Making it rain

I first heard of shooting silver iodide into the atmosphere to make it rain in China, and it didn't seem like the sort of technology that could sustainably help with water shortage (the water in the atmosphere has to come from somewhere, right?). But apparently one Idaho utility has found tangible benefits at scale:

Idaho Power, which generates much of its electricity from dams, has been using cloud seeding since 2003, at a cost of about $850,000 per year for its main program in the Payette River area, officials there said.

“We’ve found our targeting to be good, and we’ve found precipitation increases in the 7 to 9 percent range during years that were very much less than normal snowpack years,” said Shaun Parkinson, who leads the utility’s cloud seeding project and is considering expanding it.

Idaho Power believes that in the winter of 2007, its weather modification efforts added enough water to the Payette and Snake Rivers to provide an additional 50,000 megawatt-hours of electricity at one of its major hydropower complex – the equivalent of a year’s power for nearly 4,000 homes.

Nevada has just stripped rain-making from its budget, but other Western states are still pursuing it. I'm at a loss to explain scientifically why "conservation of water" doesn't make this an unsustainable solution, but clearly some people buy the empirical results.

Apparently there is still skepticism in the scientific community over weather rain-making works, but in my non-scientific and anecdotal experience, the technology definitely works.

India and China initiate domestic climate change action

The developed world reacted with consternation to India's announcement that they would accept no greenhouse gas emissions limits from the international community, so it's great news to see that a domestic cap-and-trade system has been proposed:

India has approved in principle new trading plans centred on energy efficiency as part of efforts to shift to a greener economy to fight climate change, opening up a potential market worth more than $15 billion by 2015.

Even better, China appears to be taking its own steps in the right direction:

China's top legislature, for the first time in its history, is specifically addressing climate change with the review of a draft resolution, after hearing a report on the growing environmental problem Monday.

Ni Yuefeng, a vice-chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) environmental and resources protection committee, said the resolution shows the NPC is taking the issue seriously. The details of the resolution are expected to be on the agenda today.

The resolution will pave the way for future environmental legislation, Yang Fuqiang, director of global climate change solutions at environmental group WWF, told China Daily Monday.

This is in fact doubly good news, as not only does it signal greater willingness by the two most populous countries to take action to control their own emissions, but it also weakens the arguments of those Americans who would protest that the U.S. "taking the lead" on emissions reduction wouldn't have any impact. Simplistic game theory says so... but luckily that doesn't appear to be holding in this case.

P.S. I was once eating dinner in Beijing when they "made it rain" (see picture with the linked article), and the results were pretty astounding - a torrential downpour kept us in the restaurant for the next three hours.