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

Also from the article...

[daveschroeder]

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.

Re:Also from the article...

[Shakrai]

I don't think anyone would argue with you there, but it still doesn't excuse the abuse of power. So to put up a strawman like that is essentially being an apologist.

I'm not being an apologist. I'm horrified at some of the actions undertaken by my Government in recent years. But anybody with any sense of objectivity can see that it's not nearly as bad as what's going on in China right now. Or Pakistan. Or Burma. Our people aren't jailed if they speak out against Government policy towards an oppressed/conquered racial group. Our opposition leaders aren't being assassinated. Our Supreme Court isn't under house arrest.

I will speak out against human rights abuses by any Government, including my own. This idea that we don't have the right to point out abuses in other countries because our own isn't 100% perfect benefits nobody besides the oppressive nations of the World.

Boycott the Genocide Olympics

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

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.

Re:Boycott the Genocide Olympics

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

The Chinese government gives the Sudanese government weapons in exchange for oil. The Sudanese government uses those weapons to slaughter civilians in the Darfur region. A representative of the government has actually stating that they delayed a peace agreement to end the north-south civil war in order to make sure they had a "lasting solution in Darfur" (ie, to make sure the region could not recover).

Saying "Foreign involvement and investment in Sudan might actually be helping the place" is ridiculous. It's like saying that you can send 10,000 pounds of cereal to a corrupt African government and actually expect them to pass the food on to their starving citizens. The reason their citizens are starving is precisely because of government corruption and interference. Those people are never going to see the food if you give it to their government.

Likewise, expecting a government that is actively slaughtering its people to somehow pass on any of their profits to those same people is ludicrous. The companies you reference are doing business with the government, not with the country's population, and certainly not with any resident of the Darfur region.

control the air

[Tim4444]

now if they could only control pollution...

Re:What does China gain from hosting these?

[ichigo 2.0]

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.

Re:What does China gain from hosting these?

[dcollins]

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.

Re:No, they will not

[CastrTroy]

Why not just build a stadium with a roof?

Cloud seeding has been used in Alberta too

[WebCowboy]

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.

Re:No, they will not

[MenTaLguY]

Hubris.