Slashdot Mirror
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."
Peasant farmers with rocket launchers. Lots of aircraft. What could possibly go wrong?
Ah, computer dating -- it's like pimping, but you rarely have to use the phrase "upside your head" -- Bender
...is four nosecones from 1960s nuclear weapon technology! HA! I knew it! *hide*
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Wyoming has done similar tests (click "listen now").
More
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...
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?
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.
Now that Polaroid has stopped making photographic films, I was wondering what we were going to do with all those spare silver halides short of flooding the world markets with goth jewellery.
Now I can sleep happy knowing that the Chinese are going to be spraying them into the atmosphere. I'm not a chemist, but as someone with an interest in photography, I predict a negative effect on our climate which may take some time to develop but will take a whole lot of sodium thiosulfate to fix!
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.
"China must resolutely crush the Rain/Weather forces' conspiracy and sabotaging activities," The People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC), said in a hard-hitting commentary on Saturday as Beijing poured in thousands of Chinese troops to assert control in the restive Olympic regions of the country.
China alleged that the violent weather activities were "masterminded" by the Mother Nature "clique" with the "vicious intention" of undermining the Olympics and splitting China. Mother Nature has denied the charge, and said she is ready for a dialogue with Beijing.
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.
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
Well, at least now John Fogerty will have an answer to his question.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
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.
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.
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.
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?
whatcouldpossiblygoWONG
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...