Baseless 'weather warfare' claims spread as deadly heat strikes multiple continents
- Published on July 7, 2026 at 22:07
- 3 min read
- By Stevie ROSENFELD, Manon JACOB
As record-breaking heat killed thousands of people in North America and Europe in June and July, social media posts claimed weather manipulation by the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP) in Alaska was to blame. The research center is the focus of frequent conspiracy theories that purport its radio transmissions can control the weather, but scientists said HAARP signals cannot manipulate or trigger heatwaves which are being supercharged by human emissions.
"They are using HAARP to intentionally cook us alive. Countries that are not equipped to handle extremely hot weather are being targeted," claims a July 1, 2026 Facebook post.
Similar posts circulated across platforms claiming HAARP was to blame for the high temperatures which triggered thousands of excess deaths across Europe. In North America, extreme weather disrupted several Canada Day and American Independence Day celebrations.
Some supporters of US President Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement, travelling to the nation's capital for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, also claimed the scorching heat stemmed from "weather warfare."
Kylie Jane Kremer, executive director of the conservative organization Women for America First, alleged "geoengineered" weather was being used to sabotage the White House's July Fourth plans.
The US Air Force founded the HAARP research station before transferring control to the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2015 (archived here). The facility is used to study atmospheric activity with high-frequency transmitters and has inspired repeatedly debunked conspiratorial claims alleging HAARP can manipulate the weather and initiate natural disasters such as earthquakes, wildfires and hurricanes.
Experts similarly told AFP that neither HAARP nor any other technology can manufacture heatwaves like the ones recently observed across Europe and North America. Instead, emissions from industrial activities have supercharged extreme heat over a very short window of Earth's history.
No HAARP impact
HAARP director Jessica Matthews told AFP on July 1 that the radio waves transmitted by Alaska based-research station reach a frequency that cannot be absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere and that the facility is "simply unable to generate or amplify weather events."
Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center (archived here), also told AFP on July 6 that HAARP "has no influence on weather at all, and anyone who believes it does has no factual understanding of interactions between high-frequency radio waves and the atmosphere."
She said no potential weather modification experiments could come remotely close to warming the planet as much as carbon pollution does.
"Humans are indeed making heatwaves more intense, frequent, expansive, and prolonged by substantially adding to the amounts of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere," she said.
Heat domes
Portland State University climate scientist, Paul Loikith, said on July 2 that the European and American heatwaves qualified as "heat domes," a powerful meteorological phenomenon which combines exceptionally high surface heat with strong upper atmospheric pressure to form a "dome" of trapped heat (archived here and here).
The weather mechanisms observed in late June and early July have "always caused heatwaves in Europe and the US," Loikith noted. But, he said, there was no clear physical or scientific mechanism tying together the recent episodes on the two continents.
Temperature records were rewritten across Europe in June. The heat dome in this case trapped hot air from North Africa over the Iberian Peninsula before spreading as far as the United Kingdom, eventually weakening over central and eastern parts of the continent in early July.
A recent analysis by scientific consortium World Weather Attribution (WWA) concluded that such intense heat is "increasing rapidly even in living memory, with such events tens to hundreds of times more likely since only 2003 and virtually impossible just 50 years ago" (archived here and here).
The extreme heat that roasted the United States early July was also forecast with precise accuracy a week preceding the events per standard weather forecast models, making any argument about a last-minute geoengineered manipulation null, environmental scientist Michael Mann said in a July 2 email to AFP (archived here).
AFP has debunked other claims about heatwaves and climate change.
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