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, @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...