HAARP

Excerpted from a discussion on one of the online lists. The folks who espouse the anti-HAARP opinion sound like they'd fit in well with thie Art Bell show crowd. FWIW, ERP is effective radiated power, a radio-frequency antenna metric of interest. I followed much of this due to my having been in Alaska earlier this summer.

Background:
HAARP Official site: http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/

The Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program

http://www.haarp.net/
http://www.earthpulse.com/src/category.asp?catid=1
http://www.earthpulse.com/src/subcategory.asp?catid=1&subcatid=2
from the latter (same authors as haarp.net)

Not exactly...the Anti-HAARP crowd are using the ERP numbers to
suggest that the DOD/whoever is going to blow up the ionosphere and
harm us all. This includes the son of Alaska representative Begich,
who was lost in an airplane over some huge glacier between Anchorage
and Valdez.

But what these folks do is use the ERP as the basis for their heating
calcs, not realizing that ERP is a fiction and basically says: this
transmitter of 1000 watts with a 20 dB gain antenna is equal to a
100,000 watt transmitter feeding a dipole. It doesn't mean that
there's now 100,000 watts of power available to heat the atmosphere.
It means there's 100x what the fraction of the 1000 watts that the
dipole would radiate into the same segment of the sphere. The
equations that were done for dipoles take into account the
directional factor of the transmitting antenna if you use the ERP.

Could They Short-Circuit Earth?
Earth as a spherical electrical system is a fairly well-accepted
model. However, those experimenters who want to make unnatural power
connections between parts of this system might not be thinking of
possible consequences. Electrical motors and generators can be caused
to wobble when their circuits are affected. Could human activities
cause a significant change in a planet's electrical circuit or
electrical field? A paper in the respected journal Science deals with
manmade ionization from radioactive material, but perhaps it could
also be studied with HAARP-type skybusters in mind:

"For example, while changes in the earth's electric field resulting
from a solar flare modulating conductivity may have only a barely
detectable effect on meteorology, the situation may be different in
regard to electric field changes caused by manmade ionization..."

Finally, there's this totally whacked-out scenario (especially
considering beam angles and ERP vs real power arguments):

http://www.brojon.org/frontpage/HAARP_Columbia.html