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."

Comments

Re:Also from the article...

[tgd]

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.

Re:Also from the article...

[Jimmy_B]

"... The Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions estimates that 1.5 million of Beijing's natives will have been displaced from their homes by government edict when the Olympics finally begins." Someone please try to justify evicting one and a half million people for the Olympics.

Please cite your sources. I tracked down your source, the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions Violator Award - Beijing. From that same article, however,

The main areas in which evictions have been carried out within the Municipality of Beijing during the period between 2000 and 2007 are neighbourhoods in the four central districts of the capital where overcrowding and old or dangerous housing is common; namely Dongcheng, Xicheng, Chongwen and Xuanwu. Large-scale evictions have also been carried out in several Chengzhongcun (literally, villages in the city), poor informal settlements comprising housing that has not been approved for construction, does not comply with building codes and typically is not properly serviced.

They aren't evicting people to clear space for new development, they're evicting people from unsafe, overcrowded shanties. Sounds like they should've demolished those buildings a long time ago, but they're just getting around to it now because they don't want the rest of the world to see how bad they were.

Re:Also from the article...

[prisoner-of-enigma]

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.