Debunking the HAARP Mythology

This article is in response to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR6O3kJTqaI, a video posted by a good friend of mine to his Facebook Profile.

To begin with, both of the experiments conducted by Dr. Agnew occurred more or less exactly as they were depicted in the History Channel special. I take no issue with his methods or his results. The issue I'll be addressing today are his conclusions.

Again, the simulations were 100% real, I'll just use his stated numbers and some basic arithmetic to extrapolate out to in situ results.

His conclusions are as follows:

1) ELF waves can disrupt weather patterns.
2) Earthquakes are weather.
3) ELF generators can cause earthquakes.
4) These effects can be reproduced in the real world with a similar outcome.

We'll start with the third conclusion, for reasons that should soon be clear. Firstly, Dr. Brooks Agnew had to switch from electromagnetic waves to pressure waves to perform the earthquake experiment.

As a rough estimation Dr. Agnew had less than 10 kg of sand in that tank and stated that he used 30 watts of power to power the speaker in the demonstration.

If it takes a 30 watt speaker to vibrate 10 kg of sand, it would take a 3 septillion watt speaker to move 60 sextillion kgs of earth, the generally accepted mass of our planet. So unless the mole men have substantially hollowed out our planet since the measurable mass was last calculated, you'd need to be able to harness the power output of a small sun to replicate his results on a global scale.

Now I hear your objection, the whole world didn't shake, only a small part, therefor we can cut that power requirement back. This brings us to our second point, and mathematical proof of the fallacy of his first conclusion.

To address the first conclusion, as the video said, HAARP is alleged to effect the ionosphere. It does this by transmitting Extremely Low Frequency radio waves, more commonly known as ELF waves.

To replicate the demonstrated effect on an actual cloud would require physically containing a column of air in a manner similar to the glass chamber used in the experiment. Now discounting the engineering hurdles and physical impossibility of actually doing that, we'll assume for the sake of argument that someone went to Alaska, built a glass cylinder many miles in height and diameter, and succeeded in trapping a cloud. Even with all of that accomplished, you run into the next hurdle.

Due to the Inverse Square Law it would require an amount of energy that grew exponentially with the distance from cloud to source as opposed to linearly with mass as estimated with the sound experiment. To produce a measurable ELF effect on a cloud in situ with a fixed and stationary ground antenna requires an amount of power that would need to be measured on a galactic scale.

And as far as his motivations, to cite my friend from our earlier discussion, "Money, Power, Etc..." Or, more reasonably, fanaticism. People fear what they don't understand. It's natural.

First rule of pseudoscience, correlation always equals causation. Hence since in one ELF experiment, there was an earthquake, one that by his own admission was 1000 times weaker than the one that struck Haiti (the Richter scale is logarithmic), all ELF cause earthquakes. It is a common logical fallacy, even listed on the website www.logicalfallacies.info under "Hasty Generalization". There are several other names for it, but it is commonly attributed to the human brain's ingrained desire for patternicity, i.e. it was much safer in our evolutionary past to see a lion where there was no lion and run from nothing than to not see a lion where there was one and get eaten.

From there you can extrapolate to confirmation bias, since the desired results would have been physically impossible to reproduce with an ELF generator he switched to a standard stereo speaker, which produces pressure waves. Its is left up to the viewer to assume that a 30 watt antenna behaves the same way a 30 watt speaker does, but since we only saw an experiment that produced the desired results, and not the physically impossible experiment with the actual materials, anyone who does not have a solid grasp of physics would have to assume that the antenna would produce the same effect.

Since I know my light bulb does not work the same way my stereo does (one produces longitudinal electromagnetic waves that can travel through a vacuum very similar to an ELF antenna, and the other is a speaker), I can see that his argument is false.

It is an endemic problem in our nation. I've watched stockbrokers sell penny stocks to old ladies, and snake oil salesmen stalk the ICU peddling powdered multivitamins to the families of terminally ill patients always preying on the ignorance of their intended victims. I find it no less reprehensible when a man of "science" conducts misleading "experiments" for the sake of a TV documentary, which BTW is where the first clip in that YouTube mashup is from, you can see the logo in the corner. Which brings us back to the root of all evil and his first motivation, money.

Science is not magic. If you cannot reproduce the results yourself, they're not real. You can build a radio antenna, tune it to Extremely Low Frequencies, and put it next to a sand table. You can pump it to any output you want, and all you'll do is run up your electric bill. Radio waves, regardless of frequency do not produce pressure waves. Not unless you harness them with a second antenna, and connect that to a radio tuner, and connect that to a speaker.