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China: We'll boss rain at Games

BEIJING - As they prepare to host the Olympics - an event designed to push the limits of human beings - the Chinese are trying to do what man has never done: control the weather.

With just months to go before the Summer Games come to Beijing in August, Chinese scientists say they are confident they can keep rain away from the opening ceremony or summon a storm on cue to clear the city's choking pollution.

It's a bold - and, according to international scientists, dubious - bit of stage managing, even for a nation that has already shown an outsized ambition to use the Olympics to showcase its development from rural poverty to an economic powerhouse.

China already spends an estimated $100-million a year and employs 50,000 people for rainmaking.

At installations such as one called Fragrant Hills outside Beijing, peasants don military fatigues and helmets and squat behind antiaircraft guns and rocket launchers, blasting the sky with silver iodide, hoping to shock rain from the clouds.

If rain threatens the opening or closing ceremony, Beijing officials say they will set up several banks of rocket launchers outside the city to seed threatening clouds and cause them to release the rain before it reaches the capital.

China's cloud-seeding weapons include 6,781 artillery guns and 4,110 rocket launchers, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

The Chinese scientists say cloud seeding works, but other scientists are not so sure.

"I don't think their chances of preventing rain are very high at all," said Dr. Roelof Bruintjes, a meteorologist with the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, who was in China several weeks ago and told top-ranking Chinese scientists he was skeptical.

Dr. Andy Detwiler, a professor of meteorology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology who edits the Journal of Weather Modification, suggested the Olympic weather-harnessing effort may not meet with much success.

"The only nations I know of who claim that they can schedule the weather - clear skies for public events, prevent rain at big celebrations - is the old Soviet Union and China," he said.

The Olympics are set to run from Aug. 8 to Aug. 24.

[Last modified February 29, 2008, 01:21:40]