Pollution, CCP-Controlled Weather, and an Olympic Warning

Over the last two months, Beijing’s air quality has been abysmal. I suppose this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s lived in Beijing for a serious amount of time. Still, before spending my second summer in the city, I expected the government to have made some progress on the air quality so that things would be ship-shape in time for the Olympics.

To the contrary, the air quality has been worse this summer than it was last year–something I would have thought rather impossible if you’d asked me last summer. Then, about two weeks ago, the city began to experience some strange weather. Nightly, a normal, hazy sky would suddenly transform itself into one saturated with lightning and thunderstorms. You can read Danwei’s post on Beijing’s wacky weather here. As we watched the impressive lightning and sheets of rain from our Bei Shi Da window, my brother and I would joke that it was all caused by the CCP–not satisfied with controlling the people, the legal system, and the media, had turned their sights on the weather.

Well, it seems that the government has been fooling around with the weather. According to this AP article, over the last couple of weeks, the government has been working overtime to clean up the air for yesterday’s Olympic one year countdown celebration. Besides the much publicized removal of 1,000,000 cars from Beijing’s roads, the government has also been shooting silver iodide into the skies to induce rain, which clears the air. It seems, however, that all of this was not enough to impress the visiting Olympic officials, yesterday.

Today’s Financial Times carries a story that says,

China was put on notice on Wednesday that if it did not address its air pollution problems before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it could see games organisers ordering some endurance events to be rescheduled. The warning from Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, clouded celebrations to mark the final year of the games’ preparations, especially for Beijing organisers who have tried to wave aside pollution worries with assurances of improvement and vague promises of further environmental action…

Now, will this silver iodide affect the health of Beijing’s numerous residents? Wikipedia says nothing about hazardous effects, but if any readers know anything about the risks of cloud seeding (besides precipitating weird weather), I’m interested to hear about them. According to Wikipedia, using silver iodide creates snow. I suppose this explains various reports of snow falling over Beijing this summer.

Wikipedia fun fact: cloud seeding was invented by Kurt Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard Vonnegut.