In the Fragrant Hills northwest of Beijing, a stone's throw from the Temple of
Azure Clouds, a group of villagers is preparing to do battle with the gods.
As soon as the order comes - day or night - eight farmers will rush to a
battery of 37mm anti-aircraft guns installed in a courtyard in the village
of Beixing. Four will carry the shells to the guns, two will load them and
two will take aim and open fire at the enemy in the sky.
Their mission is to protect the honour of a nation. But their targets are not
fighter jets or bombers; they are the rain clouds and smog that threaten to
spoil the Beijing Olympics.
The Beixing gunners are among 100 villagers around the Chinese capital who are
on standby to “seed” clouds - forcing them to shed or retain their rain -
before the opening ceremony of the Games on August 8.
Guided by the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, they will fire shells containing
silver iodide and other chemicals into any clouds seen heading towards the
roofless Bird's Nest national stadium.
As concern mounts over air pollution in Beijing, they could also be ordered to
induce showers during the Games to clear a toxic haze of dust and vehicle
and industrial emissions.
“The telephone rings and you must be there within a few minutes,” one
villager, who gave only his surname of Wang, said.
“You check the equipment, take aim and fire. The usual purpose is to prevent
hail but now it is to protect the Olympics.”
Beixing is one of 21 sites around the capital where the Government has set up
man-made hail-prevention and rain-increasing work stations, each with up to
four anti-aircraft cannon from the 1960s. They will be backed up by three
aircraft, which can also scatter rain-inducing chemicals, and by hundreds of
experts who will use radar and other equipment at the Beijing Meteorological
Bureau.
“We've worked on a contingency plan for rainstorm and other weather risks
during the ceremonies,” Wang Yubin, the deputy chief engineer at the bureau,
told reporters recently.
The rainmaking army is just one illustration of how far China has gone to
ensure that nothing will spoil the Olympics, an event that it hopes will
showcase its staggering economic progress in the past three decades.
It also serves a longer-term purpose: to combat the water shortages that
plague northern China and represent one of the biggest threats to continued
economic growth.
“This technology is very important to China as drought affects so many areas,”
Hu Zhijin, a weather expert at the China Meteorological Sciences Academy,
said. “The Olympics is just one element of it.”
Cloud-seeding was pioneered in the US in the 1940s and was first tried by
Chinese scientists in 1958, according to Mr Hu. China now has the largest
rainmaking programme in the world, ahead of Russia and Israel, and is
expanding its operation faster than any of the 24 other countries that use
the technology.
From 1995 to 2003 China spent $266 million on the technology, according to
state media. In the past five years it has spent more than $500 million,
officials said. The country is now said to employ more than 50,000 people
for the task, using an arsenal that includes 6,781 artillery guns and 4,110
rocket launchers. The current five-year plan in China has called for an
increase in man-made rain of 50 billion cubic metres a year - nearly enough
to fill the Yellow River, its second-biggest waterway.
The shells and rockets that are used usually contain chemicals such as silver
iodide, dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) and liquid nitrogen.
Some cause water particles in the clouds to swell into drops that are big
enough to fall and others have the opposite effect.
Critics say that the technology has never been proven to work and could damage
the environment.
Mr Hu admitted that it was a young and imprecise science.
“You have to choose the right recipe of chemicals for the right kind of
cloud,” he said. “Otherwise, it can do the opposite of what you want. And
afterwards, how do you tell between man-made rain and natural rain?”
Cloud-seeding has exacerbated fierce disputes over water. In 2004 five cities
in Henan province accused each other of “cloud theft”.
Chinese scientists insisted that the chemicals used were harmless and could
help to ease drought, disperse fog, replenish reservoirs and clear smog.
They claimed to have increased rainfall by 210 billion cubic metres - enough
to meet the annual needs of 400 million of the country's 1.3 billion people
- between 1995 and 2003.
Unlike their Russian counterparts, who have seeded clouds regularly before
national celebrations, Chinese experts have never tried to prevent rain in a
specific location - as they will have to on August 8. Weather forecasters
say there is a 47 per cent chance of rain during the opening ceremony and a
6 per cent chance of a heavy downpour.
“If it really rains heavily these methods would not be that effective,” Zhang
Qiang, the head of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, said. “I hope
God will not send a storm to Beijing.”
The experts at the office are currently carrying out a series of tests to
discover which chemicals achieve the best results.
Villagers in Beixing said that the guns had been firing more regularly than
normal in recent weeks and one said that they regularly woke her in the
middle of the night.
“It's louder than thunder,” she said. “But I've got used to it now. I just go
straight back to sleep.”
Rain Dances
— The first successful cloud seeding was conducted by Vincent Schaefer over
Massachusetts in 1946
— The United States seeded clouds over North Vietnam to extend the monsoon
over the Ho Chi Minh Trail from 1967 to 1972
— Conspiracy theorists accuse the US military of seeding cloud over the
Woodstock festival in 1969
— Russian aircraft seeded clouds over Belarus after the Chernobyl nuclear
accident in 1986
— At a G8 summit in July 2006 President Putin said that air force jets had
seeded incoming clouds so that they rained over Finland
— The earliest attempts at cloud seeding involved dropping crushed dry ice or
carbon dioxide pellets into the top of a cloud from an aircraft. Later
scientists started to use silver iodide because it was a better
cloud-seeding agent
— Some studies show that cloud seeding can increase precipitation by up to 30
per cent, but others are wary of the effect on the environment
