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China, in Search of Water, is Building a Rain-Making Network Three Times the Size of Spain (scmp.com)
China is testing cutting-edge defence technology to develop a powerful yet relatively low-cost weather modification system to bring substantially more rain to the Tibetan plateau, Asia's biggest freshwater reserve. From a report: The system, which involves an enormous network of fuel-burning chambers installed high up on the Tibetan mountains, could increase rainfall in the region by up to 10 billion cubic metres a year -- about 7 per cent of China's total water consumption -- according to researchers involved in the project. Tens of thousands of chambers will be built at selected locations across the Tibetan plateau to produce rainfall over a total area of about 1.6 million square kilometres (620,000 square miles), or three times the size of Spain. It will be the world's biggest such project.
The chambers burn solid fuel to produce silver iodide, a cloud-seeding agent with a crystalline structure much like ice. The chambers stand on steep mountain ridges facing the moist monsoon from south Asia. As wind hits the mountain, it produces an upward draft and sweeps the particles into the clouds to induce rain and snow.
The chambers burn solid fuel to produce silver iodide, a cloud-seeding agent with a crystalline structure much like ice. The chambers stand on steep mountain ridges facing the moist monsoon from south Asia. As wind hits the mountain, it produces an upward draft and sweeps the particles into the clouds to induce rain and snow.
This won't increase total precipitation. Either the moisture is moving and raining somewhere which doesn't run to the water table attached to the reservoir, or all of this water is already coming down as rain. Are they stealing rain from another province over?
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I wonder who may loose out on the rain then? Also, I bet, China won't give a rat's ass as long as they have the stronger military and with annual growth of military spending in the double digits the rest of the world should better look out.
When 1person suffers from a delusion,it is called insanity.When many people suffer from a delusion,it is called religion
This is China you're talking about. You shoot first, ask environmental questions later.
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm no climatologist, but China mass-draining the monsoons of suspended water can't have anything but nearly catastrophic effects on down-wind ecosystems that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to exist compatibly with current moisture patterns.
If they pull the moisture out of the air to get it to fall in Tibet, then it won't be there to fall wherever those air currents normally dump it - Eastern Russia, Northern China, or maybe even Japan. It would seem that relatively-dessicated air masses may behave unpredictably as well.
-Styopa