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China to Use Silver Iodide & Dry Ice to Control the Weather
eldavojohn writes "While we made light of it before, the MIT Review is taking a serious look at China's plans to prevent rain over their open 91,000 seat arena for The Olympics. From the article: 'China's national weather-engineering program is also the world's largest, with approximately 1,500 weather modification professionals directing 30 aircraft and their crews, as well as 37,000 part-time workers — mostly peasant farmers — who are on call to blast away at clouds with 7,113 anti-aircraft guns and 4,991 rocket launchers.' They plan on demonstrating their ability to control the weather to the rest of the world, and expanding on their abilities in the future."
For what its worth, Atlanta did the same thing in 1996. The whole Olympic Centennial Park area, all the new stadiums, etc were all built in former slums occupied by people who were strangely no longer in Atlanta after.
I don't know about silver iodide, but I know that silver nitrate (AgNO3) stains a dark color, but it's only superficial (in that it'll fade as your skin cycles off). On the other hand, this may cause a sudden crash in the popularity of the Blue Man Group if this comes through... Regarding the smog though, I've heard from numerous people (probably all quoting the same source though) that to alleviate the problem of pollution, China is halting the most pollutive factories in/around the city for 1 to 3 months before the Olympics.
You're thinking of Colloidal Silver.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloidal_silver
It causes a condition called Argyria, which turns the skin permanently blueish-gray.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyria
I'm not sure if other silver-based chemicals also have the same effect or not.
Check out this dude who took too much of the stuff:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XV0I6Q70Yw
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In soviet china, every cloud has a silver lining. Weather they like it or not!
China has lots of rain in this area. They idea is make the rain happen west of the area. That way, the sky is dry as it moves over the crowd. In addition,the amount of silver iodide is a trivial amount.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I have lived in the Atlanta area since 1976. I worked in the downtown area of Atlanta from 1983 to 1997. I worked at the Gold Dome Capital building, the Federal Reserve Bank and I even worked for ACOG/IBM on the 6th floor of the Apparel Mart downtown Atlanta for the Olympics.
Several months leading up to the 1996 games, it was true that the Atlanta police were rounding up the homeless. But, the city was also paying to move them to shelters/YMCA. Although they did displace occupants of the downtown area, I would fathom an educational guestimate that it was less than 5,000 people. Far less than the 1.5 million people of China.
Once the Olympics were over in Atlanta, and the city quit paying for the shelters, the homeless did return.
The only thing that has changed since then, is better policing of the downtown Atlanta area and upholding the loitering laws in place since the early 70's.
I've been to Centennial Park in the last year at night and actually felt safe to walk around. I didn't feel like that in the late 80's with a class at Georgia State University ending at 10pm and having to walk from there to the Five Points Marta Station.
I wonder what is going to happen to the 1.5 million people after the Olympics in China is over.
Nathan
...that if you take too much of it turns your skin blue and is irreversible. The condition of drinking way too much of this is called Argyria."What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?" - Doctor Who
sure, just as soon as someone justify evicting 30 or more families to build a mall or walmart. You do have a point here, but I think you're exaggerating some figures and it's hurting your argument. You claim "30 or more families" are "evict[ed]" from their homes every six months to build a Wal-Mart or a mall. Somehow I doubt this is true for a number of reasons.
First, the "big box" stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, etc. try to find unoccupied land when they can because it's cheaper. Sure, in urbanized areas that's difficult or impossible, which is why their second choice is demolishing/renovating older shopping centers, warehouses, and so forth. There's several of these going on within ten miles of my home right now. Again, this is cheaper (and easier on the PR) than going after residential areas. The absolute last choice is a residential area because it's more expensive, more time consuming, and -- as you've noted in your argument -- it pisses people off sometimes.
Second, I question your use of the term "evict." Evict means they're forcibly parted from their property. This does happen from time to time, and when it does it makes news. There have been documented cases of eminent domain abuse centered around these types of stores, and you're quite right to complain about them. That is your argument: the encroachment on private property rights by local city zoning councils (which are after sales tax dollars) and the businesses they "work" for (who want your sales dollars and pay politicians with campaign contributions). You hurt yourself, though, by claiming it happens "almost every 6 months" to 30 families. The aforementioned abuses are inexcusable, but they are much rarer than you claim.
Third, you attempt to draw some equivalence between China displacing 1.5M people and our eminent domain abuses. That is a poor analogy for many reasons, not the least of which is that the Chinese have much more limited property rights than Americans do to begin with. Also, using your very own numbers, you claim 30 families are uprooted every six months in the U.S., and you claim it's been going on "for decades." By my calculations on your numbers (numbers I disagree with, BTW), the "fuckers in the USA" displace a maximum of 60 families a year. Assuming 3 people constitutes a family, that's 180 people per year. At this rate it would take over eight thousand years for the "fuckers in the USA" to displace 1.5M people, something the Chinese are doing in far less than a decade. Even that number pales when compared to the relocation required for the Three Gorges Dam project. Yet you seem to have a problem determining the difference in scale, morally equivocating one to the other.
Like I said, your argument against eminent domain abuses are quite valid, but your exaggeration and hyperbole degenerates your argument into frothing at the mouth. What we're doing with eminent domain abuse in this country is bad, but what's going on in places like China is much, much worse...so much so that it really diminishes the more egregious abuse by trying to link it with the lesser abuse.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"As it is, the USA has put more money into that city as of late than most of the rest of the world's cities have ever received in the aftermath of a natural disaster" Yeah, it's called gentrification.
If by "gentrification" you mean trying to build million dollar mansions on the lots where all the fifty-thousand dollar homes fell over, then bitching and whining like Trent "Why isn't my home fixed yet?!" Lott about how you can't find carpenters to work for below prevailing wage when they can't afford a place to sleep after a hard day's work, then yeah, exactly.
Yeah, you're right, but the Supreme Court has unfortunately said otherwise.
I pretty much agree that the Olympics are going to be a huge expenditure with few tangible results, but I find it pretty unsurprising China is so gung-ho about this. In my opinion, hosting the Olympic games satisfies several agendas:
I don't mean to be overly cynical about the whole affair -- I had several Chinese friends who were ecstatic when it was announced that China would host the Olympics, and I'm happy for them. But in response to the original post, the Olympics often seem to be huge expenditures that may or may not pay off. Not to be unfair to developing nations, but... why do we constantly have to build new stadiums to accommodate the Olympics? Can't we just use the old ones we built, and focus more on the games and less on the "boom and bust" economics of building the infrastructure every 4 years?
The moon may be smaller than the earth, but it's much farther away!
We call it something different, but there is a lot of money spent on "cloud seeding" in the USA every year. There is some debate over whether or not it is effective, but apparently the Chinese aren't the only "bludgeoning buffoons" around here.
I don't know about silver iodide, but colloidal silver, which is what people take to fight bacteria ( I'm making no implied claims about it's efficacy ), is not harmful. You can take too much of it, and since it never leaves your cells, you do get colored blue, but there are no health consequences from it ( benefit claims notwithstanding. )
The libertarian candidate for Senator from Montana on the last go around took too much before Y2K, and he's as blue as his suit jacket! IMHO, didn't help the libertarian party's 'image' problem. They ran the blue guy for senator? What, did he beat out the guy with three arms?
If silver were bad for your skin, they wouldn't make jewelry out of it.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
You're thinking of silver nitrate. A buddy of mine spilled some on his hand. Took about 3 weeks for it to come out.
I think what they're looking at doing is identifying clouds with potential to rain on the olympics, and hitting them early with silver iodide to induce them to rain out before they get there. It has a crystal structure similar to ice, so it can induce freezing in clouds.
Also, it is not soluble in water (well highly insoluble), nor is it very toxic. It rates a 2 on the NFPA 704 Blue scale
Someone get this guy a cookie! Additionally, NO wasn't the only Katrina victim, but only conspiracy theories make the news.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
The way weather modification works (if it ever does: the jury's out on that one) is to find rain-bearing clouds and seed them so that the rain or hail falls somewhere other than where it would have normally fallen. The first thing, then, is to detect precipitation aloft. Pretty much the only way to do that is with weather radars -- satellite data is usually too coarse and not collected often enough.
... mountains. Which radar can not see through. And many of the storms do initiate over those hills.
Does Beijing have a weather radar? Good thing you asked. The Chinese government recently bought a S-band weather radar so that they could use it for the Beijing Olympic games. Unfortunately, being communists (see: East Germany), they decided that the best place to install the radar was in the middle of the city so that it could be admired by the proletariat.
Why is this funny? Because:
(a) weather radars have a "cone of silence". The radar is on the ground and has to see up high with a relatively flat beam. This means that for around 30km around the radar, it doesn't see squat. In other words, much of Beijing is in the cone of silence of the "Beijing" radar. (For comparision, the weather radar that covers Dallas in at Dallas/Fort Worth airport, far enough away from the two cities to get a good view of the weather over both of them).
(b) Most storms that hit Beijing move from West to East (as it does in most of the Northern Hemisphere). And to the west of Beijing are
Bottom line? It's going to be hard to see the storms coming. Let alone modify the weather.
Disclaimer: my views, not my employer's.
As requested, documentation:
RE: killing the birds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_sparrow_campaign
"It was decided that all the peasants in China should bang pots and pans and run around to make the sparrows fly away in fear."
Eye witness account of Great Sparrow Campaign:
http://zonaeuropa.com/20061130_1.htm
"As I recalled, my fellow students and I climbed onto some tall trees on the side of the road and banged our gongs, drums, washbasins and anything else that can make loud noises. The sparrows were forced to keep flying until they dropped dead from fatigue."
Beijing is not right next to the Gobi Desert, but it is downwind from it when the winds shift that way in the Spring. The rest of the year, it's not. But Beijing at any other time of the year, on a windy day the atmospheric effect is like being in a dust storm.
RE: Air quality in Beijing
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:HjyJWuowpeUJ:www.usembassy-china.org.cn/sandt/estnews0915.htm+beijing+air+quality+ranking&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=21&gl=us
"Beijing ranked second-worst out of 47 Chinese cities in a 1999 SEPA air pollution ranking "
RE: Concerns with the Three Gorges:
(from 2001)
http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/sijpkes/arch374/winter2001/dbiggs/three.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam
For good measure, a couple links on deforestation in China:
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/pcs/state/chinaeco/forest.htm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19203227
China's government is not comprised of idiots, but their ideologically-driven policies and lack of free and open discussion in a robust civil society lead to actions and results that are adverse to their own interests at a rate greater than that in countries that do have the ability to contest government policy.
The point of my post was that in China under the CCP, there is a history of trampling the environment for the sake of, previously, Mao's mass campaigns, and now, for the sake of rampant economic development. There is also a concommitant pattern of wildly over-engineering the environment when common sense would do. It is within that context that the story about cloud-seeding resonated.
So the post was a bit of a hip-shot. The above links and many more could have been initially provided, but it's Slashdot and the tone of the post was meant to be wry and few, even on this site, want to wade through a dissertation in response to every article. Thus, the comments were couched under the term, "anecdote."
But as an East Asian studies scholar who's lived there for significant swathes of time over the past 18 years, the comments were not pulled entirely out of thin air. Even a casual visitor to Japan can observe that many products have humorous names or sayings in English on them, such as Calpis Water or Poccari Sweat. Most people do not demand academic citation upon hearing about such a thing--they accept them for what they are: anecdotes.
It was in that spirit that the stories were relayed.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.