Rainmakers: Inside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, senior officials of China's National Development and Reform Commission and its State Environmental Protection Administration meet the press to discuss issues of environment, resources, energy, and emission control (top). Below, one member of China's army of part-time rainmakers mans an anti-aircraft gun to show the international media how he will shoot silver iodide into passing clouds.
Xinhua
How the Chinese plan to modify the weather in Beijing during the Olympics, using supercomputers and artillery.
To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird's Nest, the city's branch of the national Weather Modification Office--itself a department of the larger China Meteorological Administration--has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.
First, Beijing's Weather Modification Office will track the region's weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer.
Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city's weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.
Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Bird's Nest will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won't fall until those clouds have passed over. Zhang Qian, head of Beijing's Weather Modification Office, explains, "We use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their average size. As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall, and precipitation can be reduced." August is part of Northeast Asia's rainy season; chances of precipitation over Beijing on any day that month will approach 50 percent. Still, while tests with clouds bearing heavy rain loads haven't always been successful, Qian claims that "the results with light rain have been satisfactory."
Modifying the weather may seem a hubristic exercise. But arguably, given what else the Chinese have already invested to make this year's Olympics a showcase for China's emergence as a 21st-century superpower, it's almost the least they could do. 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. Today, Beijing boasts, alongside the vast Bird's Nest, megastructures like a new airport terminal that on its own is bigger than any airport elsewhere in the world. One measure of the city's transformation is that today 300 or so new towers, some designed by the most avant-garde architects on the planet, rise where a few short years ago there were only siheyuans (traditional Chinese courtyard residences) interspersed with bland 1950s-era boxes in the Sino-Soviet style.
Equally, though, 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). Unsurprisingly, therefore, 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.
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The nonchalance with which this information is delivered by the writer is actually more chilling than the information itself. What are the side effects of such weather alterations? It is evident someone doesn't want to directly point out an obvious correlation between weather modification and weather events in recent years like tsunamis, et al... What an insurance claim: How can anything be called a "natural disaster" with such violations of nature taking place?
Tsunamis are not weather events. They are geological events. Go buy yourself an education.
This "nonchalance" as you call it is journalistic objectivism. If you take some greater meaning or terror from an article that reports facts and actual occurrences, that's your interpretation. This is a technology review article, not a conspiracy theory or political journal. That said, there is in fact a clear undertone of opposition within the last paragraph of Page 1 of this article regarding China's engineering practices, their cause, and their immediate humanitarian effects, because those are current facts with credible sources. Your comment implies that China or others (vague) are responsible for creating recent catastrophes. Such audacious claims beg to at least be clearly stated and intellectually argued with facts, otherwise they are simply paranoid claims and should be dismissed with the same ease with which they were invented.
1. Silver Iodide and Nitrogen are not toxic.
2. They are changing the weather in a fairly limited area for a short period of time.
... sort of like a butterfly? these events aren't occurring in a vacuum, and no one is pointing to the substances as much as the events they are causing for having an unnatural effect on global conditions. not so bad? relative to what, New Jersey?
What is anti-nature? We use air conditioning at home, at work, at shopping, in car. Is this anti-nature?
of course it's tiny comparing to the greatest pollution americans have produced, why don't you stop using your airconditioning stop driving gas fueled cars stop launching shuttles into space which all cause 'butterfly' effect on mother earth don't they??
what exactly is your point???
this article should be read in a careful way otherwise it's extremely misleading and biased, for what???
Over 7000 guns and almost 5000 rocket launchers? This is the Olympics?
Silver Iodide MSDS states: Potential Health Effects Eye: May cause eye irritation. Skin: May cause skin irritation. Can cause eczema and rash. Ingestion: May cause irritation of the digestive tract. The toxicological properties of this substance have not been fully investigated. Chronic ingestion of iodides during pregnancy has resulted in fetal death, severe goiter, and cretinoid appearance of the newborn. Inhalation: May cause respiratory tract irritation. May cause effects similar to those described for ingestion. The toxicological properties of this substance have not been fully investigated. Chronic: Chronic inhalation or ingestion of silver salts may cause argyria characterized by a permanent blue-gray discoloration of the eyes, skin, mucous membranes, and internal organs. This malady results from the accumulation of silver in the body. Chronic ingestion of iodides during pregnancy has resulted in fetal death, severe goiter, and cretinoid appearance of the newborn. Prolonged exposure to iodides may produce iodism in sensitive individuals. Symptoms could include skin rash, running nose and headache. Think this will get the athletes nervous???
Peanut: MAY cause fatal anaphylactic shock
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.
even those MAYBEs are way better than the smokes in your mouth isnt it?
what are you trying to exaggerate?
as much as i oppose to the use of chemically altering the weather, I would like to see your sources. All 15 of my sources searched on yahoo! search come back as no known toxicitiy or health problems.
If they are conducting weather modifications for the Olympics, has there been any historical records (fully acknowleged by China or not) that indicates they have been modifying weather for a longer period of time?
If yes - would something like this cause problems for other nations - ie drought, excessive rainfall or snow, increased or decreased temps etc?
Just don't assume that anything that China does is to harm the rest of the world. They must have a good reasoning when doing so in front of the eyes the whole world, do you really think they are no brainers like some of you???
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.
Thank you RD. After reading the article the first thing I did was to look up Silver Iodide, although I will admit that I did not go into as much detail as you.
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.
Great look-up spirit! So why do you stop? Keep checking int o yourself, your own goverment, your own histry, your own emission, the number of souls your goverment have killed and have been killing. Then come back and give us a fuller report.
The fact that one has a mote (or a plank, or even a full-fledged beam) in one's eye doesn't mean that there aren't still beams in the eyes of others. Facts are facts. And in articles about the shady stuff America does, people do comment on America's tendency to do shady stuff.
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.
It seems people are having the anticipated knee-jerk reaction to this. Seeding clouds is hardly something new, and hardly anything that can be linked to natural disasters any more then you driving your car to work.
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...
Guest (Michaelmas)
The Chinese Have Little Choice About Weather Modification
... as the article suggests in passing, when it says that in "the country's north ... 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.'
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.
Re: The Chinese Have Little Choice About Weather Modification
Not sure that "it doesn't work" follows from your argument. Part of the current population/land load has to do with social pressure to breed more soldiers/workers/whatever in the Mao days, and much of the current ecological problem has more to do with rapid industrialization in an environment of rampant corruption and flagrantly violated environmental regulations than with the sheer size of the population. I don't see a real problem here with sustainability simpliciter.
You're right on, though, that the North needs all the help it can get.
Am I the only one who noticed that error in somebody's post above? Trying to link weather modification to tsunamis? Tsunamis are NOT weather events. They are geological events. Changes in rainfall aren't gonna matter a butterfly's fart to undersea fault lines. Also, even though the U.S. government isn't doing lots of weather modification, large scale corporate farms have been at it for decades. And bravo to the person who asked if there are records of China doing weather modification for a while. Way to read the article buddy.
ya there's always jerks out there thinking a silly way...let it be let it be
In the future, there could be geopolitical implications when one country can possibly monopolize rainfall. I dare say that rain is more valuable to a population's health than crude oil.
This article is completely wrong.
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.
Where does this article say China is using curtains or walls to block weather patterns from affecting the stadium? They're using "cloud seeding." Not once does this article use the term "weather control," and furthermore only uses the word "control" once to describe the Chinese government's control on their programs. The word "block" appears zero (0) times in this article. Did you even read this article?
Edit: If you are referring to the facts in this article being incorrect, please cite other credible sources. Simply saying "this is wrong" is not very convincing to spend our time looking elsewhere.
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zig158
64 Comments
The government that has murdered over 50 million people is now shooting toxic chemicals into clouds to attempt to control the weather. Am I the only one who sees a problem with that?
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?
Reply
DJTal
154 Comments
Re: the above article .
Although this is probably another good reason not to support the Chinese dictatorship , to put the whole thing in 'context'(context is King) , the amount of substance that they are putting into the atmosphere is tiny compared to the emission of cloud seeding soot particles and other chemicals from industry and transport in China , to say nothing of the polution particles emitted by the USA or indeed any other developed country .
Reply
kanghaiyang
1 Comment
Re:
who told you "The government that has murdered over 50 million people". have you ever checked that???
Reply
polo90
1 Comment
Re:
zig158, first of all, to accuse Chinese government as murderer has nothing to do with their attempt on controlling weather, and obviously far off the topic for discussion here. You might feel good for saying that, assuming that you are standing for justice. But let me tell you, as a reader, I don't want to see your stupid and ignorant assertion here. If you really want to fight against evil, what about the people who killed 40,000,000 of Native Americans?
Have a problem with my number? I don't believe in yours either.
Reply
jechu
1 Comment
Re:
A little off the point, no?
Reply