Original article (in Croatian) was published on 04/08/2023; Author: Melita Vrsaljko
In 1999, some members of the European Parliament believed that HAARP was a climate weapon. They wrote a proposal for a resolution that was not adopted.
For the first time, the EU admits in one of its reports that HAARP is a climate weapon. Where are the idiots who claimed that it was all a conspiracy theory?
This claim is from a Facebook post that users continued to share. It was shared 49 times, and 202 Facebook users “liked” it. An identical post also appears on other user profiles.
The author cites the German web portal Report24.news as a source, which often publishes disinformation about vaccines and the Covid-19 pandemic.
On July 19, the text regarding the report of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defense Policy of the European Parliament on the proposal for the Resolution on Environment, Security and Foreign Policy from 1999 was published on that website. The report also mentions HAARP. Report24.news posted a link to the text of the report in German.
Let us remind you that HAARP is a military-civilian program (full name The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program) which is carried out in American Alaska and uses high-frequency radio waves to research the upper parts of the Earth’s atmosphere.
It consists of a series of high-frequency radio antennas located in the town of Gakona. HAARP was launched by the US military in the early 1990s, and today the research tools within that program are managed by the University of Alaska.
The program is a frequent target of conspiracy theorists who claim that it is a weather-manipulating project. Although several such programs are carried out in the world, HAARP in Alaska is the largest, so it is not surprising that it is also the most mentioned.
The report of the European Parliament from 1999 does not focus exclusively on HAARP, but on environmental protection and the impact that war can have on ecology, etc. In the report, the European Commission is called upon to address the problems of water shortages, deforestation and poverty, but also warning of military activities that leave ecological consequences.
It is in this context that the report mentions HAARP, which is described as a “weaponized system capable of disrupting the climate”. In the report, which contains a proposal for a resolution addressed to Parliament, HAARP is explicitly highlighted as an example of military research for the purpose of weather manipulation. Such a description of HAARP, as Faktograf wrote on several occasions, is not factually based.
The discussion that took place in the institutions of the European Union at the end of the nineties also appeared in the posts of some other Facebook users, where it was also presented as the ultimate proof of the harmfulness of HAARP. That’s not true though.
Background
The Committee for Foreign Affairs, Security and Defense Policy and the Committee for the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Protection, at the request of the European Parliament, discussed and then made a report on the proposal for a Resolution on Environment, Security and Foreign Policy.
As they reported on that occasion, in February 1998 the parliamentary Subcommittee on Security and Disarmament held a debate that included the subject of HAARP. NATO and the USA were invited to send their representatives, which in the end they did not do.
In its 1999 report, the Committee states that similar programs are used in Norway as well as in the “former Soviet Union” and that they are used for many purposes. “If used as a military weapon, it can have a devastating effect on the enemy”, the Committee’s report said.
In addition, according to the document, HAARP could result in changes in weather patterns, especially in sensitive regions of Antarctica. The occurrence of holes in the ionosphere is cited as a harmful consequence of HAARP.
“With its far-reaching environmental impact, HAARP is a matter of global concern, and we must ask whether its benefits really outweigh the risks. The environmental impact and the ethical aspect must be carefully examined before any further research and testing. HAARP is a project that the public knows almost nothing about, and that needs to be fixed”, the Committee’s conclusions state.
In a proposal for a resolution sent to the European Parliament in 1999, the Committee states that HAARP, “due to its far-reaching impact on the environment, represents a global concern” and calls for “an independent international body to examine its legal, ecological and ethical implications before any further research and testing”.
The document also requests the Scientific and Technological Options Assessment (STOA) Committee to examine the technical and scientific characteristics of HAARP to assess the exact nature and degree of risk that the program poses to the local and global environment and public health in general.
Likewise, the European Commission is invited, in cooperation with the governments of Sweden, Finland, Norway and the Russian Federation, to examine the environmental and public health implications of the HAARP program for Arctic Europe and to report its findings to the Parliament.
The result?
In the end, this did not happen, that is, the Commission did absolutely nothing. They didn’t even have to because the resolution that was proposed in the European Parliament was never voted on. Proposals for resolutions, namely, are not legally binding documents nor do they represent “recognition” by the European Union of anything.
Namely, members of the European Parliament have the right to create any resolution and ask the Parliament to vote on it, in the same way that, for example, opposition representatives in the Croatian Parliament can propose legislative changes, but only adopted resolutions really become a common position or a common policy European Union.
On several occasions, the European parliamentarians subsequently mentioned the aforementioned report from the late nineties.
For example, in 2003, a group of representatives asked the Commission whether there are environmental and public health implications for Arctic Europe arising from the HAARP program and what steps the Commission has taken to establish international standards for the impact of military action on the environment in peacetime.
“The High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) for Arctic Europe is a military program. The committee does not have the authority, or even the expertise, to conduct the investigation that the Parliament requests in paragraph 26 of its Resolution”, responded the Commission.
Despite the Commission’s declaration that the Committee for the Assessment of Scientific and Technological Options had no scope to examine HAARP’s scientific characteristics and risk assessment, members of the European Parliament in the years that followed continued to raise questions about what the Committee had done about HAARP.
Thus, in 2015, a group of representatives sent questions to the Commission related to HAARP – whether this program is considered a weapon, what is its purpose, where is it installed and what are its powers.
On that occasion, the Commission responded that the body is aware of the parliamentary Subcommittee on Security and Disarmament’s hearings and reports from 1999, but that the issue of HAARP has not recently been discussed in the relevant EU bodies, nor is the Commission aware of any recent initiatives to put HAARP on the agenda.
By the way, the answers that the representatives requested from the European Commission can be found on the pages of the HAARP program, where it is explained in detail how HAARP works and what it is used for.
Disinformation about HAARP
There are several unsubstantiated claims made in the aforementioned report and in Facebook posts that refer to it.
It should be noted that the authors of that report are not scientists, but politicians. Their debate on HAARP in the European Parliament took place only a few years after the program began to operate, during the period when numerous disinformation began to emerge around the project. They were subsequently refuted by numerous experts, but they continued to circulate on the Internet.
Also, the text of the proposed resolution is contradictory. Although HAARP is titled as a “weapon system that disrupts the climate”, it is also written that the impact on the environment and the ethical aspects of this program have yet to be examined.
First, therefore, it is stated that HAARP has a far-reaching impact on the environment, and then, in the second part, the need to examine the implications of using that system is mentioned. It is unfounded to simultaneously claim that the program has a far-reaching impact on the environment and that the impact on the environment has yet to be examined.
It is therefore incorrect to claim that the EU “recognizes” that HAARP is a climate weapon since the proposed resolution was never adopted, probably due to the factual inaccuracies it contains.
Namely, no evidence is given for the claims about HAARP, but further research is called for. Even today, more than 20 years later, there is no evidence based on which one could conclude that HAARP is a climate weapon. Moreover, various experts claim that this is simply not possible (1, 2, 3).
HAARP does not control the weather
Namely, high-frequency radio transmissions deal with interaction with ionized particles in the ionosphere, above 100 km altitude. It is part of the atmosphere through which radio waves travel that enable communication over long distances, which is also the reason why the military is interested in researching the ionosphere.
Most of the weather on Earth’s surface occurs in the troposphere and stratosphere, up to about 15 kilometres above sea level (while the lowest band of the ionosphere starts at about 60-70 km above sea level and goes up to 500 km). Therefore, the allegation of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Protection from 1999 that HAARP seeks to impact the biosphere, the part of the atmosphere in which living beings are found, is incorrect.
Bruce Ward, an ionosphere researcher at the University of Adelaide in Australia, told the AAP web portal that there is no possibility that HAARP affects the weather on Earth.
“For us to have any effect on weather, there would have to be some physical phenomena that transfer energy to the lower layers of the atmosphere in a very non-linear way, that is, increase it enormously”, he explained.
Claims that HAARP is responsible for earthquakes and almost all types of weather disasters were previously shared on social networks, which is also not true (1, 2, 3).
In such disinformation, HAARP is almost always presented as a “secret project” about which little is known, although the very location where the antennas are located is open to the public once a year. In addition, scientists using findings from HAARP regularly publish their work publicly.
In conclusion, the fact that some members of the European Parliament made a report in which HAARP is unfoundedly described as a climate weapon, does not mean that the EU “recognized” that this program is dangerous or harmful. Moreover, scientists specializing in such research claim that HAARP is harmless to humans and the environment.