GeoEngineering: The Chinese taking theory to practice

Chinese Government Plans to Cause Ten Percent More Rain By 2015

By Rebecca BoylePosted 12.12.2011 at 4:57 pm40 Comments

Beijing Haze, February 2011 bfishadow via Flickr

China is already doing plenty of things to the atmosphere above it, but most changes are byproducts of the country’s marathon industrial revolution. Now China plans to make some purposeful atmospheric changes — namely making it rain, for the purpose of growing crops.

RELATED ARTICLES

	New Fog-Harvesting Devices Could Provide Clean Drinking Water for the World's Poor
	Beijing Deploys Giant Deodorant Cannons to Freshen Up City Landfill
	China's Weather Manipulation Brings Crippling Snowstorm to Beijing

TAGS

Science, Rebecca Boyle, agriculture, air pollution, china, cloud seeding, pollution in china, precipitation, rain, rain clouds

China is starting four regional programs to artificially increase precipitation across the country by 10 percent before 2015, under a newly released 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), according to the state-run China Daily. “Weather intervention” could bring an additional 230 billion cubic meters of precipitation per year — that’s on top of the 50 billion China already artificially creates annually, China Daily says.

“Because clouds are boundless, weather control is boundless. The five regional weather control programs will coordinate the ground resources, such as the cloud seeding rockets and planes, across provinces to increase potential rain or snow,” said Zheng Jiangping, deputy director of the China Meteorological Administration’s department of emergency response.

Cloud seeding, involving the injection of silver iodide particles into the atmosphere, helped clear some of the pollution from Beijing before the 2008 Olympics. But it does not always go so well. This time, cloud seeding is necessary to make actual rain, authorities said.

READ MORE HERE