Everyone Talks About The Weather…

The old saying that “everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it” turns out not to be true in China. The latest issue of Plenty Magazine features an excellent article by Tom Scocca about the extensive effort currently being mounted by the Chinese government (whose Weather Modification Office employs more than 50,000 people) to ensure clear and sunny days in chronically smog-choked—and in July and August, rain-soaked—Beijing for the Olympics this summer. Weather modification turns out to have a long history in China; attempting to fulfill Mao Zedong’s imperative “Ren ding shen tiang” (”Man must defeat the heavens”), the country spends $90 million annually on munitions shot into the sky in order to variously seed clouds for rain or head off precipitation.