Scientists Concoct a $2-Trillion-Per-Year Plan To Geoengineer The Sahara Desert

This sounds like a Bond villain's evil plot to alter the world and then take control. Haha

It should be pointed out that they are only considering greening a small part of the Sahara Desert, which is larger than the continental-USA in extent. Further, large parts of the Sahara Desert were much wetter, greener and lusher than they are today, in the quite recent past, and the Amazon Jungle has existed without interruption for much much longer than that. As for a plague of locusts, have you done much environmental catastrophism scaremongering lately?

Reporting this speculation (Death of the Amazon, locusts, and even the cost) as facts is unworthy of PopSci, and more appropriate for a checkout rag. How's this for an "inevitable comment": This is trash reporting, pure and simple!

One generations plants the trees, the next enjoys the shade.

Some geoengineering plans are better ideas than others. I would rather use the cheap and simple method of dimming the sun a little more using an aerosol.

By the way, what I am about to tell you is independently verified by a respectable university (Rowan) and commercially available (six contracts have been signed so far). There has been a breakthrough in energy technology - a US company is able to get 200X more energy from hydrogen than it takes to get it from water.

The story was broke by Reuters last week. The company is BlackLight Power Inc and it's website is www.blacklightpower.com .

By the way, I am not affiliated with this company, nor do I have a financial interest in it. My bio is at www.myspace.com/dobermanmacleod .

What kind of nonsense is this :D. Put some solar powerplants (preferably dished stirling engine based pleasee) in Sahara instead :X

I wonder if they'll find the CSS Texas over there...

LOL

"There is no doubt that global warming is a clear and present danger, and geoengineering may be part of the solution to that problem. But I think this is one case where I have to agree with the inevitable comments and say this cure sounds worse than the disease."

Then why bother with the article in the first place?

Global warming is a clear and present danger? S.Fox is hook line and sinker for that propoganda. Check out the interview BBC did with Gerd Leipold "Greenpeace Leader Admits Arctic Ice Exaggeration" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC7bE9jopXE

and start laughing.

mclean
I did research on African countries a few years ago and what I discovered was that most of the imformation about Africa back in the 1700's and 1800's is found in the travel journals of people from europe. These journals have been bound into books that contain pictures of the countryside in the african countries they were traveling in. Those pictures taken in the 1850's of the countryside in Ethiopia are mind awakening to the devistation that has taken place in the last one hundred and fifty years. What is now moonscape in Ethiopia was then lush forest extending forever in ever in all direction. I could not believe my eyes. Those africans were able to devour every scrap of wood in only a hundred an some years. The journals I found are in the graduate library at Michigan State Library. Go take a look.
From what I've seen of pictures taken by rich europeans in the 17 & 18 hundreds pure sand hasn't been blowing that long and what has been blowing across the ocean has been more likely a broad range of soils, molds, insect larve, vegatation particles and million of other particles. This varity will continue to grow once more with the inrichment of northern africa and will bring more good and bad across the waters, as always; but it will help decrease the ocean waters temperture and hence reduce hurricanes coming across the ocean.
This is an example of what we humans should be doing rather than watching pretend news from FOX NEWS CORP. We need to consider these larger projects and get our tiny ass thoughts out of our way.

2 trillion a year? The cost is really dependent on the scale, is it not? Maybe if you wanted carbon neutral water desalination and wanted to water square miles.

The Sahara used to have rivers and forest, they are painted on the rocks. Reforesting huge swathes of it would only be reversing man's desertification of the area over the last few thousand years.

The real problem I see is how you keep Africans from taking advantage of new forest the way they destroyed the old ones. Possibly through the use of other drough tollerant, but productive for human trees (almonds come to mind).

Oh, and the last time I checked, locust were a good thing (converting areas of shrubbage to delicious, nutritious protein treats with little actual loss to established shrubs and trees).

Unfortunately for some,The grid scientist with different news,and definitely different views,and a completely different degree than you, says this is the type of idiotic waste of our finances that we laugh about everyday.
Deserts are made by man,but not in this century for that one. Why,just a pyramid being toned to a draw tone on the correct grid node would bring forth all of the rain they would need.
Science boys have been put in a loop,I assure you and need not solve GW either,as that is periodic and will abate.
But Pop Sci folks need to be smarter than that,now dont they?
If they would take the taskings of a Grid Scientist,they could solve their quandary of not understanding earths life systems.
The worlds people have been had,actual Earth Science has been buried.
We should never listen to or pay a theorist,or pay carbon credits for a theory that has no basis in reality,no matter also how many letters or government numbers behind their name on their business card.

i hope the writer of this ridiculous article realizes the Sahara is expanding south at a rate of about 48 km per year.

The only comment I have is that reporters need to report and leave there opinions out of it. I can't stand it when I watch the news and some reporter has to put there two cents in. I just feel news should be presented in an unbiased manner. As for the story itself, it sounds like a good plan with some kinks that needs to be worked out.

Proposing to grow a mono-culture forest of one species of tree?

And not a very wildlife-friendly species of tree at that!

I know it sounds snarky, but maybe Monsanto is funding the proposal.

Next!

Two trillion per *year*? While I can't disprove that figure, I find it impossible to believe, absent strong, clear, convincing evidence.

I have read many times over the years that the Sahara used to be largely tropical rain forest, though faint memory seems to tell me that was on the order of 9,000-10,000 years ago. Wonder if the Amazon rain forest has been around that long. I also wonder just how dependent the Amazon basin actually is on dust from the Sahara.

As for Africans using forests with no eye towards the future, of course they will -- some of them. If that's the only way I could cook food, so would I.

When the Sahara was a wetter place, the rest of the world was a colder place, well, sort of. The problem here is that global warming generally makes the atmosphere more laden with moisture, for the reason that warmer water in the oceans evaporates more easily.

What is debatable is whether that evaporation rains out over oceans or moves far in-land to rain out. This question depends on prevailing winds, jet streams, and the great oceanic conveyor system of currents. Unfortunately, today we can only guess at what any of those factors were back in the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago.

My guess is that the globe presently moves into the start of a new Little Ice Age (since 1998.) The reason this happens is because the greenhouse gas C02 which humans emit is only a trace element in the atmosphere to begin with and even if it doubles, triples, or quadruples in the 21st century it will do nothing significantly to alter the global cooling already underway in the last decade.

All those "scientists" whose careers and grants depend on the global warming blunder are spinning every bit of data and interpretation as fast and far as they can to bat down the reality that the world is actually getting colder, but when they fail using really desperate tactics it should be evident even to the unwashed masses of humans world wide that anthropogenic global warming was a self-serving fairey tale from the get-go.

Keep the money for mars,stop mendling with earth,better play with mars and try terraforming there than messing up the balance of the earth's ecosystem.We will soon need another home as the human population is exploding in its growth!!!!Let's save this money and try make it work on mars!!One planet is no more enough for mankind!!

Obama, give the green light to release bees to back up the locusts, just for fun. Call it an air superiority tactical scenario that the African people are just arm flailin wild over as soon as they saw it.

Yeah,Mr. President, don't trip on it man don't trip, they'll never know the locusts and bees were our idea if no on tells them. Castro is dead, after all.

USDA guided by the sternest public safety warning from Surgeon General that Americans must eat more bee pollen and honey which will now be made available in public schools. Americans go for it because none of their kids been sweet in a long time.

I'm left wondering whether some authors on this column support, or disagree with, the idea of transforming the desert. Well done to all the others who wrote coherently and please keep up the good work.

I agree with transforming deserts back to green space and the idea of importing water with the aim achieving a self sustaining eco-system. I disagree with desalinating the water first. This is a very energy-costly exercise. There are ways in which solar power alone can be used to pump saline water inland, where the heat from the Saharan sun alone would be enough to evaporate off freshwater, leaving behind salt, which I read with interest earlier, has up to 14,000 uses!

Presently salt production is carried out in hot climates in specially manmade basins. Imagine the potential industry that could be created by producing salt simply as a by-product.

The idea of evaporating water inland would be to eventually raise the moisture content sufficiently to increase the frequency of adiabatic rainfall caused by winds blowing air over higher ground. More frequent precipitation on the highly fertile dust would very quickly yield and sustain green shoots.

Cost has been mentioned. In $ trillions at that, which suggests that the article originates in the US and the idea that the cost should be so great that it should be prohibitive. Hold your horses folks! It seems almost egotistical to suggest that Americans need to pay for it, or profit from it for that matter! The indigenous (African) population are quite capable of channelling the natural resources around them in order to create the infrastructure necessary to reverse desertification. Indeed, huge numbers of peripheral desert dwellers are already engaged in mass tree planting exercises in an attempt to control advancement of the desert. All that is really needed is knowledge, education and coordination, the cost of which can be negligible by comparison to what was suggested in the article. All other resources exist in-situ.

I disagree with the idea that the Amazon rainforest could significantly suffer from lack of Saharan dust, which represents only a tiny proportion of the bio-matter that the Amazon produces to sustain itself. Eggs and baskets? Why settle for one rainforest, when you can have 2? Particularly when the Brazilians are chopping their's down in order to satisfy the worlds appetite for beef.

Geo-engineering of other planets is not yet feasible and won't be in our life time. We need to get there first, and then how will we achieve the change? For the contingent of the population who feel reluctant to meddle with the planet for fear of breaking it, would it not be better to be a little bit more resourceful and practice improving the denigrated parts of our own planet in the meantime?

As for solar energy production. Doesn't the Sahara already offer bountiful quantities of the minerals necessary for large scale production of solar power infrastructure?

How useful is a desert? How beneficial is it, to life in general, that deserts advance so rapidly, not just in the Sahara, but also in the Atacama in S. America and elsewhere in Asia? Surely desertification is a potential threat to a growing global population. And surely it is very worthwhile pursuing the reversal of desertification for:
- habitable space;
- food production - arable and livestock;
- oxygen production;
- raw material production; and
- another exiting place to explore on holiday! - there can be enjoyable benefits too.