Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it...Rain Chemicals Down on Our Heads.

I know Minnesota is tired of winter and yet another snowstorm. We had a bit of snow last week, too. Maybe an inch--but it was almost enough to close school. There are no plows, no sand, no salt. What there is are hordes of people who drive, walk, and bike as if nothing has changed. My 3 minute drive from school to home one almost resulted in 4 casualties--an electric cart tried to pass me on the right as I slowed down to turn right. Another couple tried to cross the street. Yet another backed up out of a parking space...all of them behaving as if the streets were dry and I had the ability to stop in time. Which I didn't. Even at 15 miles an hour. It was tense.

Still, it was nice to have that skiff of snow to brighten things up. We've had no precipitation since October 24, so we're in a dry dry drought. Everything is gray and dull--the sky, the buildings, the ground--so it looked so nice to have a little bit of white fluff.

Then I found out why it snowed.

A carpet of snow blanketing the Forbidden City and the ancient halls and courtyards of the Lama Temple has transformed China’s capital into a fairyland. Hundreds have played truant from offices to sneak a peak of the first snowfall of the winter.

But nature has been given a helping hand. The heavy snowfalls over Beijing have principally been induced by meteorological offices to try to mitigate the most severe drought to grip northern China in nearly half a century.

City officials have been blasting chemicals into clouds over northern China to create the first precipitation in more than 100 days. The first flurries fell on the capital on Tuesday. By Tuesday, more than 500 cigarette-sized sticks of silver iodide had been seeded into clouds above Beijing from 28 rocket-launch bases around the city, said the Beijing Weather Modification Command Centre.

But this was still nowhere near enough to alleviate the drought that is threatening wheat harvests in several northern provinces.

Since the Government calculated that the city had gone for more than 100 days without a drop of rain, residents have been complaining to one another about how the snowfalls that were a common occurrence even into the 1980s appeared to have halted, as drought and desertification have marched towards the city from the Gobi desert.

Making the most of the cloud cover and renewed scattered snow, officials decided to “enhance” the fall by artificial seeding again last night. They fired 313 more sticks of silver iodide into the sky. The procedure made the snow a lot heavier, officials said.

Guo Yingchun, a senior engineer with the Hebei provincial meteorological observatory, said: “The snow has brought moisture to the soil and that may end the drought.”

Shades of Big Brother. In my Brave New (Chinese) World, we have a Weather Modification Command Centre. But ICK. Like there's not enough chemimcally crud floating through the air already. I have to think there are consequences somewhere for this. What if that weather that was artificially forced to drop snow here might have naturally dropped it over some other place that needed it--say a FARM somewhere. This can't be good.