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How China learned to fix the weather
Beijing snowfall was created by cloud-seeding to help solve water shortages
When heavy snow blanketed Beijing over the weekend, it was the earliest it had fallen on the Chinese capital since 1987. But the snowfall was not a meteorological anomaly, it was a purposeful act by the increasingly influential Beijing Weather Modification Office, part of a national network which employs 37,000 people across China to use cloud-seeding technology to adapt the country's climate.
With northern China still struggling from water shortages after a hot, dry summer, local officials organised workers to fire rockets carrying 186 doses of silver iodide into the sky over the course of Saturday night and Sunday morning. This caused the heavy clouds which had been covering Beijing to precipitate, dropping approximately 16m cubic metres of snow on areas affected by the drought, and causing temperatures to plummet under zero.
Zhang Qiang, the deputy director of the weather modification office, told the Guardian: "In terms of the influence on crops, since the temperature will get warmer again soon it causes less harm than benefit to farming. Water melted from snow just meets the demands of winter irrigation in agriculture."
With their vast workforce, aeroplanes and hundreds of lasers, the Chinese use weather modification more widely and publicly than any other country in the world.
With an annual budget of over $63m, they mainly intervene to make it rain after droughts or to prevent hailstorms, and occasionally diversify into putting out fires or improving conditions after damaging dust storms. In total, state statistics indicate that nationwide weather modification programmes caused fully 7.4 trillion cubic feet, or more than 200 squared kilometers, of rain to fall between 1995 and 2003.
The Chinese also use this technology to ensure that showpiece occasions go ahead without a hitch. In 1997 they provided snow on New Year's Day, and last summer, as the world's attention focused on Beijing, more than 1,100 rockets were fired into the atmosphere to stop a band of showers from menacing the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
Likewise, the Chinese used the technology to make sure that the weather was immaculate earlier this autumn when they celebrated the 60th anniversary of Mao coming to power in 1949.
The principles of cloud-seeding were discovered in the US just after World War II, and one of the first scientists involved was Dr Bernard Vonnegut, brother of the novelist Kurt.
The US military used it for Operation Popeye, a plan to extend the monsoon season over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos during the Vietnam conflict, under the slogan of 'make mud, not war'.
The Russian military seeded clouds to stop radioactive material reaching Moscow after the Chernobyl disaster. And there is a conspiracy theory that the US government used such methods to make it rain for the duration of Woodstock. ·
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This is ridiculous, and known as the Prosecutor's Fallacy. An unusual event (early, heavy snow) and a supposed causative agent (silver iodide) cannot be linked together like this. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that the silver iodide caused the snowfall. Since the event described, there have been more heavy, crippling snowfalls. The Chinese would like their people to think that they can control even the weather. But you don't have to believe the propaganda.
Excerpt from 'What is the Primary Funamental Right?'
"The environmentalist broadsheet Planet Ark reported on 16th October 2006 that "Zhang Wenjing, glacier expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, discounted previous forecasts that glaciers across western China could disappear in decades or the Himalayan glaciers could melt away 50 years, Xinhua news agency reported.' "Those predictions may be excessively pessimistic," he said. "So far glaciers in the middle and eastern part of the Himalayas have not shrunk on any large scale."
The world wide fear of global warming through excessive CO2 emissions has undoubtedly helped reduce the amount of pollutants pushed into the atmosphere and into land fills which then leech into water ways. But 2007 cooled down by about 0.6c according to the four major global temperature keepers, Hadley, GISS, UAH, and RSS. No Sunspot activity was reported during 2007 and the world has lost the warmth it gained over the last 60 odd years in just 1 year. Many climatologists believe we are entering a new Ice Age which should arrive around 2040. If CO2 does cause global warming then maybe we should be increasing its output instead of trying to curtail it. "
http://www.primaryfundamentalright.org/index.php?pageName=pfrWhatIs
When their water supply from the Himalayas dries up as the ice melts ever faster, they will need this trick more and more, but it's unlikely to make up the difference, and could so easily lead to drought in other areas of China or bordering countries who may not take kindly to them stealing their rain. The answer isn't to manage the environment but to repair it.