[The Epoch Times, January 25, 2022](The Epoch Times reporter Lin Yan comprehensive report) For the Winter Olympics, Beijing has turned millions of gallons of water into fake snow, and they have also prepared weather intervention, artificial intervention to create Snow falls, disperses storms, and even turns the sky blue.
The CCP has long attempted to alter the weather through cloud-seeding (commonly known as artificial rain/snow), a process that stimulates rainfall by firing silver iodide material anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers into the clouds, which in winter The process becomes a stimulating snowfall.
While skiers slalom against a blue sky and snowboarders compete cross-country, outsiders may fail to notice what authorities are doing behind the scenes — controlling the weather.
Beijing has a dedicated agency responsible for managing the weather, and they are tasked with launching rockets to eliminate dust storms, reduce hail and ease droughts. Beijing has been stepping up weather management over the past 14 months, a level of intervention rarely seen either in China or around the world.
In December 2021, government officials in Beijing announced a major expansion plan that would target artificial rainfall over more than two million square miles. The program will officially launch in December 2021.
At the end of June of the same year, on the night before the party to celebrate the centenary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, Beijing fired rockets into the clouds to provide artificial rain. The rain will cleanse the polluted and haze-filled air for the next day’s rally, according to researchers at Tsinghua University.
Similarly, during the so-called Second Session of the CCP, the sky in Beijing was clear, revealing a rare blue sky and white clouds, some of which were also related to artificial manipulation of the weather.
Beijing’s air pollution is severely polluted, and PM2.5 exceeds the standard by 6 times
But weather manipulation is not what you want. Chinese authorities warned on Monday (January 24) that severe air pollution is likely to be encountered during the Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics, although urgent measures will be taken to ensure the events are not affected.
Air pollution in Beijing on January 24 reached 218 micrograms per cubic meter on the Swiss technology company IQAir’s index, a “very unhealthy” moderate level of pollution.
Reuters reported that Beijing has been shrouded in thick smog in recent days, with PM2.5 as high as 205 micrograms per cubic meter on Monday, more than six times the WHO’s standard of 5 micrograms per cubic meter.
Beijing hopes to use the Winter Olympics as a showcase for its efforts to promote green energy, having built dozens of wind and solar farms to power the games. At the same time, the authorities have also shut down industrial production that uses energy such as coal and stopped coal for civilian use.
China has fired 250 shells into clouds, planes stand by
The Washington Post reported Monday that while it’s unclear how much of this artificial rain Beijing will use during the Winter Olympics, at least 250 artillery shells have been fired into the clouds near Zhangjiakou over the past three months, with 12 at the same time. Aircraft responsible for the artificial rain are on standby at airports in the area.
At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, only 21 sites fired rockets into the clouds to prevent rain from falling over the bird’s nest on the night of the opening ceremony and to keep the air dry.
Experts predict that the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics will require more artificial precipitation than the 2008 Summer Olympics. Because the Winter Olympics are mainly in the mountains, on the one hand, the weather in the mountains is unpredictable, and on the other hand, the winter activities also require more external conditions than the indoor summer games.
Beijing and the two nearby mountains that host skiing and snowboarding competitions — Yanqing and Zhangjiakou — have little snow. As a result, snowmaking needs to be made almost entirely by hand, using an estimated 49 million gallons of water, and environmentalists worry that this could affect Beijing’s water supply, which isn’t much.
In addition, to build the energy and land needed to build these outdoor competition venues from scratch, almost all experts in arid Beijing agree that the idea of a “green” Olympics is untenable.
“Does a country have the right to shape the weather”
The Washington Post questioned that Beijing’s artificial rainfall could have a major impact on China’s 1.4 billion people and surrounding Myanmar, India and Nepal, among others, and sparked a kind of ethical meteorology tension between national sovereignty and global responsibility relation.
“Or, in layman’s terms: Does a country have the right to shape the weather?” the report reads.
Dhanasree Jayaram, a professor of geopolitics and international relations at the Manipal Institute of Higher Education in India, said the outside world has seen and will see from China “more frequent, more active, More unilateral use of weather-altering technology.”
He has studied weather changes in China. “The truth is we don’t really know what this means for various ecosystems,” he said. “We only know one thing, the atmosphere is not divided by political boundaries.”
The military use of artificial rainfall is prohibited under the Environmental Modification Convention. China has joined but not ratified the long-standing international agreement.
“I’m worried about a lot of things,” Jayaram said. “There are a lot of things that China can do with this, such as creating challenges for its hostile neighbors.”
“Mainly I’m concerned that there’s a lot of uncertainty about what they’re going to do, and there’s not a lot of transparency in what they’re doing,” he added.
Beijing’s environmental hegemony attempts to tame the weather
Some researchers worry about Beijing’s environmental hegemony. Xushen Jian, a professor at the Department of Geography and Environmental Resources at National Taiwan University, questioned Beijing’s recent climate-modifying initiatives, saying: “In China, clouds are no longer seen as merely an atmospheric weather feature. Instead, clouds are now seen as a Water resources available for human use.” His series of papers were published in Geographic Forum and Society and Space.
In an emailed reply to The Washington Post, Jian Xushen said the EU has had extensive discussions on the moral and ethical issues of artificial rainfall, but “such transparency and checks and balances are relatively limited in China.”
He warns that there is a slippery line between large-scale engineering and one-off local projects, both from the same philosophy.
“Blueskying proposes a new ideology whereby rain and even the colour of the sky are controlled by humans (i.e. states). It represents a pioneering concept of taming the weather through ‘radical practices of time reorganization and weather modification’, In other words, blue sky and white clouds can be seen as the realization of a small-scale geoengineering,” he said.
If the cloud rains in one place, will there be a shortage of water elsewhere?
The outside world is more worried about whether the large-scale artificial rainfall in Beijing will cause greater environmental risks. There is no evidence yet that regional artificial rainfall will have an impact beyond the targeted area, but few countries in modern society have undertaken such a large-scale or sustained effort as the Chinese Communist Party is doing, the researchers said.
They worry that people within hundreds of miles of China — and even neighboring countries — could be affected by systemic changes in precipitation and could be deprived of vital precipitation.
Hannele Korhonen, director of the Finnish Meteorological Institute and a well-known artificial rainfall expert, asks in a film: “There is X amount of water in the world. If you let the cloud rain in one place, then the other Will there be no water in the place?”
No matter how much contention there is, a change in the weather can bring about an uneasy feeling. It is believed that changing the weather is intervening in the creation of the gods; in other regions, it is believed that artificial rain in one place will steal rain in another; in some places people fear that this will cause flooding.
Responsible editor: Ye Ziwei#