If you’re a fellow conspiracy-theory buff, you’re undoubtedly aware of the suspicions raised on the Internet about so-called chemtrails, which resemble ordinary aircraft exhaust to everyone except those who believe they actually are part of a top-secret U.S. military plot to control the weather. The truly ironic thing about that supposition is that on the other side of the planet, virtually unnoticed by online cabal enthusiasts, somebody else has been engaged for decades in a massive meteorological manipulation effort that vastly outstrips anything ever attempted in this country. I’m talking about the government of China and its half-century-long effort to make it rain — or not rain — wherever it chooses.
It is true that weather manipulation was pioneered in the 1940s by two American scientists, Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut (brother of novelist Kurt). They got the idea of using substances such as silver iodide and frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice) to cause super-cooled liquid water in clouds to form ice crystals, which then fall to Earth as rain or show. But it was the Chinese who embraced the concept and put it to work on a large scale in the mid-1950s, as a way of combating the devastating droughts and water shortages that historically have plagued their country. Communist founding father Mao Zedong gave the effort his personal blessing, opining that “man-made rain is very important … I hope that meteorological professionals put more effort into it.”
And they did. By the 2000s, China’s national Weather Modification Office was spending $100 million annually on its weather modification efforts, which employ 50,000 workers and an arsenal of nearly 7,000 artillery pieces and 4,000 rocket launchers to pummel the clouds with rain-inducing chemicals. By China’s own estimate, its rainmakers generated an additional 250 billion tons of rain between 1999 and 2007, an amount sufficient to fill the Yellow River four times over. Qin Dahe, director of the China Meteorological Administration, has boasted to the Chinese news agency Xinhua that “China has become the world's number one in its weather modification service scale.”
Western scientists, it should be mentioned, are skeptical about the Chinese claims about their weather-manipulating capability.
In addition to making it rain or snow on command, China’s weather modifiers are now taking on an even more ambitious task — preventing rainfall that might put a damper on this summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing. A recent article in Technology Review describes their plan:
"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.'"
Western scientists have expressed their doubts about whether any of this will actually work. A 2003 National Academy of Sciences report concluded that although seeding clearly caused changes in clouds, there was insufficient data to prove that attempts to manipulate the weather really are effective. “There is no scientific literature available that can substantiate (Chinese) claims," Roelof Bruintjes, who leads the weather modification group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, recently told the Denver Post. "Personally, I'm very skeptical about what they're claiming to do."
But let’s suspend that disbelief for a second, and assume that the Chinese weather manipulators can indeed halt Beijing’s summer rains. Tampering with the city’s weather may well exacerbate Beijing’s infamously polluted air, which contains the highest levels of poisonous nitrogen dioxide on the planet. "The only thing that cleans up the pollution is the rain," explains Veerabhadran Ramanathan, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California-San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in a recent interview with USA Today. “And if they are going to suppress rain, my worry is the pollution will be oppressive. It's a Catch-22." Staging endurance running and cycling events in such conditions could cause athletes to perform wretchedly and possibly even endanger their health — thus tarnishing the luster of China’s big moment on the world stage.
So, what do you think? Should the Chinese try to manipulate the weather during the Olympics? Or should they let nature take its course? Express your opinion below.
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