It’s storming in HK right now as I type, work has been finalised, missed Coldplay in HK by a day and there isn’t much for me to do. I recall sometime back I told a few friends in Melbourne about Beijing’s rain-making antics. To no surprise, they were as astounded as I was when I first read about this cloud-seeding biz in one of the local papers here.
Supposedly, Beijing has been experiencing some odd weather, a boingboing reader - Scott points out:
“almost every day has been beautiful cool and sunny…but at night, come 7PM-ish, the sky turns forebodingly dark and we get these magnificent thunderstorms that last well into the early morning hours.”
While I am no scientist, my initial thoughts were that anyone trying to fuck with mother nature will some day pay the price, or worse still, we as a planet will pay the price. Anyway, with a little time on my hands, I decided to see what I could find and to my delight, boingboing already posted an article on the issue. You will be surprised how much you can find on this cloud-seeding business. Type in “Rain in Beijing” and this interesting article is revealed - Reuters article.
Now I haven’t really researched the scientific arguments to this rain making business, nor do I really have the motivation to do so at the moment but surely any Einstein could see that putting extra strain on our already depleted planet for short term relief (or in the name of progress) is not going to solve anything.
Rain-making, locking up bloggers, google censorship, hi-tech cheating….what next Beijing?
