China, in Search of Water, is Building a Rain-Making Network Three Times the Size of Spain (scmp.com) 111
China is testing cutting-edge defence technology to develop a powerful yet relatively low-cost weather modification system to bring substantially more rain to the Tibetan plateau, Asia's biggest freshwater reserve. From a report: The system, which involves an enormous network of fuel-burning chambers installed high up on the Tibetan mountains, could increase rainfall in the region by up to 10 billion cubic metres a year -- about 7 per cent of China's total water consumption -- according to researchers involved in the project. Tens of thousands of chambers will be built at selected locations across the Tibetan plateau to produce rainfall over a total area of about 1.6 million square kilometres (620,000 square miles), or three times the size of Spain. It will be the world's biggest such project.
The chambers burn solid fuel to produce silver iodide, a cloud-seeding agent with a crystalline structure much like ice. The chambers stand on steep mountain ridges facing the moist monsoon from south Asia. As wind hits the mountain, it produces an upward draft and sweeps the particles into the clouds to induce rain and snow.
The chambers burn solid fuel to produce silver iodide, a cloud-seeding agent with a crystalline structure much like ice. The chambers stand on steep mountain ridges facing the moist monsoon from south Asia. As wind hits the mountain, it produces an upward draft and sweeps the particles into the clouds to induce rain and snow.
You need moisture first (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, they'll use up all the water before it rains over the pacific ocean. Oh, noes, the Pacific Ocean will dry up! AAaaaaaaa!
Re:You need moisture first (Score:5, Informative)
This seems to be in the center of a continent, and affecting water-laden air moving northward. It looks like there's 850-1,850 miles of land before this air would reach Taiwan and the East Chinese Sea. The US is 3,000 miles across.
It looks like they could impact Gansu or Mongolia.
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The moisture flows northward and much of it ends as snow which becomes ice in the Arctic.
This has the potential to reduce the amount of Arctic ice cover significantly.
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Hmm, center of Asia, water-laden air moving northwards...
Who could possibly be effected by this sort of thing? After all, there's noone north of China, after all.
What's that you say? Russia? Nah, couldn't be!
Re:You need moisture first (Score:5, Informative)
This particular question is addressed at the very end of TFA. Sounds like there is a real concern with reducing the rainfall of other regions of China.
Reducing the rainfall in regions other than China is not mentioned as a consideration.
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That's because if the history of China is any indicator, they won't give a fuck what happens outside of China, including areas that they consider to be China, but the rest of the world (and those areas themselves) considers to be completely different countries.
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If this isn't man-made climate change, I don't know what is.
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Well now, there's your answer to climate change, and rising oceans.
That's sarcasm, in case someone doesn't figure that out.
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The US also is next to the Pacific, but we don't plan on using it to satisfy water needs in the Midwest. The Midwest gets its water from rain and snow melt in what is mostly the Mississippi watershed. If we wanted the Midwest to be wetter, we'd want more rain and snow in that watershed, not a project to import water from the Pacific. Similarly, the Chinese are talking about more rain in areas quite a bit away from the coast.
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At what levels.
Everything is toxic at a particular level. Stop fearmongering.
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Sounds like they are planning to put a LOT of silver into the air. It's going to come down somewhere ... Iodine is at least biologically useful ...
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> Everything is toxic at a particular level.
You don't know what the fuck you are talking about.
Not everything has an LDLo or LD50.
https://biology.stackexchange.... [stackexchange.com]
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It also adds silver iodide to the air and rain which is of course toxic.
It could be worse. In his novel "The Caryatids", Bruce Sterling had them doing something similar, using nuclear fusion bombs.
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Would RO desalination plants be cheaper?
Than a small device burning a chemical? Not likely. Desalination plants are expensive and cranky of maintenance.
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Re:You need moisture first (Score:5, Informative)
It's entirely possible that these airmasses aren't going to rain or snow anywhere after passing over the Tibetan Plateau. Getting up to the level of the plateau -- 14000 feet and up -- involves a lot of orographic uplift and squeezing out of moisture. Once they move on to lower elevation areas, they will drop and warm. The resulting humidity may well be too low to support precipitation.
The article, if you actually read the whole thing, acknowledges that there may not be a lot of moisture there to extract even in Tibet. It also makes it clear that this is only a proposal and has not been approved by Beijing.
A Zero-Sum Game? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder who may loose out on the rain then? Also, I bet, China won't give a rat's ass as long as they have the stronger military and with annual growth of military spending in the double digits the rest of the world should better look out.
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I wonder who may loose out on the rain then?
If it works perfectly, this will divert some of the monsoon moisture to China. End result would be slightly less destructive rains on one side, and slightly more drinkable water on the other (where "slightly" may be an enourmous number in human-scale terms, but is fairly small compared to the total numbers involved).
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If it works perfectly
Was it really necessary to make me spray coffee all over my screen this early in the morning?
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Was it really necessary to make me spray coffee all over my screen this early in the morning?
Ewwww, who keeps coffee in a spray bottle?
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The monsoon is a seasonal change in prevailing winds. The summer monsoon, which runs from July to September, transports huge amounts of moisture from the Indian Ocean. Northern South Asia also has a winter monsoon, that runs from October to April, and brings modest rains in the first few months.
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"Less destructive rains" like that destructive flooding of the Nile that Mubarak's dam stopped?
You know, the flooding that was driving organic salts and detreitus miles inland, making the west bank fertile and allowing farmers to produce high yields.
Stopping the destructive flooding of the Nile also devastated Egypt's capacity to produce food. It was an enormous, expensive project that destroyed their economy and created famine.
How destructive are these monsoons?
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I'm sure it'll disrupt rain patterns in the area.
And this is just the beginning of how population pressures and global warming are going to affect people. If folks think we have an immigration problem now, just wait 20 years. The World is going to have some serious environmental and resource problems to contend with as well as the innate tribalism and xenophobia most people's have.
And a wall or walls at our borders? Pffft! Won't do jack shit other than waste money. See, there's something called boats....
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The trade winds bend fairly north in Asia, so that the prevailing winds in Tibet run from northeast to southwest, unlike most of the continental US at that latitude where westerlies prevail.
So if moisture is falling on the Tibetan plateau, it's not falling in the northern parts of South Asia. If China succeeds, I believe the losers will be Nepal, the Punjab, and possibly eastern Pakistan -- places that receive a mild fall northeast monsoon coming down from the Himalayas but not the more potent and well-kno
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This is incorrect. The Himalayas act as a barrier and nothing comes "from tibet".
The Monsoon is SW and SE (From Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal)
Re: A Zero-Sum Game? (Score:2)
...loose
You sure you're a virgin??
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:how this research breakthrough came to be (Score:5, Funny)
Give this man some +mods (Score:1)
Finally, that line has a purpose.
Thanks for the laugh.
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Who has the resources and guts to stand up to them?
China has the worlds largest population, and a large land area (About the same as the United States) if forced into a war-time economy they would be able to kick the butt of any other nation. Including the United States which has the largest standing army, but China has a potential army.
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Silver Iodide (Score:2)
Must be all that medieval silver they hogged (Score:1)
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They take iodide and they paint it with a rattle can of silver paint.
See? That would be cheaper! I don't know why scientists never listen to me, I even built my own rocket.
Re:Soil bacteria (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's possible they are learning. TFA does mention that the government might not green light it because they are worried about the down-stream effects (no pun intended).
China has been pushing really hard, maybe harder than anyone to clean up its environment and deal with climate change. They started in a very bad place, hit peak coal a few years ago, installed more wind than the rest of the world combined... It's not perfect by any means but they seem to be serious about it.
Re:Soil bacteria (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's obviously an intent to weaponize weather - it says right in TFS "cutting edge defense technology".
Poison drywall, poison toothpaste, poison dogfood, and now poison rain. Chinese leaders are mimicking Jack Nicholson's joker
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Unfortunately, the Tibetan plateau has few coastlines to supply the salt water for desalinization.
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Nice try, Quang! (Score:1)
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We're down to just distilled water, and pure grain alcohol.
So they are stealing rain... (Score:2, Interesting)
By forcing rain to fall on Chinese soil... they are effectively inducing a drought elsewhere. Say now, the south of Russia becomes incredibly dry because there is no rain. China has no regard for absolutely anything. They take a technology and simply use it, asking no questions.
What are the dry-to-be countries in the area do, then?
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What are the dry-to-be countries in the area do, then?
War. Which is exactly what would happen if there isn't some form of offset such as China selling crops at a greatly reduced price to those areas and so on.
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What are the dry-to-be countries in the area do, then?
War. Which is exactly what would happen if there isn't some form of offset such as China selling crops at a greatly reduced price to those areas and so on.
Yea... and we think resource wars over oil are vicious...
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm no climatologist, but China mass-draining the monsoons of suspended water can't have anything but nearly catastrophic effects on down-wind ecosystems that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to exist compatibly with current moisture patterns.
If they pull the moisture out of the air to get it to fall in Tibet, then it won't be there to fall wherever those air currents normally dump it - Eastern Russia, Northern China, or maybe even Japan. It would seem that relatively-dessicated air masses may behave unpredictably as well.
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Unless it goes the same way many large projects in China go...in the dumpster. But it will probably cause ecological havoc before they admit they screwed up. Then it will takes years of them denying there was any ecological havoc while they pray for auspicious circumstances to magically make it work. After Ping goes Pong, they may decide to pull the plug.
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All during which the world's ecologically-conscious community will continue to attack Trump for....reasons.
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Reasons being that he's so much worse environmentally than previous US Presidents, and at least the US population can exert pressure on him and Congress. I have a very tiny impact on how the US is run, and none at all on how China is run.
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Hungry people are dangerous. Of course the Chinese military can handle their neighbors okay.
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This article brings up the idea of climate wars in which a nation-state substantially affects the weather to damage another’s interests.
It would also create win-win situation, bringing more water in China while removing excess water from flood suffering neighbor. The real problem is that we have no clue of actual consequences.on our actions on such a complex system.
Take that (Score:2)
Manmade Climate Change deniers. /s
Seriously, is there weather modeling software that can do some predictive analysis of what this means to everyone else in the region? And what impact this meddling may have on global weather patters?
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Desalinization plant (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems a bit more practical to build some desalinization plants. From what I have understood, recent advancements in membrane tech would make it far cheaper than in the past. Plus, there is the added benefit of lithium production.
https://www.ft.com/content/107... [ft.com]
Health effects via food production? (Score:3)
The collected rain will probably be used for food production and drinking water. If the crops accumulate this silver iodide and then ingested, then what happens?
It is not entirely safe. From toxnet (https://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/search/a?dbs+hsdb:@term+@DOCNO+2930):
(It does not mention increased cancer risk, however, and no concentrations are mentioned, and hopefully the concentrations will be small)
1) MILD TO MODERATE ORAL TOXICITY: Patients with mild
ingestions may only develop irritation or grade I
(superficial hyperemia and edema) burns of the
oropharynx, esophagus or stomach; acute or chronic
complications are unlikely. Patients with moderate
toxicity may develop grade II burns (superficial
blisters, erosions and ulcerations) are at risk for
subsequent stricture formation, particularly
esophageal. Some patients (particularly young
children) may develop upper airway edema.
a) Alkaline corrosive ingestion may produce burns to the
oropharynx, upper airway, esophagus and occasionally
stomach. Spontaneous vomiting may occur. The absence
of visible oral burns does NOT reliably exclude the
presence of esophageal burns. The presence of
stridor, vomiting, drooling, and abdominal pain are
associated with serious esophageal injury in most
cases.
b) PREDICTIVE: The grade of mucosal injury at endoscopy
is the strongest predictive factor for the occurrence
of systemic and GI complications and mortality.
2) SEVERE ORAL TOXICITY: May develop deep burns and
necrosis of the gastrointestinal mucosa. Complications
often include perforation (esophageal, gastric, rarely
duodenal), fistula formation (tracheoesophageal,
aortoesophageal), and gastrointestinal bleeding.
Hypotension, tachycardia, tachypnea and, rarely, fever
may develop. Stricture formation (esophageal, less
often oral or gastric) is likely to develop long term.
Esophageal carcinoma is another long term
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The question you should always ask, (Score:4, Interesting)
about China's intentions when they 'develop' anything in the hinterlands, is how this will assist them in destroying or diminishing the indigenous, non-Chinese, population.
Especially in Tibet.
How much silver is that? (Score:2)
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Isn't silver antimicrobial? Surely that must have an effort on the ecosystem.
The last time I seeded a cloud (Score:3)
The last time I seeded a cloud, I just had to install OpenStack
That's what she said (Score:2)
Also install beavers on every little creek which will help as they build deep ponds that cut into evaporation compared to wide shallow ones while building up water stores and reclaiming land from scrub.
This from PBS last night.
Oh, also the beaver family installs will warm your heart.
When the US did something like this... (Score:1)