This is a few days old by now, but I’m still catching up.  Busy week.

Chinese scientists artificially induced the second major snowstorm to wreak havoc in Beijing this season, state media said, reigniting debate over the practice of tinkering with Mother Nature.

After the earliest snow to hit the capital in 22 years fell on November 1, the capital was again shrouded in white Tuesday with more snow expected in the coming three days, the National Meteorological Centre said.

So, the Chinese claim they can control the weather.  Useful propaganda for them, I suppose.  If you control the weather, then you have one more tool in the toolbox to control the people.

Color me skeptical, to say the least.

The idea of cloud seeding has been around for quite some time, and is a Voodoo science at best.  Perhaps China figured out a new way to seed clouds.  Perhaps not.

But the real question is: should we be messing with the weather?  Shouldn’t there be limits on what we mess with?

I’ve watched enough Sci-Fi (or is it SyFy?) to know that this only ends in Apocalypse.

In the meantime, there are at least some in China who disagree with the government’s plan:

“No one can tell how much weather manipulation will change the sky,” Xiao Gang, a professor in the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the paper.

“We should not depend too much on artificial measures to get rain or snow, because there are too many uncertainties up in the sky.”

And in Future News, Xiao Gang, former professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has graduated from re-education camp.  He will now head the government’s cloud seeding research.  “There is nothing the Chinese people cannot accomplish,” a newly thin Gang said.

h/t CW