The Chinese are worried about dirty, polluted air in Beijing during the 2008 Summer Olympics. But, they have a plan. Rather than actually cleaning up the sources of their worst-in-the-world air pollution, they plan to fire rockets into the sky, release silver iodide crystals, and wait for the resulting rain to cleanse the air. Read more here.

Never mind that the scientific evidence for such "weather modification" has been described by most of the world's scientists as inconclusive at best. The Chinese invented rockets, and by Golly they're going to use them.

It reminds me of my days writing for the New Bedford (Mass.) Standard Times. I was assigned to find the most obscure, oddball state agencies still on the books, but with little or nothing to do, and write about them.

One was the state's 1950s-era "Weather Modification Office." It was the job of the bureaucrats in that office to examine and approve (or disapprove) proposals by entrepreneurs to "seed" clouds for farmers and communities troubled by drought or otherwise eager for rain.

Sometimes it rained, and sometimes it didn't. Of, course, that would have been true even if they hadn't taken to the skies to drop silver iodide into the most promising clouds they could find. They went about their business, crowed about their "successes" and collected their dough. Eventually, people recognized they weren't getting much in the way of results. 

Curiously, although the data demonstrating that it works are still not in, the industry has not gone away. And weather modification remains a tantalizing possibility for entrepreneurs and scientists and public officials in dry regions. Here is a sane discussion of where things stand in Arizona.