Cloudy in Beijing Blogging about my time in China

Government made snow

Apparently Sunday's snow was brought on in part by the government. News outlets are reporting that Beijing's weather modification office had enhanced the precipitation by firing 186 doses of silver iodide into the skies the night before. As a result, all the weather forecasts for the next day were wrong, and instead an additional 16 million tons of snow fell on the city.

This was all meant to help end a drought in Beijing (I didn't even know we were experiencing one, although it hasn't rained for quite some time). But China does indeed have a history of manipulating the weather. Weeks ago they did it prior to the country's 60th anniversary parade in order to ensure the clouds would break, and that the skies would be clear over the capital.

I recently wrote a post for Global Voices Online that looked at what people on the Internet were saying about the man-made snow.  A lot of the comments made me laugh, especially one person's comment:  "Everything is made in China, even snow."