After a lovely, warm afternoon spent at Cheung Sha beach yesterday, I woke this morning to a sudden and bitter cold tearing through the apartment at breakneck speed. Outside the window I could see the surface of the ocean moving rapidly from the strong wind. Walking to the station, people were shivering in surprise at the sudden cold front that has hit Hong Kong.
 
Early winter, perhaps?
 
Not quite.
 
The front page of the paper today explained that China’s Weather Modification Office went trigger happy in its artificial precipitation campaign to end a drought, firing 186 doses of silver iodide into the clouds to force the rain to fall. Seems like they might have gone a bit too far — the campaign resulted in a snowstorm in Beijing which cancelled dozens of flights and caused havoc on the streets at the city’s residents were unprepared for this drastic change in weather.
 
Sounds a bit Truman Show-ish to me — press a button and the sun comes up, turn a dial and the rain comes down. While weather modification is nothing new, and China is certainly not the first country to practice it, I find this event more than a bit scary. Beijing is almost 2000 kilometres away from Hong Kong, and even here we are being affected. The weather agency here is advising people to bundle up tomorrow as they expect the temperature to drop to 17′C. That’s a good 10 degree difference, literally overnight.
 
How can it be that a handful of people almost 2,000 kilometres away have the power to push some buttons and affect millions and millions of people in the surrounding areas without their consent or consultation?
 
While here in Hong Kong we just have to deal with a small cold snap, in many areas of mainland China the snowstorm caused a suspension of shipping, a shutdown of roads due to trees falling onto the streets under the weight of snow, and thousands of acres of crops destroyed. How much money did all these people and companies lose? And what are the chances of them getting any compensation from the government for this weather experiment gone wrong?
 
It also raises the question of what if something went wrong, and instead of snow, for example, it become a rain storm that turned into a lethal flood? Obviously if they can accidentally cause a blizzard, they can accidentally cause a flood too. And of course, surely there is also the potential to use this technology against other countries, if they were so inclined?
 
While we humans can do amazing things to change our landscape and control the environment to improve the quality of life for millions of people, I have to say that the perhaps the power to control the weather is something that I do not want any government to have!