Here to help? Chinese say cloud seeding improves climate
Mainstream media stories such as this one (see excerpt and link, below), invariably describe cloud seeding as “controversial” and “unproven.”
The Chinese have shown their ability to use weather as a weapon, however. The government says it wants to combat the effects of global warming on the Tibetan landscape. It recently dropped 1/2-inch of snow in the highlands, at 15,000 feet.
But cloud cover, on demand, can also provide the “sanctuary of poor visibility” to military targets on the ground.
| Chinese make first artificial snowfall |
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By Richard Spencer in Hong Kong
Last Updated: 2:25am BST�19/04/2007
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China claimed yesterday to have caused a snowfall for the first time as part of its increasingly ambitious attempts to control the weather.
Officials in the meteorological bureau in Tibet said they had used “rain-seeding” techniques to trigger a snowfall over the city of Nagqu last week.
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| China is the world’s largest practitioner of rain-seeding, a controversial procedure that involves releasing silver iodide as a catalyst into clouds either by aircraft or by firing cannon shells into them. |
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