The Day Has Finally Come...

....when people are able to physically alter the weather. When I was little, I used fantasize about a machine that could convert wintery grey skies into puffy white clouds and sunshine, but I never imagined those ideas actually becoming a reality.

In preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China has developed a 3-stage plan to control the weather over the "Bird's Nest", a brand-new, roofless, 91,000 seat Olympic stadium:

"First, Beijing's Weather Modification Office will track the region's weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer. 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."

I don't know how I feel about having chemicals shot into the sky for the sake of clear skies...actually no - I'm very wary of it. This whole project screams modern day World's Fair - Now With Mad Scientists and Toxic Chemicals - to me. What's crazy is the fact that weather engineering isn't a new phenomenon -the US, China, and Russia have all been working on various weather-engineering projects for decades. The technology has been used to debilitate Vietnam during war, relieve droughts in China, prevent radioactive rain from Chernobyl from reaching Russia, and now to ensure sunshine on important days. Circle the one that doesn't belong.

Ultimately, I'm interested to see if the project will be successful. Throughout history, there has been mixed reports about the efficacy of weather-engineering, and a successful program could have the potential to help - and hurt - a lot of people. Even if there were immediate, positive results, I don't know if I'd support the use of the technology. Who knows what the long term effect of chemical weather change is? There's something about tweaking mother nature that just doesn't sit well with me...I feel like our world is backing itself into a fatal corner.

More on weather engineering and the Beijing Olympics from MIT's Technology Review here.