Having worked within the sector, there was a clear lack of interest in or budget for monitoring - so claims of success must be met with requests for verifiable evidence, which is never forthcoming.
Wouldn't a project of this size be easily monitored with publicly available sattelite imagery? If there was funding, you could structure it purely based on the imagery, for example a country could receive ~1M$ for every 10px of green that was not green at the start of the project. And another ~1M$ if those pixels are still green 5 years later, and perhaps some diminishing recurring payment afterwards to ensure the projects survival.
1. Tree survival is an issue before the trees become “visible” from space.
2. Project funding typically lasts 3-5 years at a max.
3. In the organisations which run this type of project, there is an “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone” staff problem: flawed projects are funded and staffed by people who know they won’t carry the can for project failure.
4. To be very realistic, funders of these projects don’t care. Indeed, corruption might be a feature rather than a bug.
Ah that's unfortunate. I'm sure there's technological solutions to point 1, but that's pretty irrelevant if the other three points are true. It seems a bit ridiculous if a project funding is 3-5 years, if it's supposed to be a permanent solution.
Are corrupt funders really such a large share of money for these projects? Is it industrial companies using non-profit funding to grease wheels for their endeavors?
Allegedly it has already had an effect on rainfall but I haven’t found anything refereed on the topic (not that I tried too hard — not my day job).
Also the effect is allegedly improved monsoon in some places (at the cost of drought elsewhere). I’d think that the cost alone would have given rise to some interesting papers, were it actually happening.
All that being said, I’m still encouraged by some efforts, though they remind me of protectors trying to repair the ramjets at the edge of the ringworld.
I couldn't find details about the logistics and design of the GGW itself. I know the similar Chinese project largely failed because they planted a monocrop of trees in perfect grid formation, which turns out doesn't create a self-sustaining forest.
Is this mistake getting fixed with the GGW? Are they planting a diversity of native drought-tolerant species over a varying timeline to allow for trees of different ages?
Indeed, there is a "technical brief" on their site, which has no technical details but a lot of information about how they can get funding from World Bank and other NGOs.
This has been ongoing / in the works for a long time and the methods they are embracing now are more likely to succeed in the long term. A mono-culture of out-of-place trees, it is not. It is country by country so there are some problems around coordination and equal funding iirc
Coinciding dates are being made to carry an enormously heavy load, there.
We do know that up until ~20kya there were millions of square miles of rich river valley land, now under the sea, that could have supported tens or hundreds of millions population. And, in most of the world, we have no idea how many people lived there throughout most of prehistory, with isolated exceptions.
All of the comments supporting this are by people who have failed to so much as google this topic. The Sahara used to get monsoon rains until about 11kya to 5kya[1] when the axis of the earth shifted a bit.
That’s not true at all lol, complete BS. For one, the amount of grazing required for that is absolutely larger than anything we have today.
We exited an ice age, which created conditions which helped to create pastures. Climate change has been happening far longer than humans have impacted it (not saying humans aren’t impacting it).
Further, grazing makes fields more robust if done property. Grasses will grow faster to compensate and the poop enhances the conditions to create fields.
> the amount of grazing required for that is absolutely larger than anything we have today
Who's to say that there wasn't more grazing (by area) back then?
> Further, grazing makes fields more robust if done property.
I'm not a farmer, but I know that this depends a lot on what is doing the grazing. Sheep for example apparently graze the grass down really far, and prevent the growth of bushes and tree saplings that are otherwise important for balancing the ecosystem.
And as far as I know, England and Scotland lack trees specifically because overgrazing prevented forests from regenerating after being cut for timber: https://youtu.be/nAGHUkby2Is
One reason cited for lack of new sequoia growth in the Sierra Nevada is introduction of sheep towards the later period of Spanish colonization, and continued through early 1900s with the US taking over.
You need people to herd animals. There weren’t nearly the same number of people back then. The people who were around would have been largely nomadic especially if they were herding animals since they would need to move their herds to different grazing land depending on the season. Those aren’t conditions that create overgrazing which occurs when you have a lot of people with a lot of animals using limited pasture land that’s broken up by property lines and agriculture.
Actually, this is not the real problem. It's not the herding of animals that's creates the overgrazing. It's the large scale killing of predators. This creates huge herds of grazers that absolutely destroy the landscape.
This is how the savannah and the great plains where created. To protect their herd and children; natives killed the lions, saber tooths, wolves, hyenas, big cats and bears. In effect creating the great grassy plains. Not saying that humans created all the large grassy plains; just saying they have become substantially bigger since humans are around.
In North America, megafauna (dire wolf, saber-tooth cat, cheetah, horse, camel, mammoth, mastodon, giant sloth, 30+ genera) were killed off not by human activity but by a comet strike c.10818 BCE. It did in the Clovis culture, too. There were simultaneous extinctions in South America and Africa.
In fact we have almost no idea what the human population was, in most areas of the world. And, none at all in the millions of square miles of the Sunda region, now under water from Java to Viet Nam, and connected to more land where the entirety of the South China Sea and Yellow Sea now are.
For many decades anthropologists and archaeologists earnestly insisted the Americas were barely populated, pre-Columbus. Now we have found major earthworks projects in both North and South America that required societies in, at minimum, tens of millions to have built and maintained.
We know appallingly little about the recent history of our species beyond ~6000 ya, with only tiny, isolated digs at older sites.
A major earthwork in Java, Gunung Padang (previously assumed to be a natural feature because of it size), dated to 22 kya has had excavations halted since 2014.
I would need to see a source for this, because it doesn't sound plausible to me. Populations were lower of course, but look at how much of the population is concentrated in city centers today.
I would hardly be surprised if rural population density was significantly higher than in the past, with more farms as well as more grazing herds, even if they were much smaller than what we have today.
But I also don't really know if this squares with the sheer amount of meat and dairy that modern humans consume. How much does factory farming offset the need for open grazing land?
Basically, this is a subject area where intelligent clever people get themselves into trouble by thinking they know more than they do. I'd rather see what the experts say.
You’d be surprised how small the human population was. Estimates for 1 AD are somewhere between 150 and 300 million people in the entire world. Our historical impact on the surface of the earth is tiny compared to what we do now but even our modern efforts are often lost within the sheer vastness of the earth. The world 5000 years ago was mostly devoid of human life.
That is assumption backed by the most patchy evidence. The fact is that we have no idea what population was in the absence of major construction or seashell middens left behind, in almost all places.
Recent decades have seen population estimates forced to be raised by orders of magnitude in many places.
They were still small especially compared to everything within the last 150 years. You’re going to have to back up your claims if you are going to propose a much higher number.
How much desertification in Africa is caused by humans?
My impression has been that the Sahara, North Africa, the Middle East, and eastern Mediterranean were all gradually becoming dryer anyway. Is that wrong?
It is true that the Holocene extinction and other events are caused by humans, and that, in the larger scheme of things, life on Earth would thrive better without us. But it is a fallacy to pretend everything is caused by us, and such claims only make conversations about real change caused by us more muddy than they need to be.
Doing this is the opposite of being a doomer. I love the concept of terraforming the desert and desert walls. This is positive, inexpensive and we should do much more of this.
Planting trees without any sense of how they would become a viable ecosystem is pointless. Forests are complex ecosystems. Businesses do this because it's the cheapest sustainability strategy. These are economic project that not only don't put a single dent on climate change, they make it worst. The easiest solutions are often the worst.
Isn't it possible for a complex ecosystem to develop without knowing exactly how it happens? My compost heap hosts a fairly complex ecosystem - more complex than I understand, and I created it merely by heaping my yard waste and food scraps in the corner of my lot.
If someone gave you $15B, how would you use it to put a dent in climate change?
It makes it worst by letting businesses write off pollution. Entire industries are becoming carbon neutral, on paper at least. Ever wondered how building 10 billion electric cars will save the planet?
You can't put a dent on climate change until you find a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That's what matters. Trees have to last a 100 years to be effective carbon stores.
A bunch of wild claims with zero references to back them up. Poster is making massive assumptions about how these organizations operate. They clearly are talking out of their ass if you research the established organizations working in this field https://www.internationaltreefoundation.org/our-work
The one thing my pessimist outlook (and something that might be reflected in other takes here on HN) is that Nakamura was adamant about focusing on local needs. He gave short shrift to global programs and NGOs. What made him different, and what I think made him successful, was that he _listened_ to the people.
Is the project independantly assessed by anyone ? (UN, press, etc... ?) Of course I'm on the "doubting" side (bad habit), but I can't wait for being wrong about doomism once in a while
American and British naval forces fired over 110 Tomahawk cruise missiles, while the French Air Force, British Royal Air Force, and Royal Canadian Air Force undertook sorties across Libya and a naval blockade by Coalition forces. French jets launched air strikes against Libyan Army tanks and vehicles. The intervention did not employ foreign ground troops.
The effort was initially largely led by France and the United Kingdom, with command shared with the United States.
Both Libyan officials and international states and organizations called for a no-fly zone over Libya in light of allegations that Muammar Gaddafi's military had conducted airstrikes against Libyan rebels in the Libyan Civil War.
I doubt you’ve missed HN having a slightly higher standard of commentary than other social media sites, and non moderators’ parts in keeping it that way.
Being irrationally Americentric while simultaneously condescending to Europeans in characterizing the Libyan intervention as “US” gets both basic recent history wrong, and promulgates US > EU sentiment worryingly present on HN.
The idea of limiting the expansion of the Sahara desert with mass tree plantings started gaining traction back in the 1950s. The people most closely associated with this idea are British. Qaddafi died when he was mutilated by other Libyans.
Qaddafi was no saint, quite the opposite, but that shouldn't give Western countries a free pass to go directly interfere in Libyan politics. It has very little to do with helping Libyans, and much more to do with the fact that Libya happens to be located on the largest oil reserves in Africa.
Even if it only half works, it is worthwhile, which is why lots of anti-climate change action is worthwhile. Add up all the little bits and maybe it delays catastrophic climiate change long enough to get some new ways of solving it, or long enough for a younger generation to take it more seriously, maybe it makes the rise in temperatures slightly more bearable, the sea rises slightly less or the species extinctions fewer in number.
Certainly a better investment than the 4x4s, overseas holidays and technology that lots of rich people spend their money on!
Or maybe all the straw banning and feel good recycling efforts (and similar efforts with little actual impact on CO2) consume our energy and attention and allow us to feel good about doing something.
Meanwhile we've not made any significant headway in tackling the problem, and things continue to get worse.
If we want to solve this, we're going to have to have sustained focus and effort devoted to solving the hard problems. That means regulation, international cooperation, changes in how we live our lives, impact on corporations, etc. There is no easy way out of this.
FWIW straw bans and recycling are typically not really about carbon at all, more about the impact of waste. Recycling can sometimes have a meaningful carbon impact, but it can also be carbon positive in many cases.
But I really dislike the attitude of "well this thing isn't going to solve climate change, and the real problem is industry/agriculture/government/etc, so we shouldn't bother doing it." Of course we should. We should all try to make incremental changes to respect the environment more.
It's just lazy reasoning to try to justify continuing to live a lifestyle that damages the environment without having to question it.
I'm not sure if you think that's what I'm proposing, my last sentence makes it clear I'm not.
I'm a fan of recycling and basically any other well intentioned goals. I'm not a fan of them when they're cynically abused by big corporations to make people feel as if they're "saving the world" so they can go on living a life that continues to push us over the edge.
> Being more open to people and ideas has been way more fun.
I recently had the same realization. I haven't fully squelched the cynicism but I am trying hard to assume the best of people, that they're posting in good faith, and to take them at their word. It's definitely more difficult but I feel it is more satisfying.
Further, I try to avoid this scenario: https://xkcd.com/386/ I find it not only exhausting but also unproductive.
Maybe because it's too little too late and it can't stop the ever growing pressures of overpopulation. But then since each degree of climate change adds a significant 7% humidity to the atmosphere, I have a faint hope that one year a torrential rain will turn the sahara into a green savanna again.
Neither our planet in general, nor its comfortably-livable surface area, are overpopulated in the aggregate.
We have enough resources to provide for everyone here now, and everyone likely to be here within the next several decades—at which point, according to the best predictions I've seen, overall population growth should be slowing or stopping.
https://www.lifegate.com/africas-great-green-wall-a-bursting...
Having worked within the sector, there was a clear lack of interest in or budget for monitoring - so claims of success must be met with requests for verifiable evidence, which is never forthcoming.