Some people and news media in China now start to blame  their own trials in cloud seeding for heavy snowfall that by now has killed at least 40 people. Quite a few buildings, a school among them (again), collapsed under the weight of the  snow,

testing the country's disaster preparedness and prompting fresh questions about Beijing's efforts to alter its weather.

Cloud seeding is one of the oldest and probably most tested methods to alter the weather (and eventually the climate). For some years now, it might be considered as part of  geoengineering techniques(see post November 4, Engineering snow in China).

Now, if cloud seeding is even slightly to blame for these storms, we might have to think twice about other methods to influence weather patterns or the whole climate - methods that have not been tested at all. Consider it a warning not to be to self-assured about meddling with the world's  weather...

Feng Lee / Getty Images

Since we seem incapable of changing our way of life, we try to engineer our way out of climate change and its consequences. Up to now,  most grand ideas on geoengineering are just that. Ideas. But we are trying....

A Nov. 1 snowfall in Beijing — the city's earliest since 1987 — is due, Chinese scientists say, to a campaign of  "cloud-seeding" to encourage precipitation,

reports Time.com. Rainmaking is an old desire. And large parts of Northern China are turning into a desert - due to a combination of industrial pollution, drought and changing climate patterns. But engineering world climate is not without dangers. Who should be allowed do what and when - and can we deal with unintended consequences? Even small trials like this Chinese "cloud-seeding" are not without risk, as Time continues.

...if you choose to believe in cloud-seeding, the Chinese scientists may have even overdone it. The snowstorm lasted for 11 hours, disrupting flights in and out of Beijing and hampering shipping off the Chinese coast.

We truely are venturing into unknown territory.