While wacky schemes to control the weather might seem more like comic book fodder than the stuff of headlines, weather modification plots have been making the news a lot lately. Take the case of the uncharacteristic snowfall in Beijing Monday.

The city was blanketed with its earliest snowfall in a decade, closing roads, delaying planes, and hampering shipping, according to one wire report. Residents later learned the winter wonderland may have been courtesy of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, which had coaxed the precipitation from existing cloud cover using silver iodide, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“We won’t miss any opportunity of artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from the lingering drought,” Zhang Qiang, head of the modification office, told China’s Xinhua news agency. Zhang estimated the seeding created 16 million metric tons of snow, according to Xinhua.

Although the cloud seeding—a practice whose effectiveness is disputed by many scientists—was lauded as bringing much-needed moisture to the drought stricken city, it may have done so at the cost of other areas in the region, according to the Journal. The effect of weather modification in one location on surrounding locales is an ongoing ethical dilemma of messing with Mother Nature.

A less-than-neighborly plan by the Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov to keep his city snow free presents the flip side of the Beijing problem. Luzhkov’s plan to intercept clouds and make them dump their snow before they reach the city has drawn the ire of those on the receiving end of the “gift,” according to the Moscow Times.

“We’ll need additional money for removing the snow, where will we get it?” Pavel Lykov, who works in the region’s public utilities and transport department, is quoted as saying. “When they prevent clouds in Moscow in the summer, the cucumbers turn yellow. The question is: is it safe?”

Luzhkov, however, remained sanguine about the effects the plan would have on the city’s suburbs.

“What if we force this snow to fall beyond Moscow?” he is quoted as asking. “The Moscow region will have more water, bigger harvests, while we will have less snow.”

But weather control intrigues don’t stop at snow. This summer, Bill Gates filed another in a long line of patents to squash hurricanes, and the National Academies of Science looked at staving off climate change with a cooling layer of sulfur dust. Many scientists agree, however, that weather wrangling is neither an easy fix, nor one that should be taken lightly. Considering our technological capabilities in the context of the potential consequences, one climate researcher indicated fear might be a more appropriate response.

"Frankly, I'm a little ambivalent about all this," Stanford Researcher Ken Caldeira told National Public Radio in June. "I've been pushing very hard for a research program, but it's a little scary to me as it becomes more of a reality that we might be able to toy with our environment, or our whole climate system at a planetary scale."