Making it rain or shine was the crazy bet that the Chinese authorities took on in 2008 during the Beijing Olympic Games, marked by oppressive heat (23°C at night, 35°C during the day), frequent storms and heavy air pollution. To ensure that the sky would not spoil the opening ceremony, Beijing had put the “cloud chasers” of its “weather modification program” on alert.
Their weapon: rockets loaded with silver iodide intended to seed the clouds. “The technique consists of sending silver iodide into the clouds, from planes or ground cannons, which promotes the creation of ice crystals,” explains Laurent Deguillaume, a physicist at the University of Clermont-Auvergne. “They absorb the humidity around them and end up falling to the ground in the form of snow, ice or water.”
Since the 1940s, experiments to manipulate the climate
The aim of the manoeuvre: to make clouds rain down before they fly over the Olympic stadium for the opening ceremony. The Figaro correspondent in Beijing reported at the time that he had met Yu Yong Gang, one of these cloud chasers whose mission was to “eliminate the rain” by shooting at any threatening cumulus clouds.
“In this Olympic summer, the mission could be to prevent rain at one point, or on the contrary to trigger precipitations that will try to clean up some of the heavy ambient pollution,” the journalist explained. Across the country, the weather modification program would mobilize more than 30,000 people, 7,000 anti-aircraft guns, 5,000 rocket launchers and about thirty planes.”
China has been devoting huge resources to cloud seeding programs for decades. In August 2022, Beijing bombed the atmosphere to bring rain to the Yangtze River region, which was suffering from a historic drought. “Since the 1940s, experiments have been conducted in around fifty countries to manipulate the climate, to get rain here and no hail there,” explains lawyer and writer Mathieu Simonet, author of “The End of Clouds.” (Ed. Julliard).
Last year, nearly 70 solar geoengineering projects were inventoried worldwide, mainly in marine cloud brightening, stratospheric aerosol injection and cirrus cloud thinning.
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