About 5 paragraphs up from the bottom I found this:
‘If it really rains heavily these methods would not be that effective,’ Zhang Qiang, the head of Beijing’s aptly named Weather Modification Office, said recently, adding : ‘I hope that God will not send a storm to Beijing.’
I found it fascinating that they have a Weather Modification Office, and so openly talk about it. I was propelled to do a little digging to see what I could find out about this Weather Modification Office.
The Beijing Weather Modification Office is a unit of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau tasked with weather control in Beijing and its surrounding areas, including parts of Hebei and Inner Mongolia. The Beijing Weather Modification Office form a part of China’s nationwide weather control effort, believed to be the world’s largest; it employs 37,000 peasants nationwide, who seed clouds by firing rockets and shells loaded with silver iodide into them.
The work of the Office is largely aimed at hailstorm prevention or making rain to end droughts; they have also induced precipitation for purposes of firefighting or counteracting the effect of severe dust storms, as they did in the aftermath of one storm in April 2006 which dropped 300,000 tonnes of dust and sand on the city and was believed to have been the largest in five years. Their technology was also used to create snow on New Year’s Day in 1997. Other proposed future uses for induced precipitation include lowering temperatures in summer, in hopes of reducing electricity consumption. More prominently, they have also been enlisted by the Chinese government to attempt to ensure that the 2008 Summer Olympics are free of rain, by breaking up clouds headed towards the capital and forcing them to drop rain on outlying areas instead.
If you still have a hard time believing all of this go Here (Chinese web site) and copy and paste the text Here (Google Translate). Here is a sample of that page:
Beijing Weather Modification Office of a staff member, at 11:43 on the 24th to 19:35, they Pinggu in Beijing, Changping, Miyun and three counties in Zhangjiakou in Hebei Zhuolu, Huailai, Chicheng have conducted The anti-aircraft artillery, rocket-rain hail suppression operations, accumulated a total of 394 fired artillery shells, rockets 31
Obviously the translation isn’t perfect, but you get the idea of what happened.
Still want more information about Weather Modification, then you should read some of the senate bills that have been drafted in the last couple of years.
Weather Modification Research and Technology Transfer Authorization Act of 2005
S. 517 [109th]: Weather Modification Research and Development Policy Authorization Act of 2005
Or this article from Wired in 2007
Or even better yet, Read my post about the Weather Warefare Treaty