Society
Hidden hands behind Katrina
Published 03 October 2005
Observations on weather
Attentive readers of the web have known for some time that there was nothing random or natural about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Much bigger forces have apparently been at work around the Gulf of Mexico, and I don't mean global warming.
Reverend Bill Shanks, of the New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans, points out that his city is now free of abortion, sodomites, witchcraft and false religion. "God simply, I believe, in His mercy, purged all that stuff out of there."
Less predictable, perhaps, are the ideas of Scott Stevens, an Idaho weatherman convinced that Katrina was caused by "weather modification technology". According to Stevens, Japan's Yakuza mafia used a Russian-made electromagnetic generator to produce the hurricane. Why? To avenge the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. Apparently the technology blurs "the lines between the third and fourth dimension", playing with the "energy membrane that separates the two dimensions". And, of course, Katrina is a "very Russian-sounding" name. QED.
It would be easy to dismiss Stevens as a crank were it not the case that, as seems to happen so often, reality is chasing to catch up with fantasy. Last March a Republican senator from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison, introduced a bill to establish the Weather Modification Operations and Research Board. Now before committee, the bill defines weather modification as "changing or controlling, or attempting to change or control, by artificial methods the natural development of atmospheric cloud forms or precipitation forms which occur in the troposphere" (the part of the atmosphere where most weather happens). The board's duties would include evaluating the "efficacy" of "purposeful" weather modification.
One possibility, apparently, is cloud seeding experiments, and perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that a senator from arid Texas is in favour of developing that. But it doesn't stop there.
Back in 1996 the US military's Air University in Alabama produced a paper entitled Weather as a Force Multiplier: owning the weather in 2025, outlining "a strategy for the use of a future weather-modification system to achieve military objectives". It declared that "from enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns, to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary".
In Alaska, meanwhile, there is the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, run by the air force and navy, which is trying "to exploit emerging ionosphere and high-power radio technology for new military systems applications". So beware. Somewhere up there a cloud may have your name on it.
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