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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."
Following the announcement in 2001 that the 2008 Games had been awarded to Beijing, the government of the People's Republic initiated $40 billion of new construction there, bringing 120,000 Chinese migrant workers into the city (at about $130 each a month) and triggering a five-year steel shortage worldwide. [...] 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. This preemptory modernization is of a piece with China's scale, its 1.32 billion population, and the authoritarian control exerted by its Communist central government, which nowadays is dominated by technocrats and engineers who favor mega-projects like the world's largest dam (the Three Gorges dam over the Yangtze River), its highest railway (the Qinghai-Tibet line), and even its biggest Ferris wheel (in Beijing, opening in 2009).
Someone please try to justify evicting one and a half million people for the Olympics.
I'm sure someone will try...which just proves that China's subtle information campaigns to attempt to make the world think that everything is rosy or somehow justified are working like a charm.
The Chinese government wants to use the Olympics to inject a dose of normalcy into their demeanor, but there is nothing normal about purposely and continually funding a genocide despite the requests and demands of every other nation in the world.
now if they could only control pollution...
Isn't Silver Iodide bad for you, specifically your skin? I know there's this concoction (that has silver) that if you take too much of it turns your skin blue and is irreversible.
If china pumps a ton of this stuff out, this will obviously get into the drinking water and then the athletes will drink that water as well as the local citizens and so you get blue skinned Chinese and athletes!
I think the US, UK, and its allies should boycott the Olympics. Of course I'd like our country to show China that democracy is way better than communism like we did to the Russians back in the hey-day, but China has smog (high levels of mercury and lead than any smog city in the world) and now silver iodide in their drinking water. I wouldn't want our strapping young athletes to end up with lungs like that of a smoker and have asthma attacks.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
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If you look at a list of countries that have hosted the olympic games in modern times, you'll notice that it consists of industrialised nations. By hosting the olympic games, China wants to show the world that they are now a member of the club.
Money? And lots of it, I'm sure. Just think of the taxes collected on every penny spent there: airfare, travel, meals, lodgings, souvenirs, equipment, entertainment, and so forth. The Olympics is a giant event with money being poured into all the infrastructure surrounding it.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Lets say YOU are in charge of a secret government program to try and control the weather. If you needed to conduct these tests would you:
A. Fly planes and dump chemicals over Cleveland, Ohio. Where any joe sixpack can look up and see the results.
B. Fly planes in one of the vast territories in which the human population is so sparse that you could walk in a straight line for days before even encountering a road? Or, barring that, the Pacific Ocean?
Extra Credit!!!!
For what nefarious purpose is the US government conspiring to control the sunny days in Cleveland?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
They gain honor, prestige, and recognition. And if you think those are less important than money... well, there's your cultural divide, right there in a nutshell.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Here in colorado, the lower part of the state has been using Silver Iodide for several years (basically, since the monster drought). This year they had to stop it because they were at 163% of normal. Was it the Silver? Do not know. But where it is not used, the amount is just slightly above 100%. So, it is possible that it is working. Now, what is needed is for us to build more resevoirs or start re-injecting back into the ground, rather than letting our water run off to other states.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No. Then we would simply accuse the Chinese of genetically engineering athletes (or at least socially engineering them, which is for some reason worse in my mind). That's basically what everyone said about Yao Ming, remember?
Basically, they can't win for losing. Here are some examples of what the average Westerner thinks of China and the Chinese:
1. There are a lot of them, and living conditions universally suck (but they don't know it because the Great Firewall won't let them go to those sites)
2. They pretty much read agitprop all day about crushing enemies of the people, or about doing Taiwan a favor and "reunifying" them, or something.
3. Most have jobs staffing assembly lines, gleefully turning out ridiculously unsafe products made of things like pure arsenic or asbestos. This includes food products. All of these products are cheap knockoffs of existing products designed in the West (especially the food products)
4. The rest are goldfarmers or farmers, regular type (i.e., "peasants")
5. The government universally treats its citizens like crap, unless you are some sort of apparatchik (witness: evictions for the Olympics).
The Olympics is China's big chance, on the eve of them becoming a superpower, to dispell all of these ridiculous ideas. So far they are not doing especially well, probably because there is a nugget of truth in all of those outlandish preconceptions. They really need some kind of positive media coverage, especially since we're running out of Jackie Chan.
If they do pull it off, then they look good to the world (which up until now has been ambivalent/suspicious but not as angry as they are with, say, the USA). It would mean that they would have an easier time becoming a superpower and extending their influence. I think their mileage is going to vary, the exposure will be good but they're not going to get away with ANYTHING thanks to the internet.
Do you have a trite list of what the average you thinks of westerners?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Why not just build a stadium with a roof?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
South-central Alberta (between Calgary and Red Deer in Western Canada) is known to be one of the worlds more severe "hail belts". Hail has been responsible for hundreds of millions in damage, ranging from crops and houses (penetrating shingles and shakes to the point of damaging the cladding underneath, as well as causing flooding) to automobiles and airplanes (a hail storm in the Calgary area caused a cargo flight to Minneapolis to abort its ascent when tennis-ball-sized hailstones destroyed the cockpit windscreen of the Boeing 727 jet).
For the past dozen years, the government has regularly seeded clouds in its hail damage mitigation programme. As a Calgary resident I can say that it has noticeably reduced the frequency and intensity of hail storms, and has probably contributed to millions of dollars in savings in disaster relief and insurance claims.
Given that this is not only an old practice, but one that occurs frequently around the world, I don't see where the news-worthiness or controversy is in China's application of cloud seeding to divert precipitation from Beijing during Olympic events, aside from the mildly amusing reason behind the project.
Hubris.
DNA just wants to be free...
Well, you could argue that since the leevees that failed were built by the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal government did have at least some of the share of blame.