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Would flooding the deserts help stop global warming?
Imagine flooding a desert half the size of the Sahara. Using 238 trillion gallons of desalinated ocean water to do the job. Creating millions of 1-acre-square micro-reservoirs to grow enough algae to gobble up all of Earth's climate-changing carbon dioxide. For an encore: How about spreading the water and fertilizer (the dead algae) to grow a vast new forest of oxygen-producing trees? A Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Y Combinator, unveiled the radical desert flooding plan as one of four "moonshot" scenarios that it hopes innovators will explore as potential remedies to catastrophic global warming. But would it work? And should it even be tried?
With unlimited capital and political will — both far from given — experts said the scheme would stand a chance of reducing dangerous greenhouse gas levels. But while they generally believe the climate crisis has become severe enough to push even extreme options onto the table, the experts cautioned against interventions that might create as many problems as they solve. "We do not want to have this be purely profit driven," said Greg Rau, a University of California, Santa Cruz climate scientist and part of the team that helped Y Combinator craft the request for proposals. "We are trying to benefit the planet, not just make money. So we need this kind of research and development first, but then oversight and governance over how any of this is deployed."
[...] Y Combinator called filling 1.7 million acres of arid land with 2-meter-deep pools of water "the largest infrastructure project ever undertaken." Just to pump ocean water inland and desalinate it would require an electrical grid far greater than the one Earth now devotes to all other uses. "It's a desert for a reason," said Lynn Fenstermaker, a research professor at Nevada's Desert Research Institute. "Flooding the desert and then keeping the water there, in an already water-poor area with all the evaporation, is hard to imagine." Y Combinator doesn't deny the magnitude of the challenge. "Economies of scale as well as breakthroughs in material science and construction technology will all be necessary for success," its proposal says.
Y Combinator pegs the price tag at $50 trillion. That's roughly half the entire globe's economic productivity for a year. Altman said in an interview that the cost for any solution will need to drop into the billions to become more realistic. "You can do a lot of things that require spending more money than you will ever be able to get," Altman said, "and it just doesn't come." Brought to a more realistic price, he believes that governments will pay.
Previously: Y Combinator Requests Startups for Atmospheric CO2 Removal
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @03:38AM (13 children)
Why don't they just do the selectively blocking out the sun thing, then once the shade is up there they can make money by messing with the amount of light various countries receive and demanding ransom? Is that to obvious of an evil destructive plot for them?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @03:41AM (12 children)
Also, draining the Mediterranean sea to irrigate the Sahara desert was literally a Nazi plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa [wikipedia.org]
These people are getting more and more obvious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @04:06AM (2 children)
Of course irrigation of the Sahara would be a popular plan. There is evidence that the Sahara was once underwater, and Atlantis may have once been there.
Before flooding anything, there should be some archaeological investigation done around the Richat Structure, and there have been some candidate sites identified with Google Maps. Identification of possible archaeological sites from satellite images or aerial photography is also an emerging method in archaeology. While "Atlantis" may give pause, I don't find anything fantastic about the idea that a civilization once existed that flourished up until it met its doom due to geological activity. Something similar happened to Pompeii.
If it's been discredited let me know and I'll leave it to the electric universe guy to keep posting about it. It's not like I'm expecting a dig of the Richat Structure to find a ZPM or two.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @04:48PM
Of course not. We already know that Atlantis is in another galaxy and can only be reached through a special stargate in Antarctica.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 15 2018, @03:36AM
When? Nebraska was underwater at one time too (65 million years ago), that doesn't mean that Atlantis was there either. This scenario is particularly confusing to me because Atlantis is supposed have started above water and sunk rather than the other way around.
What would one look for there that could possibly be related to an advanced civilization of any sort before ours?
The problem with these more extreme conjectures is that the world hasn't changed that much in the past few million years aside from changes in sea level and modest continental scale changes like the final shrinking of the Tethys Ocean to present day Mediterranean. That rules out the sinking of small continental islands much less their subsequent presence in the middle of existing continents.
Unfortunately, there has yet to be a reason to credit it.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday November 14 2018, @05:38AM (8 children)
The Nazis also figured out smoking was bad for you and ran anti-smoking campaigns. Hitler was (mostly) a vegetarian. Does this therefore mean everyone should smoke and vegetarianism is evil? Fuck's sake, man, THINK before you type.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @06:10AM
Yes, it is the only possible explanation. If you are not consuming at least a pack of cigarettes a day and eating a slab of bacon with every meal then the Nazis win.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @10:39AM (4 children)
Anti smoking campaigns are messed up, sorry that I dont share your authoritarian tendencies. It amounts to brain washing, and most of the data it is based on is crap too. Also, all animal studies point to tobacco smoke being a weaker carcinogen than cell phones and quitting smoking leading to more cancer than just continuing to smoke, but theyll never tell you stuff like that.
Interestingly, where I live, when they banned smoking on trains almost the first thing that happened was the police used it as an excuse to beat a minority to death and strip search a bunch of women. How fitting.
Also, vegetarianism isnt a particularly a good idea since the typical diet involves consuming so many grains and carb consumption over about 50g/day spikes your insulin too much so your appetite is unnaturally strong. Of course its still better than the food pyramid recommended diet though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @01:26PM (1 child)
You are ridiculously wrong. What have you been reading, a Philipp Morris info pamphlet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @08:55PM
They basically need to start exposing the animals within hours of birth, continue until it is an adult, then stop exposing them. Even then it only works with select strains of rodents and not all of them develop cancer.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15765916 [nih.gov] [nih.gov]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29370344 [nih.gov] [nih.gov]
https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/November-2015/What-Happened-the-Last-Time-a-Chicago-Cop-Was-Charged-With-Murder/ [chicagomag.com]
http://wispofsmoke.net/PDFs/Whitby.pdf [wispofsmoke.net]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @03:03PM
You lie. No one needs an excuse to beat a minority to death.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday November 16 2018, @05:06AM
So let me get this straight, because LEOs gonna LEO, anti-smoking laws are bad. Right. Shit, we'd better get rid of laws against murder too because cops are bastards. Fuck me, that's twisted. Now I've actually been doing a keto diet for about 6 weeks and am down to just over 145 lb at 5'10", so you're *partly* right about vegetarianism. But it's possible to do vegetarian keto, even, if you're careful.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 14 2018, @03:01PM
Of course vegetarianism is evil. Animals evolved to be eaten. You see a cow in the field. I see some soul doing penance for his past evil lives. He loses a multitude of sins, when he submits to the butcher, to be prepared for eating. Say he killed his wife three lifetimes ago, and got negative 100 karma. Today, he submits to the butcher, and he gets 1200 positive karma. Everyone wins. EAT MORE BEEF!! And, choke more chickens.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @03:31PM
HOW CAN YOU HAVE ANY PUDDING, IF YOU DON'T EAT MY MEAT?