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Tuesday, March 25, 2008 Weather Engineering in ChinaContinued from page 1 By Mark Williams
The Chinese began experimental weather engineering in 1958 to irrigate the country's north, where average yearly rainfall compares with that during the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and sudden windstorms blasting down from the Gobi desert have made drought and famine constant possibilities. Today, the People's Republic budgets $60 to $90 million annually for its national Weather Modification Office. As for the return on this investment, the state-run news agency Xinhua claims that between 1999 and 2007, the office rendered 470,000 square kilometers of land hail-free and created more than 250 billion tons of rain--an amount sufficient to fill the Yellow River, China's second largest, four times over. Furthermore, while Qian's weather engineers in Beijing have been testing their capabilities for the past two years, the Chinese say that during the past five years, similar efforts have already helped produce good weather at national events like the World Expo in Yunnan, the Asian Games in Shanghai, and the Giant Panda Festival in Sichuan. Although they possess the world's largest weather modification program, the Chinese point to the Russians as being the most advanced. In 1986, Russian scientists deployed cloud-seeding measures to prevent radioactive rain from Chernobyl from reaching Moscow, and in 2000 they cleared clouds before an anniversary ceremony commemorating the end of World War II; China's then president, Jiang Zemin, witnessed the results firsthand and pushed to adopt the same approach back home. As for the historical credit for starting the whole weather-engineering ball rolling back in 1946, that belongs to employees of General Electric in Schenectady, NY--most notably, scientist Bernard Vonnegut (brother of the late novelist Kurt), who worked out silver iodide's potential to provide crystals around which cloud moisture would condense. During the 1960s and '70s, the United States invested millions of federal dollars in experiments like Stormfury (aimed at hurricane control), Skywater (aimed at snow- and rainfall increase), and Skyfire (aimed at lightning suppression). Simultaneously, the U.S. military tried to use weather modification as a weapon in Project Popeye, during the Vietnam War, by rain-making over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an effort to close it. Nevertheless, because weather is the epitome of a complex, emergent system, no analytical models or methodologies existed that produced data conclusively, proving that weather modification worked. In the United States, research funding died down and commercial weather modification efforts became hemmed in by stringent regulation. A 2003 report from the National Academy of Sciences concluded that despite more than 30 years of efforts, "there is still no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification efforts." Still, according to William Cotton, a meteorologist at Colorado State University, "as far as the science of weather modification is concerned, the evidence that it works in certain situations is very compelling." The Chinese are certainly in no doubt: once they have demonstrated their capabilities to the rest of the world at the Olympics later this year, the party's central planners intend to expand their national weather modification program in 2010, turning the Weather Modification Office into a separate government ministry that will double the amount of rain-making and other weather engineering that China is now doing. |

Comments
zig158 on 03/25/2008 at 5:44 AM
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To give you an idea how many people 50,000,000 really is, it’s 1 person per second for over a year and a half. Their recent actions in Tibet really show how much they have changed don’t they?
DJTal on 03/25/2008 at 10:58 AM
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kanghaiyang on 03/25/2008 at 11:49 PM
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polo90 on 03/28/2008 at 12:25 PM
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Have a problem with my number? I don't believe in yours either.
jechu on 06/20/2008 at 1:29 PM
1
johnalphonse on 03/25/2008 at 9:46 AM
77
neotheologian on 03/27/2008 at 11:42 AM
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ReEvolveD on 03/28/2008 at 2:42 PM
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sorgfelt on 03/25/2008 at 10:21 AM
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2. They are changing the weather in a fairly limited area for a short period of time.
johnalphonse on 03/25/2008 at 2:01 PM
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garyvannest on 03/27/2008 at 10:15 AM
2
frumblefoot on 03/27/2008 at 10:59 AM
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what exactly is your point???
this article should be read in a careful way otherwise it's extremely misleading and biased, for what???
lasertekk on 03/25/2008 at 10:55 AM
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frumblefoot on 03/27/2008 at 11:00 AM
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RD on 03/25/2008 at 12:15 PM
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garyvannest on 03/27/2008 at 10:25 AM
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Pollen: MAY cause hay fever.
Egg: MAY cause coronary heart disease
Eat too much: MAY cause death
Drink too much: MAY cause death
Driving: MAY cause accident
...
How wonderful the MAY is.
frumblefoot on 03/27/2008 at 11:02 AM
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what are you trying to exaggerate?
ryce on 03/28/2008 at 12:46 AM
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mkogrady on 03/25/2008 at 12:23 PM
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If yes - would something like this cause problems for other nations - ie drought, excessive rainfall or snow, increased or decreased temps etc?
frumblefoot on 03/27/2008 at 11:27 AM
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stop being naive on things and googgling silver iodize, you think they really did it without having googled it first? Well I becha they didn't since they probably have some of the top scientist did quite a bit research on it for years first.
Some of you people should make sense of yourself first before you yell.
neotheologian on 03/27/2008 at 11:41 AM
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zig158 on 03/26/2008 at 2:13 AM
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As for Kanghaiyang’s question, yes I have checked into that and you can too. A good place to start would be
http://mises.org/story/2652
this article summarizes what you will find else ware if you choose to look deeper.
Weather control is a Pandora’s box that is best left unopened. A bit late for that I suppose.
lathiatmit on 03/27/2008 at 2:21 AM
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janissary_88 on 03/27/2008 at 12:51 PM
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Of course, this article is talking about the modern Party's monomaniacal focus on the Olympics and the dubious merits of weather control tech, not the wars and chaos of the 60s and 70s, so I'm not entirely certain what folk were meaning to accomplish in terms of creating constructive dialogue by bringing up those casualty figures in the first place.
Shiladie on 03/26/2008 at 11:59 AM
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I think this is a great step that I'm glad the chinese are willing to take. Hopefully this leads to more technologies along this line, allowing for more manufactured weather worldwide.
I expected less technophobia then i'm seeing on the above comments from people on this site...
Michaelmas on 03/26/2008 at 1:32 PM
1
In fact, if you fly over Northern China's landscape, you can look down and see a countryside in which -- like large areas of the American Midwest -- there's a human habitation every half-mile or so. However, unlike the Midwest, it'll not be a single family residence or farmhouse, but a whole village of one or two-hundred people.
Overall, two-thirds of China is more or less non-arable. That means with a fifth of the world's population to support, China has a base of less arable land of far worse quality than the U.S. -- and where the U.S. has plenty of currently unused land surface it could turn to agricultural purposes, China is already using everything it has.
Beyond that, there's the pollution in China. Downtown Beijing has atmospheric pollution that the WHO reckons is five times more than is healthy for humans.
So expect to see more weather modification and mitigation from the Middle Kingdom. Understand, too, that the Chinese may have a different take on small eco-footprint 'sustainability' than middle-class Western Greens. One reason is that -- as they tend to never let the rest of us forget -- China has the world's oldest continuous culture. Arguably, viewing matters in this historical context, China already 'did' sustainability starting in the 15th century, when it decided not to permit disruptive technologies and to reject industrialization for four centuries. Sustainability in the Western Green style for the Chinese, therefore, is what got them to the population-to-land ration they have now. Thus, it doesn't work.
janissary_88 on 03/27/2008 at 1:00 PM
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You're right on, though, that the North needs all the help it can get.
neotheologian on 03/27/2008 at 11:38 AM
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frumblefoot on 03/27/2008 at 2:08 PM
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1speeder on 03/27/2008 at 11:43 AM
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maddeng on 04/06/2008 at 5:42 PM
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The chinese have no intention of controlling the weather.
CONTROLLING
Controlling the weather would entail preventing accumulation from forming or wind patterns carrying accumulation to a certain pattern.
BLOCKING
They are preventing rain that might occur from entering a certain area. They are basicaly going to form a curtain or wall around the area of the stadium.
To say they are controlling the weather we would need to tag that same definition to every building in the world.