Tag: geoengineering

Great Green Wall

The “Great Green Wall”, has helped raise total forest coverage to nearly 25% of China’s total area, up from less than 10% in 1949. In the remote northwest, though, tree planting is not merely about meeting state reforestation targets or protecting Beijing. When it comes to making a living from the most marginal farmland, every tree, bush and blade of grass counts – especially as climate change drives up temperatures and puts water supplies under further pressure.

2022-02-04: Apparently people are really bad at naming, since there’s another Great Green Wall project in Africa:

In the mid-2000s, African leaders envisioned creating a huge swath of green that could help combat desertification and land degradation. The project, called the Great Green Wall, began in 2007 with the aim of planting a 15 km wide belt of trees and shrubs that would extend from the coast of Senegal on the Atlantic to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. The World Bank has poured over $1b into this endeavor, and the initiative’s scope has grown to include efforts to fight poverty, reduce inequality and build climate-resilient infrastructure. In ecological terms, the program has been a huge success. As of 2020, nearly 4000 km2 of land has been restored to arability in Niger alone.

2023-05-13: As always, projects in developing countries that are declared “huge successes” are not, on closer look

The pace of financing is too slow to achieve this target. As of 2020, 20% of degraded land (200k km2) had been restored and 350k of the promised 10m jobs had been created. That is mainly, although not solely, because just US$2.5b of a required $30b has been spent since the project began. Donors have committed $15b to a pipeline of 150 projects. It’s not clear how much of this is grants, how much is loans and how much is existing funding relabelled as Great Green Wall money. Moreover, coordination between Great Green Wall countries and donors is weak. Trust between the African Union and international donors is in short supply. Donor nations seem to be picking and choosing which countries to invest in, with a preference for those in relatively stable regions.

We made oxygen on Mars

An experiment on board the Mars Perseverance rover designed to produce breathable oxygen from carbon dioxide has been switched on and is working! On April 20 it produced 5 grams of oxygen — not a huge amount, but it’s designed to make as much as 10 grams per hour, and this is the very first time oxygen has been converted from native air on another planet. MOXIE by itself can’t produce that much, but again it’s not designed to actually do that, it’s just to make sure the tech works. Still, just 4 MOXIEs could keep a human breathing on Mars. That first amount it made, 5 grams, is enough for ~10 minutes worth of breathing for a single person.

Yang Bid Very 21st Century

In the history of politicking, few politicians have publicly declared what to do about America’s crumbling malls, or how to provide free marriage counseling for all, or how to make filing taxes fun. But Andrew Yang, who’s gunning to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, certainly has—and those are the more minor concerns among a dizzying list of 80 policy positions on his campaign website.

also has geoengineering, UBI and many other things.

Aral Sea Restoration

But Kazakhstan’s North Aral Sea has seen a happier outcome, thanks to a nearly $86m project financed in large part by the World Bank. Along with repairs to existing dikes around the basin to prevent spillage, an 13km dam was constructed just south of the Syr Darya River. Completed in the summer of 2005, this dam, named Kokaral, surpassed all expectations. It led to an 3m increase in water levels after just 7 months—a goal that scientists initially expected would take 3 years.

Artificial Rain

China is planning the implementation of a large-scale weather changing project to ensure a consistent rain supply. The system is created from a network of solid fuel burning chambers that produce silver iodide, a compound with a structure much like ice that can be used in cloud seeding. Once in place, the system has the potential to increase rainfall in the region by up to 10 billion cubic meters a year. 10000s of the small burning chambers will be installed across the Tibetan Plateau in an attempt to increase rainfall in an area 3x as big as Spain

A magnetic shield for Mars

An inflatable structure can generate a magnetic dipole field at a level of perhaps 1 or 2 Teslas an active shield against the solar wind and allow the Martian atmosphere to thicken overtime. Mars atmosphere would naturally thicken over time, which lead to many new possibilities for human exploration and colonization. These would include an average increase of 4 °C, which would be enough to melt the carbon dioxide ice in the northern polar ice cap. This would trigger a greenhouse effect, warming the atmosphere further and causing the water ice in the polar caps to melt.