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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."
Wyoming has done similar tests (click "listen now").
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Here, back when out country was called USSR the Party would order the same thing done to prevent rain over the Red Square during the military parades that took place on major holidays, like November 7th (Anniversary of October Revolution) or may 9th (Russian V-Day).
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Someone please try to justify evicting one and a half million people for the Olympics.
sure, just as soon as someone justify evicting 30 or more families to build a mall or walmart.
That happens almost every 6 months in the USA, People lose their homes and farms for building a walmart or mall or something else for a private company all with the blessings and help of the local government that pull a "eminent domain" rabbit out of their hats and give the families peanuts for their home and land.
Just because it's on a larger scale, (and probably would happen in the USA if the olympics were to be in LA, Hey East LA, everyone get out, we're going to demolish you for a pretty olympic complex that will be useless in 5 years.)
China is doing what the fuckers in the USA have been doing for decades.
First, justify evicting one. Then justify evicting 100. Then pay the other 1,499,900 people enough that they don't complain.
Just Kidding. It's crazy. COHRE(the source for the estimate) does pretty much seem to hate the Olympics though:
http://www.cohre.org/view_page.php?page_id=268
Are you planning on not watching the Olympics and stepping up efforts not to buy products from China? Beyond that, there is approximately fuck all that citizens of other countries can do about it.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
What I wonder, is what China (in particular, the Chinese gov't) gains from hosting the Olympics. It costs money. It's hard on the citizens. It pisses off the citizens, and casts the government in a bad light. All the things they're doing to their citizens in preparation are not in a spotlight for the rest of the world, which also casts the government in a bad light.
So my question is, other than saying "we hosted the olympics in 2009", what benefit is it to them to do so? I'd think that they'd get more respect for having the games hosting in another country, and then having a winning Olympic team.
I don't even want to see how the media is going to paint China as this "mystical, magical land", when in reality it is a polluted cesspool of human rights violations, forced abortions, population control, poison in their products that are shipped to this nation. The forced smiles alone on their hand-picked robot citizens that will be obviously ordered to mill around Olympic Village and say wonderful things about China will be enough to make me hurl on my flat screen.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
Cloud seeding works about as well as a polygraph but with a bit more of a scientific basis behind it that makes people think it might just work this time. They can no more control the weather than we can read minds so it's not worth the sensationalist headline.
So overall how much have the chinese spent on the 2008 summer olympics?
Around $2 billion, which is less than a week's trade imbalance with the US. So don't worry, they can afford it easily. Where were the last 10 things made that you bought recently?
I don't see this going well with the climate oscillations, particularly the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the El Nino Southern Oscillation. This could cause massively destructive monsoons in the South East Pacific and flooding in South America in about a year. People still want to screw with mother nature regardless of the dangers that it poses.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
of three anecdotes about China and the environment.
The first was from the Lonely Planet's China guide, wherein one of the contributors said he was an avid jogger who moved to Beijing. Upon discovering the poor air quality, he decided it was better for his health to stop jogging.
The second was the funny and sad story of the fate of songbirds in Beijing. Apparently, Chairman Mao hated them. So he commanded all the citizens of the city to go outside and bang on pots and pans. The birds, scared by the racket, flew around and around until they dropped dead out of the sky from exhaustion. Subsequently, the insect population soared without the birds to keep them in check.
A reasonable person might have concluded that they should bring back the birds and restore equilibrium, but not Mao. He then decreed that since insects were breeding in the grass and vegetation in the capitol, that everyone should turn out and uproot all the plants and soak the trees down with DDT (a practice which continues to this day, in fact). Then, with no ground-level vegetation around, the city began to experience vexing dust storms.
The Chinese Communist Party efficiently proclaimed it a consequence of being downwind from the massive Soviet industrial complexes in Siberia.
The third anecdote involves the Three Gorges Dam. When the it looked like the CCP would put the plans into action, scientists and experts from around the world unanimously proclaimed it a Bad Idea. It would wipe out endangered species. It would erase one of the two greatest cultural and scenic features of China: the Three Gorges are somewhat analogous to the Grand Canyon and have inspired Chinese poets and artists for thousands of years. It would prove ineffective in generating power over the long run due to the rapid silting up of the reservoir. It would dislocate millions of people pushed out by the rising waters. It would create a potential disaster for the people living downstream (including Shanghai, one of the most densely populated cities in the world), because the dam itself was built across several faults.
But the CCP went ahead, because nature and man must be subsumed beneath the needs of the proletariat. Now it turns out, once the reservoir is filling, that all those concerns were true. For instance, the increased weight of water in the reservoir above the fault lines has accelerated the number of temblors. Also, with restricted water flow, regions downstream are experiencing drought (an unexpected consequence). And with the reduced water flow, pollution has become more concentrated and caused public health problems. And the last unexpected consequence is that the increased water levels in the reservoir have triggered all kinds of landslides.
In short, China's approach to the environment is nothing short of a disaster. And unhappily for them, the effects of the disaster are immediately felt and born by the rank-and-file Chinese, given the high population density. Yet because of the totalitarian presence of the CCP and its totalizing ideology and propaganda, the country and its people are unable to efficiently evaluate proposals and effectively respond to problems.
It's sad, because the Chinese are an incredibly inventive and resourceful group. They've given so much to the world. One wonders what they could achieve in a free and open society. But alas, they have, at least for the time being, chosen to handicap themselves with a system that turns all their genius to idiocy.
The rest of us should observe, and take notes for our own societies.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
No, New Orleans was a case of corrupt black city officials not properly utilizing the monies granted to them via the federal government.
I'm a long time Bush supporter and I have to concede that I was very disappointed with the way that he handled Katrina. Let me put it this way. If I was President, I'd have had an army in there on day one, stopping at every Home Depot on the way to pick up stuff to build with and sending the bills to Congress. I'd have had generators in there and the water out. That didn't take place. It doesn't mean that he's racist, as the original poster states, and nor does it absolve the local residents from their own admittedly corrupt local government, but, by the same token, when a man is drowning, you don't sit there and yell at him for not following proper safety regulations on the boat. You pull him out.
I wanted to see Bush with the megaphone in downtown New Orleans, the same way as he was on top of the WTC rubble. I thought that moment in September in NYC so long ago was Bush about as good as a President could get, and by contrast, the Bush we got for Katrina flew over the region in Air Force one, delegated the disaster to a low level functionary that wound up failing at the job, and then, to top it all off, gave us some vague excuses about seperation of federal powers and the posse commitatas act. The guy was already breaking the law doing wiretaps without a court order, so, if you are going to argue the President can bend the rules to protect the American people, then he should have bent them in New Orleans.
I mean, if Bush could muster the national purpose to turn an attack by a rogue group into an invasion of not one, but TWO countries, certainly going against the spirit of our own signing of the UN Treaty, then, he could have bent a few rules, and been that figurehead again, and mounted a national effort to rebuild New Orleans. The man had an opportunity to become a living legend, and he blew it, and America is lesser for it.
This is my sig.
In ATL, the citizens at least could use the 5th Amendment's taking clause to get just compensation for any property lost to the government.
I had to look, but China does surprisingly have a version of the "eminent domain" clause in their Constitution - See #6 of "Amendment Fourth" down the page. Note it doesn't say "just compensation"... it just says they can take private property, and pay you something for it. Somehow I don't think, unless you are a Communist party big-wig, that value is decided by an impartial tribunal in a court of law.
Santa Clara County, California used to have a weather modification program. It's Silicon Valley now, but it used to be a prime agricultural area; it has great topsoil. But it doesn't get quite enough rain.
So, for about thirty years, when rain clouds were passing over but it wasn't raining, the call went out to all the silver-iodide stations to start up their generators. These were basically oil burners that put out a smoke column with silver iodide in it.
It helped a little, enough to be statistically significant, but it wasn't spectacular. Beijing is putting in about 100x the effort to cover about 1/10 the area of the Santa Clare Valley effort, so they might get a useful effect.
is that China has their yuan tied to the dollar (while the dollar has gone done by 33 - 50% against nearly all money, it has gone done less than 10% against the yuan. EU Euro is rising in strength and China is starting to really push their wares into there. In a short time, EU, Canada, and even Australia is about to run up monster deficits against China. It is already growing. Quickly. And I doubt that China will open up their money.
But I also suspect that EU (and perhaps the west) will use issue of CO2 as a means of changing a lot. In particular a simple carbon tax will solve a lot of their problem.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What you refer to is the Great Sparrow Campaign which was an attempt to combat a severe grain shortage in China by exterminating airborne and landborne pests that consumed or fouled the grain. Like most large-scale attempts to restructure nature this one failed with ugly ugly consequences. In this case, absent birds to eat them the locust population exploded killing the grain.
Interestingly enough just at the same time that China was facing this massive grain shortage Russia called in, loans that it had outstanding demanding grain and other food in payment. Rather than Default the communists forced the loans to be paid but that ended whatever positive relationship the two countries had. All through the 80's when people talked of a "Communist Conspiracy" they ignored the fact that after that little stunt the Chinese hated the Russians.
One possible consequence of cloud seeding may be hinted at in this Guardian article RAF Rainmakers 'caused 1952 flood' Let's hope that isn't the case.
What does the phrase "1.5 million natives have been displaced from their homes" mean, in this case specifically? There is no fundamental human right to a *specific piece of property*. If those 1.5 million people were moved into comparable (or possibly even *better*) housing elsewhere in the city or in a city/town of their choice, or at least compensated with sufficient funds to purchase comparable housing, then I don't see a problem with it (we do the same thing in the US - it's called "Eminent Domain"). If those people were just thrown out on the street, or put into ghettos, that would be a violation of human rights. But, national governments need the power to re-allocate land use. Otherwise, there'd be *nowhere* for anyone to ever host the Olympics.
Sometimes, to build an airport, railroad, or public venue (such as a Stadium), you gotta move some people. That's just life. The important thing is how you accomplish that moving. It's possible to move 1.5 million people in a way that deals fairly with those people and doesn't make them homeless. I don't know if that is the case in this particular situation, but you have not offered any evidence that this is *not* the case.
Wrong though?
So my question is, other than saying "we hosted the olympics in 2009", what benefit is it to them to do so?
Assuming you meant to say "2008" rather than "2009", I can only give you a partial answer. More specifically as to why it has to be 2008.
In Chinese culture, as well as other Asian cultures that share that heritage, the number 8 is a very lucky number and is also associated with prosperity. This belief is also applied into dates. The olympics is scheduled to start on August 8, 2008, or in number representation 8/8/8. I recall back in August 8th of 1988 (8/8/88), many Asian people where I lived (San Gabriel Valley, California which is otherwise known as the new LA Chinatown) bought up many lotto and lottery tickets.
I would imagine this number thing is so central in their beliefs such that the Chinese govt must really want to display prosperity.
In the 50's Mao had some ideas about what enemies to fight (and mobilize the population against).
"the country's biggest four evils - rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows? "
Read the article (those of you who don't know this important bit of history so we don't repeat it)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3371659.stm
which ended in disaster and famine. Well now its the weather. Too bad the weather in one part of the world effects all other parts, the butterfly effect.
Between genetic engineering on the "oh it will be alright, we have taken into consideration all the possible consequenses" and massive weather modification (for some games). I think we have made great evolutionary progress towards total survival and total good life for everone forever, don't you?
With all the concern about Global Warming, as anyone ever included in the Warming models, mans attempt at controlling the weather. I know where I live if the clouds are gone and it isn't raining we get a little hotter.
I know where I live if the clouds are gone and it isn't raining we get a little hotter.
The quantities and dispersion of chemicals involved in cloud seeding are infinitesimally small in comparison to the amounts of CO2 and CH4 released into the atmosphere, both from natural and man-made sources. Humans no doubt have an impact on climate, however I don't think we've even come close to mastering CONTROL of the climate on a global scale. Cloud seeding is quite localised and doesn't really work precisely enough to give *total* control of weather.
Anyways the effect of cloud cover on temperature varies with geography, seasons and time of day. Clouds can act as thermal isolation in either direction; at midday in the summer an overcast sky can block incoming sunlight and cool things down. However in the winter, or at night, or at other locales, clouds may INCREASE the actual or apparent temperature as they trap heat from leaving an area. Where I live in the winter, a clear, cloudless sky at mid-day usually happens when it is very very COLD (whereas, during a chinook when winter days are warmest there is always a "chinook arch" cloud formation), so I don't think you can associate the presence or absence of clouds with expected temperature.
In any case, cloud seeding doesn't seem to reduce cloud cover significantly. It seems to merely divert the occurrence of precipitation, making the inevitable happen a bit earlier. Some US states have tried to use it to make chronically dry areas get more rainfall that normally falls areas further downwind. In Alberta it is used to induce precipitation before hailstones can form. Hail is when water vapour adheres to small particles and is carried by wind currents to freezing altitudes, where it falls again and collects more moisture before being blown back up again, and cloud seeding makes the water vapour form larger droplets sooner so it falls before it can be caught in the hail-forming cycle. Presumably in Beijing they want to induce rainfall before a system reaches the city.
Nobody has figured out how to stop rain that is already happening, or to create a storm system; we can only trigger rain to happen sooner. I cannot see how this has a significant impact on global temperatures and weather patterns.