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If you feel like watching more hopeful content on the subject, there is Allan Savory's TED talk about how to stop desertification[1], and Freeman Dyson's speech

If you feel like watching more hopeful content on the subject, there is Allan Savory's TED talk about how to stop desertification[1], and Freeman Dyson's speech called "heretic thoughts about science and society"[2]. Basically, those speakers suggest climate change is an issue that can be solved with better land management. Soil is extremely good at absorbing Carbon Dioxide. Isn't it why there is so little CO2 in the atmosphere (0.04%)? We just need to make sure the process does indeed happen. When one looks at the map of Earth, the vastness of the desert areas is scary. Yet there are reasons to believe this is relatively recent. The Sahara was wet few thousands years ago, the American deserts became so mostly because of the considerable environmental changes brought by Europeans. Desertification is much scarier than climate change, and it did not wait for the industrial revolution to happen. Reversing desertification is probably not impossible (after all it is being attempted already in many places around the world, like in Africa[3] and China[4]), and it might very well reverse climate change as a bonus. I personally wish more effort and public attention was diverted to it. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xFLjUt2leM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xFLjUt2leM 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-North_Shelter_Forest_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-North_Shelter_Forest_Pro...

vram22 9y ago
Re. reversing desertification: Came across this technique - imprinting - recently - seems interesting: Imprinting soils – Creating Instant Edge for Large Scale Revegetation of Barren Lands: 1) https://permaculturenews.org/2012/09/19/imprinting-soils-creating-instant-edge-for-large-scale-revegetation-of-barren-lands/ https://permaculturenews.org/2012/09/19/imprinting-soils-cre... Excerpt: [ Imprinting is a method for instantly adding what permaculturists call the ‘edge effect’ to soils, utilising a heavy and dimpled/wedged roller to ‘imprint’ soils with patterned depressions. The bottom of these depressions then become collection points for all the crucial elements needed for seed germination and soil building: seeds themselves, water, organic matter (including plant debris and animal manure) and wind-blown silt and clay particles. ] Check the before and after photos in the article. 2) http://imprinting.org/ http://imprinting.org/ Bio of Dr. Robert Dixon, who started this: 3) http://imprinting.org/biography.htm http://imprinting.org/biography.htm
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  Woah, that's very interesting. It's pretty well-established that analyzing land based on gross regional characteristics is a disaster for reasons like these - the relevance of a given patch of soil to erosion resistance or vegetation support can change massively over miles or even yards. Sometimes protecting 100 acres of exposed, average land is less useful than protecting a single acre of liminal ground that holds back stream or wind erosion, or helps to germinate the next 'stage' of vegetation. What's totally new to me is the idea of going out and making seminal land like this. Finding it is hard, protecting it is harder, but making it? There's an idea that could actually be compatible with the sort of bulk-analysis development governments are capable of. This seems to at least have the potential to really matter, and be far more usable than most grand environmental schemes.
  - vram22 9y ago
    Yes, it does seem so. Also, though I haven't checked the financial aspects, it seems like it could be done at somewhat low cost, and still be effective to some extent - e.g. not only the machine-driven imprinting, but might be possible to do it manually by humans (using some hand-operated tools, like even just spades/shovels, or something a bit more sophisticated). And that could be decided on a case-by-case basis depending on availability and cost of the human labor vs. cost of the imprinting machine (the tractor with an attachment or whatever it is).
jackmott 9y ago
>Soil is extremely good at absorbing Carbon Dioxide. Isn't it why there is so little CO2 in the atmosphere (0.04%)? We just need to make sure the process does indeed happen. Nonsense hand waving. Nobody has a coherent plan for how to "just" make that happen. The people who think they have a coherent plan haven't opened up excel or a napkin to do some preliminary math about the scale involved.
- Brakenshire 9y ago
  One of the major problems we have is that this amazing carbon sink is being destroyed, there have been quite a few years where slash and burn in rainforests has competed with the burning of fuels as the major source of carbon emissions. We face a major challenge to halt that, but to actually reverse it entirely and aim for a radical recreation and expansion seems ambitious. My understanding was that rainforests take hundreds, perhaps thousands of years to develop.
  - opportune 9y ago
    The problem is that by focusing on rainforests, we also unfairly target some of the poorest countries on earth. Coming from westerners, who essentially deforested an entire continent (Europe) and chopped down and replanted another one (US/Canada), this message is highly hypocritical. If you're a poor farmer making $3000/year in Brazil or Indonesia you don't give two shits about what some latte-sipping American thinks about the rainforest, you're worried about feeding your family and getting your kids a good education. The solution is to actually subsidize these farms out of chopping down the rainforest. If you pay the farmer $5k to not slash and burn the rainforest so they can plant their crops there, they won't because that income is almost as much as they would make anyway. The problem is, this doesn't really work at scale. But that's economics; if we truly valued the rain forest as much as we said we did, we would be willing to pay to keep it around (like Norway actually does).
    - enraged_camel 9y ago
      >>The problem is that by focusing on rainforests, we also unfairly target some of the poorest countries on earth. Those poor countries will be hit -- in fact are already hit -- the hardest by climate change.
Daishiman 9y ago
Hope without plans is useless. Hope is not a strategy. This is pretty much just prayer, and a grain of sand in the vastness of problems caused by climate change. Nothing to do with solving permafrost thawing, nothing do with solving the heat shock created by extreme climates, no solutions for ocean acidification.
- iak8god 9y ago
  > Hope without plans is useless. So is despair. Reversing desertification will sink tons of CO2 back into the ground.

vram22 9y ago

Re. reversing desertification: Came across this technique - imprinting - recently - seems interesting: Imprinting soils – Creating Instant Edge for Large Scale Revegetation of Barren Lands: 1) https://permaculturenews.org/2012/09/19/imprinting-soils-creating-instant-edge-for-large-scale-revegetation-of-barren-lands/ https://permaculturenews.org/2012/09/19/imprinting-soils-cre... Excerpt: [ Imprinting is a method for instantly adding what permaculturists call the ‘edge effect’ to soils, utilising a heavy and dimpled/wedged roller to ‘imprint’ soils with patterned depressions. The bottom of these depressions then become collection points for all the crucial elements needed for seed germination and soil building: seeds themselves, water, organic matter (including plant debris and animal manure) and wind-blown silt and clay particles. ] Check the before and after photos in the article. 2) http://imprinting.org/ http://imprinting.org/ Bio of Dr. Robert Dixon, who started this: 3) http://imprinting.org/biography.htm http://imprinting.org/biography.htm

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Bartweiss 9y ago
Woah, that's very interesting. It's pretty well-established that analyzing land based on gross regional characteristics is a disaster for reasons like these - the relevance of a given patch of soil to erosion resistance or vegetation support can change massively over miles or even yards. Sometimes protecting 100 acres of exposed, average land is less useful than protecting a single acre of liminal ground that holds back stream or wind erosion, or helps to germinate the next 'stage' of vegetation. What's totally new to me is the idea of going out and making seminal land like this. Finding it is hard, protecting it is harder, but making it? There's an idea that could actually be compatible with the sort of bulk-analysis development governments are capable of. This seems to at least have the potential to really matter, and be far more usable than most grand environmental schemes.
- vram22 9y ago
  Yes, it does seem so. Also, though I haven't checked the financial aspects, it seems like it could be done at somewhat low cost, and still be effective to some extent - e.g. not only the machine-driven imprinting, but might be possible to do it manually by humans (using some hand-operated tools, like even just spades/shovels, or something a bit more sophisticated). And that could be decided on a case-by-case basis depending on availability and cost of the human labor vs. cost of the imprinting machine (the tractor with an attachment or whatever it is).

jackmott 9y ago

>Soil is extremely good at absorbing Carbon Dioxide. Isn't it why there is so little CO2 in the atmosphere (0.04%)? We just need to make sure the process does indeed happen. Nonsense hand waving. Nobody has a coherent plan for how to "just" make that happen. The people who think they have a coherent plan haven't opened up excel or a napkin to do some preliminary math about the scale involved.

Brakenshire 9y ago
One of the major problems we have is that this amazing carbon sink is being destroyed, there have been quite a few years where slash and burn in rainforests has competed with the burning of fuels as the major source of carbon emissions. We face a major challenge to halt that, but to actually reverse it entirely and aim for a radical recreation and expansion seems ambitious. My understanding was that rainforests take hundreds, perhaps thousands of years to develop.
- opportune 9y ago
  The problem is that by focusing on rainforests, we also unfairly target some of the poorest countries on earth. Coming from westerners, who essentially deforested an entire continent (Europe) and chopped down and replanted another one (US/Canada), this message is highly hypocritical. If you're a poor farmer making $3000/year in Brazil or Indonesia you don't give two shits about what some latte-sipping American thinks about the rainforest, you're worried about feeding your family and getting your kids a good education. The solution is to actually subsidize these farms out of chopping down the rainforest. If you pay the farmer $5k to not slash and burn the rainforest so they can plant their crops there, they won't because that income is almost as much as they would make anyway. The problem is, this doesn't really work at scale. But that's economics; if we truly valued the rain forest as much as we said we did, we would be willing to pay to keep it around (like Norway actually does).
  - enraged_camel 9y ago
    >>The problem is that by focusing on rainforests, we also unfairly target some of the poorest countries on earth. Those poor countries will be hit -- in fact are already hit -- the hardest by climate change.

Daishiman 9y ago

Hope without plans is useless. Hope is not a strategy. This is pretty much just prayer, and a grain of sand in the vastness of problems caused by climate change. Nothing to do with solving permafrost thawing, nothing do with solving the heat shock created by extreme climates, no solutions for ocean acidification.

iak8god 9y ago
> Hope without plans is useless. So is despair. Reversing desertification will sink tons of CO2 back into the ground.