Weather Engineering in China
Found on Technology Review on Wednesday, 26 March 2008
Beijing's Weather Modification Office will track the region's weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer.
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.
China has invested billions of dollars into the games in order to get the most out of the publicity. For China, this is a chance to attract the attention of businesses and to show off how they can ignore everything, from nature to human rights; and it will be encouraged to do so even more since no consequences are in sight. Instead of simply cancelling the games because of the oppression by military forces in Tibet, the officials in charge just look away, accepting it. 28 years ago, 65 countries boycotted the olympic games because of an invasion; however, at that time, the Soviet Union wasn't what you would call an ideal business partner.