"Climate Changers" - By CWP Fellow Eyck Freymann

In August 2008, shortly before the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the Beijing sky was thick with smog. To the Communist Party bigwigs, this was an unacceptable backdrop for China’s big debut on the international stage. So, the Beijing Weather Modification Office was called in to clear the air. With planes and modified anti-aircraft guns, technicians fired canisters of silver iodide into the clouds, releasing ice-like crystals. The water vapor condensed, and it rained all around the city. By the time the foreign visitors arrived, the Beijing skies had turned to a picture-perfect blue. Human beings have long dreamed of controlling the weather. In the 1840s, James Pollard Espy , the U.S. federal government’s first meteorologist, proposed setting fire to the Appalachian mountains to stimulate rainfall. More in this series: In the 1960s and 1970s, following in the tradition of Josef Stalin’s “grand plan for the transformation of The Diplomatic Deadlock nature” to increase agricultural output and “beat drought,” Soviet climatologists proposed a range of strategies to “improve” the country’s climate, including by The Adaptation Advantage detonating hydrogen bombs and punching holes in the ozone layer.

https://www.thewirechina.com/2022/12/18/u-s-china-geoengineering/ - BY EYCK FREYMANN — DECEMBER 18, 2022

Eyck Freymann holds joint postdoctoral fellowships at the Arctic Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Columbia-Harvard China & the World Program, where he studies the geopolitics of climate change. He is also Director of Indo-Pacific and global pandemic coverage at Greenmantle, a New York-based advisory firm, and a Non-Resident Research Fellow with the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.

His first book, One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard UP 2020), is assigned on undergraduate and graduate syllabi at Harvard, Cambridge, Columbia, Peking University, and elsewhere. He also writes on a range of other current affairs topics, including U.S. politics and foreign policy and COVID-19. Freymann’s writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic. As a reporter and columnist for The Wire China, he is the author of “The Warming War,” a series of investigative reports about the breakdown in climate diplomacy and its implications for the planet and global security.

Freymann holds a doctorate in China Studies from Balliol College, University of Oxford; two masters degrees in China Studies from Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, where he was a Henry Scholar; and a bachelors degree cum laude with highest honors in East Asian History from Harvard College.

Photo Credit: By DooFi - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7279294