China wages war on Olympic weather
Bill Schiller, Toronto Star
July 16, 2008
Behind locked gates around Beijing these days, some heavy artillery sits aimed at the clouds
BEIXIN, CHINA–Mark Twain once famously said, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
Here, 25 kilometres northwest of central Beijing, they’re desperately trying to do something about it – it’s just that nobody wants to talk.
“You can’t come in here,” says a groundskeeper from behind the locked gates of the Beijing Haidian District Weather Modification Office. “No one gets in here without permission from the higher authorities.”
Behind him stands a battery of four 37-millimetre anti-aircraft guns and a rocket launcher mounted on a trailer.
It’s all part of Beijing’s war on weather.
With the Olympic Games just 23 days away, the government is determined to do everything it can to ensure a picture-perfect opening for the event.
That includes trying to control the heavens.
The battery of guns here in the village of Beixin is just one of 26 installations around Beijing ready to blast clouds with silver iodide and other chemicals in an attempt to keep the Olympic opening ceremonies dry.
If storm clouds appear moving towards the roofless “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium on Aug. 8, authorities want them pre-empted, blasted and induced before they can rain on Beijing’s Olympic parade.
…
But for China, efforts to manipulate the weather didn’t just begin with the Beijing Olympic Games.
They date back to 1958 and Chairman Mao Zedong who encouraged it as part of a wider “war on nature,” an unfortunate period that also brought a massive famine.
Today, however, China boasts that it spends about $90 million annually on weather modification projects across the country and has assigned some 30,000 scientists to research and conduct experiments. It also employs 7,000 artillery guns and 4,000 rocket launchers in cloud-seeding efforts nationwide.
But despite its claims of scientific progress down the years, many remain skeptical.
Roelof Bruintjes, a U.S. scientist, informed a conference in Colorado in April that he told the Chinese during a recent visit to Beijing that there could be no guarantees for a dry Olympics.
“We cannot make clouds or chase clouds away,” he told the conference. He also said he was “very skeptical” about claims of Chinese progress.
“There is no scientific literature that can substantiate their claims,” he said.
But China is not the only country engaged in weather modification experiments.
Canada too has dabbled in cloud seeding, but mainly to mitigate crop damage from hailstorms.
The science of weather modification through cloud seeding actually began in the United States with experiments by General Electric in 1946. But with little proven success over more than 60 years, the U.S. government has largely ceased research funding.
Nevertheless, there are an estimated 150 weather modification projects in 40 countries and, in an age of diminishing water resources, a group of U.S. scientists is trying to persuade the federal government to once again fund research.
China, meanwhile, also continues to use aircraft in its experimental efforts.
Last year, in the first week of August, the country’s English-language China Daily newspaper carried a short story that revealed details of cloud seeding on a much larger scale.
It reported that three government planes carrying 30 technicians had flown in a circle of about an 80-kilometre radius for three hours over Inner Mongolia.
The story said the technicians dropped silver iodide and small amounts of diatomite – composed mainly of silica – into the atmosphere at about 8,000 metres.
It was at about this time that Beijing experienced its extraordinary thunderstorms. Whether the two events are connected is not known.
Full Story | See Also: Technology Exists to Redirect Hurricanes, Naval Physicist Says | Weather War? | NASA Funds Sci-Fi Weather Control Technology | Much of Britain sprayed in secret germ warfare tests
July 28th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
[...] | See Also: Mass Arrests as Beijing Prepares for Olympics | Defiant Beijing family loses home | China wages war on Olympic weather | Beijing families forcibly relocated for Olympics | Tanks, Face-Scanning Cameras Part of [...]
November 17th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
[...] lockdown | Mass Arrests as Beijing Prepares for Olympics | Defiant Beijing family loses home | China wages war on Olympic weather | Beijing families forcibly relocated for Olympics | Chinese riot in Shenzen over rape, murder, [...]
January 5th, 2009 at 2:31 am
[...] lockdown | Mass Arrests as Beijing Prepares for Olympics | Defiant Beijing family loses home | China wages war on Olympic weather | Beijing families forcibly relocated for Olympics | Chinese riot in Shenzen over rape, murder, [...]
February 12th, 2009 at 4:33 am
[...] lockdown | Mass Arrests as Beijing Prepares for Olympics | Defiant Beijing family loses home | China wages war on Olympic weather | Beijing families forcibly relocated for Olympics | Tanks, Face-Scanning Cameras Part of [...]
February 12th, 2009 at 4:59 am
[...] lockdown | Mass Arrests as Beijing Prepares for Olympics | Defiant Beijing family loses home | China wages war on Olympic weather | Beijing families forcibly relocated for Olympics | Tanks, Face-Scanning Cameras Part of [...]
March 10th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
[...] lockdown | Mass Arrests as Beijing Prepares for Olympics | Defiant Beijing family loses home | China wages war on Olympic weather | Beijing families forcibly relocated for Olympics | Chinese riot in Shenzen over rape, murder, [...]
March 21st, 2009 at 5:40 am
[...] thinktanks sowed seeds of food crisis | Canada expanding parkland at ‘extraordinary’ pace | China wages war on Olympic weather | Ontario places vast boreal area under protection, 22% of province off limits to development | Get [...]
March 31st, 2009 at 2:31 pm
[...] thinktanks sowed seeds of food crisis | Canada expanding parkland at ‘extraordinary’ pace | China wages war on Olympic weather | Ontario places vast boreal area under protection, 22% of province off limits to development | Get [...]
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:09 am
[...] lockdown | Mass Arrests as Beijing Prepares for Olympics | Defiant Beijing family loses home | China wages war on Olympic weather | Beijing families forcibly relocated for Olympics | Tanks, Face-Scanning Cameras Part of [...]
September 25th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
[...] thinktanks sowed seeds of food crisis | Canada expanding parkland at ‘extraordinary’ pace | China wages war on Olympic weather | Ontario places vast boreal area under protection, 22% of province off limits to development | Get [...]
October 2nd, 2009 at 11:44 pm
[...] [...]
October 19th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
[...] [...]
October 20th, 2009 at 6:44 am
[...] [...]
November 24th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
[...] [...]
December 21st, 2009 at 4:08 am
[...] lockdown | Mass Arrests as Beijing Prepares for Olympics | Defiant Beijing family loses home | China wages war on Olympic weather | Beijing families forcibly relocated for Olympics | Tanks, Face-Scanning Cameras Part of [...]
February 16th, 2010 at 1:44 am
[...] lockdown | Mass Arrests as Beijing Prepares for Olympics | Defiant Beijing family loses home | China wages war on Olympic weather | Beijing families forcibly relocated for Olympics | Tanks, Face-Scanning Cameras Part of [...]