The unseasonal snow that fell on Beijing for 11 hours on Sunday was
the earliest and heaviest there has been for years. It was also, China
claims, man-made. By the end of last month, farmland in the already
dry north of China was suffering badly due to drought. So on Saturday
night China's meteorologists fired 186 explosive rockets loaded with
chemicals to "seed" clouds and encourage snow to fall. "We won't miss
any opportunity of artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering
from a lingering drought," Zhang Qiang, head of the Beijing Weather
Modification Office, told state media.
The US has tinkered with such cloud seeding to increase water flow
from the Sierra Nevada mountains in California since the 1950s, but
there remains widespread scientific sniffiness in the west at such
attempts at weather control. The chemicals fired into the sky, usually
dry ice or silver iodide, are supposed to provide a surface for water
vapour to form liquid rain. But there is little evidence that it works
– after all, how do investigating scientists know it would not have
rained anyway?
Such doubts have not stopped China claiming mastery over the clouds.
Officials said the blue skies that brightened Beijing's parade to
celebrate 60 years of communism last month were a result of the 18
cloud-seeding jets and 432 explosive rockets scrambled to empty the
sky of rain beforehand. Last year, more than 1,000 rockets were fired
to ensure a dry night for last year's Olympic opening ceremony.
"Only a handful of countries in the world could organise such
large-scale, magic-like weather modification," Cui Lianqing, a senior
meteorologist with the Chinese air force, told the Xinhua news agency
after last month's parade.
Magic or not, there is growing interest in such attempts to
deliberately steer the weather, and on a much larger scale. Next
spring, a group of the world's leading experts on climate change will
gather in California to plan how it could be done as a way to tackle
global warming, and by whom. The ideas, some of which, similar to
cloud-seeding, involve firing massive amounts of chemicals into the
atmosphere, can sound far-fetched, but they are racing up the agenda
as pessimism grows about the likely course of global warming.
As interest grows, so does concern about whether such techniques,
known as geoengineering, could be developed and unleashed by a single
nation, or even a wealthy individual, without wide international
approval. "What will happen when Richard Branson decides he really
does want to save the planet?" asks one climate expert. If China
thinks it can make cloud seeding work, then what about geoengineering?
"If climate change turns ugly, then many countries will start looking
at desperate measures," says David Victor, an energy policy expert at
Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations. "Logic points to a big risk of unilateral geoengineering.
Unlike controlling emissions, which requires collective action, most
highly capable nations could deploy geoengineering systems on their
own."
--
Thanks and best regards
J.Suresh
New No.3, Old No.7,
Chamiers road - 1st Lane,
Alwarpet,
Chennai - 600018
Ph: 044 42030947
Mobile: 91 9884071738
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