When I first heard about China modifying the weather to make the sky blue for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, I thought it was just another myth like Utah sending all the homeless people to Hawaii for their Olympics. However, while reading the newspaper yesterday, it told of how Beijing had snow 10 days earlier than usual and how this was caused by an attempt to create more precipitation on the dry farmland by cloud seeding. The gist of how it works is that they shoot silver dioxide and frozen carbon dioxide into the atmosphere either from the ground or by plane. The process is called cloud seeding. Would it be considered ironic that the clouds have to be seeded so it can rain on the seeds to make them grow? When it rains, is that considered harvest? Things to ponder... It turns out Australia has been doing tests on this method of weather modification since the 1960's. Anyways, not any deep new insight, I was just astounded by this information and thought I would let you know.
