OPINION | EDITORIAL: Change in the weather

Something’s happening here


The Red Chinese have a show to put on next week. It's called the Olympics. And we'd love to see the operations order on that doozie. No outfit is more punctilious than The Party. The apparatchiks in charge have even ordered around the weather.

We're not kidding. The Beijing government is taking no chances that snow won't be there, or that smog will.

Mainland China has a department called the Beijing Weather Modification Office. It's a division of the China Meteorological Association Weather Modification Center. And they control when it rains and/or snows. Or are trying their best.

According to The Washington Post, the Chinese masters have already turned millions of gallons of water into snow. And The Party has already tried to decrease smog by telling people how much electricity and gas motors they can use. At least until the visitors are gone. But all that is the easy part.

As far as the Weather Modification Office(s):

The "efficacy is, to say the least, debatable," says The Post. "A National Science Foundation study several years ago suggested seeding can increase precipitation. But many researchers say the statistics don't add up to much, and in fact can't add up to much because there's no way to run a control on the same cloud to determine what its output would have been without the seeding."

That's not likely to make it up the chain in official Party post-op reports. If there's enough snow during these Games, surely The Party will take credit.

Not everybody, however, thinks the ChiComs can fool Mother Nature.

"Cloud-seeding has always been something for people who have more money than sense, and these efforts are no exception," said Gavin Schmidt, a senior climate adviser at NASA. "It's a very big spend with probably not a lot to show for it."

But it's not likely he will be asked to speak at The Party's meeting next year.


Upcoming Events