International scientists have doubts that the country will be able to pull off this feat. China has high hopes for this project to be just another way to showcase that the nation is no longer about rural poverty but an economic powerhouse.
China has spared no money into restructuring the infrastructure of Beijing in time for the summer games. It’s spending $40 billion to modernize the ancient city. This is in addition to the $100 million it currently spends a year on Beijing. The government currently employs 50,000 people just to produce rain.
Fragrant Hills is one installation outside of Beijing that hires peasants in military fatigues to blast silver iodine into clouds to stop rain from falling on the capital city. If rain is threatening to ruin the opening ceremony, then there will be multiple areas where the employees are blasting away at the clouds with rocket launchers.
“We are now drafting the implementation plan for the artificial rain mitigation for the opening and closing ceremonies,” said Wang Yubin, a Beijing Meteorological Bureau engineer. “This is a very complex process, so we must select the right time and place.”
China is short on water and arable land, so they have been spending millions on rainmaking and rain prevention. Their arsenal in this quest includes 6,781 artillery guns and 4,110 rocket launchers. More than 4,200 flights took place between 1995 to 2003 for cloud seeding.
The Chinese say that their weather making technology works. They claim that rainfall increased during those years by 210 billion cubic meters. That amount is enough to support the needs of a 400 million population but China has a population of 1.3 billion.
Internationally, though, those claims have been met with skepticism.
“I don’t think their chances of preventing rain are very high at all,” said Dr. Roelof Bruintjes, a meteorologist with the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, who was in China several weeks ago and told top-ranking Chinese scientists he was skeptical. “If there is really a weather system that is producing rain, they won’t be able to do anything. We can’t chase away a cloud, and nobody can make a cloud, either.”
With the August climate in Beijing warm and wet, it’s no wonder that the government is hoping their plan works. A washout on the opening ceremonies would be unfortunate but rain itself during the tightly scheduled games could be a scheduling nightmare. Then again the city’s overwhelming pollution needs rain to make breathing easier. The only thing that clears the pollution is rain.
“The only thing that cleans up the pollution is the rain, and if they are going to suppress rain, my worry is the pollution will be oppressive,” said Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, who will use the Olympics to study the impact of reduced pollution. “It’s a Catch-22.”
So will China be able to pull off what most experts say is impossible? The skeptics have their vote in and China has its ballot cast. The results on this one will come in August. Bring your umbrella just in case.
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