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Can We Terraform the Sahara to Stop Climate Change?

Real Engineering · 2.9M views · 2018-09-14 · 12:48

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Overview

Real Engineering examines whether greening the Sahara could draw down carbon and slow climate change. It concludes that the effort would be enormously costly and that changes in albedo and other effects undercut the climate benefit.

On Hacker News

Recommended in tree-planting and carbon removal threads as a sourced explanation of why greening deserts is not a simple climate fix.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2018–2021

Topics

Climate policy, solutions & debateEnvironment, agriculture & food systems
Search by tags
saharaclimate changecarbon removalalbedoreal engineering

What people said

jarenmf · 2021-07 · Recommendation

Greening deserts is not a good solution for climate change. In fact it might worsen climate change due to albedo changes. A nice video about this: [VIDEO]

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cpeterso · 2019-04 · Recommendation

This video ("Can We Terraform the Sahara to Stop Climate Change?") examines how we might do just that. The conclusion is that it's technically possible (like many things), but the cost far outweighs the benefit. It also introduces new climate risks. [VIDEO]

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Latty · 2019-04 · Recommendation

I recently saw a video about doing this - apparently the desert is actually a really bad option if we want to combat climate change - the core problem is that the desert currently reflects a lot of light from the sun. If we cover it with forest or whatever, then suddenly we adjust the albedo of the earth and absorb more heat, negating some of the impact. Combined with the energy need to pump (and desalinate for trees - your suggestion of kelp would presumably help there) water, etc... make it not really work. Source: [VIDEO] I recommend watching the video - it explains it better and goes into detail - it cites its own sources.

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Sources

Video by Real Engineering, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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