Beijing (AsiaNews / Agencies) - Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao yesterday visited the northern province of Hebei, has been hard hit in recent days by two snowstorms that have caused 38 casualties, injured dozens of people and caused massive damage to infrastructure in the province. But in the country discussions abound over the responsibilities of government, which in order to provoke rain in Beijing artificially induced climate change. According to some government sources, when three snowstorms that hit the capital in the last 11 days were artificially induced, through the bombardment of certain cloud agglomerations on November 1.

The snowstorms were incredibly intense and well ahead of the seasonal average, in the north hundreds of thousands of cars are trapped in ice, blocking highways, while two schools collapsed, killing four students.  Because of the seriousness of the situation, the Public Security Bureau of Shijiazhuang (capital of Hebei) has created a command centre for emergency operations: The priority is to restore movement in the streets.

But public is uncertain about the origin of this Chinese environmental disaster. The Office of the environmental modification in Beijing initially admitted that the first heavy snowfall was induced, and the government newspaper China Daily wrote yesterday - citing an unnamed government official - that the second storm was caused by man. In addition, the Met Office in the capital has admitted that both "were too heavy for beginning of November."

The bad weather has actually blocked six provinces: Shaanxi, Shanxi, Hebei, Henan, Hubei and Shandong. Thousands of flights were canceled, making it very difficult to move away from areas affected by snow. Wen Jiabao visited Shijizhuang to control operations in support of  the population: he visited passengers waiting in the train stations and then went to the border of Shanxi.

According to the provincial government authorities in the course of the storm more than 1,200 houses collapsed, and 1900 others were damaged. The damage amounts to about 44 million. Experts in meteorology negatively comment on the climatic changes induced by the government. According to Xiao Gang, professor at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, "nobody can tell how much you alter the sky if you manipulate the weather. We should not be too dependent on gimmicks to get artificial rain or snow, because they shoot too many uncertainties into the air”.