting the alarmist assertion that global warming has put the Earth in crisis and is caused primarily by mankind.

•Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

•Roy Spencer, University of Alabama at Huntsville, principal research scientist and team leader on NASA’s Aqua satellite.
Don Easterbrook, professor of geology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, who will present new data showing “the most recent global warming that began in 1977 is over, and the Earth has entered a new phase of global cooling.”

Of course, the fact that Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, Neptune's moon Triton and other bodies in our solar system show identical warming trends with the Earth couldn't possibly mean the Sun has anything to do with climate change.

And here I thought Al Gore said the debate was over?

Browner: Obama's Socialist Climate Czar

The now severely debunked global warming scare still has a friend in the new president, who has appointed his own "Climate Czar" (why do we still insist on using Russian monarchial terms for these jobs?), Carol Browner. But it turns out Browner is one more on the bandwagon for a global government, and a self-confessed Socialist.

According to the Washington Times today,

"Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama's pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for "global governance" and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner's name and biography had been removed from Socialist International's Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group's congress in Greece was still available."