Living in China’s Expanding Deserts | Hacker News Reader

Living in China’s Expanding Deserts

nytimes.com

But farming is also becoming more difficult. Huang Chunmei, who grew up in the town of Tonggunao’er and now farms there, said the water table was two meters, or about six feet, below ground during her childhood, and “now, you have to dig four or five meters.”

This is the bottom line; you can plant trees all you like, but this is not a matter of simple erosion due to overuse or clear-cutting. Rather, the climate systems of the region are changing, and presumably they suffer from the same overuse of subterranean water that everyone else does in the developed/developing world.

I feel terribly for these people, desperately slapping band-aids on a sucking chest wound, especially since the story of this century seems to be that the people on the front lines of climate change are the people who contributed least to the creation of the problem in the first place. It's also hard to see a happy outcome for them, since they're first on the metaphorical chopping block; even if the world suddenly woke up and took notice, it would be too late for them.

Sidenote, while a band-aid won't help a sucking chest wound, an occlusive dressing to halt the progress of the pneumothorax can be improvised with a piece of plastic laid over the wound and tape on three sides.

In next week's episode of "HN or WFA", we'll either show you how to setup a new bootstrap site or how to take spine precautions when dealing with the victim of a fall in the backcountry.

WFA?

I ask, because if there's a site that routinely discusses stuff like this (advanced yet practical medical stuff) i'd be very interested in reading it.

WFA, I assume he's talking about Wilderness First Aid, a medical certification.

Ah. Improvised 1-way valve. Love it.

Now that's a perspective I didn't expect, yet appreciate greatly. TIL

China is also building many dams. I wonder what the downstream ecological impact is (apart from the normal riparian impact).

Dams/reservoirs are one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases. The flooded territory starts decomposing and large amounts of greenhouse gasses are released.

It's hard to imagine that it's going to be good; given how much energy it takes to build them, and the risk that they'll be useless due to radical changes in the availability of water in those areas.

The background video clips were done incredibly well in the post. The clips added to the setting of what was going on in the text without being distracting. Kudos to the NYTimes for that.

Really? On my five-year old Mac Mini scrolling was erratic and the text that was supposed to come up for a bit just flashed and went away before it could be read.

Having the videos be in clearly defined regions instead of wanking about with the scroll function would have been much more sensible.

Really good use of drone shots.

while land in Russia, in particular East, is becoming more usable/livable with no population growth :) Through the history empires have risen and fallen in sync with climate changes, and climate change has already initiated redrawing of the maps in the Middle East and North Africa and looks like it is just the beginning of the new round of maps redrawing around the world.

Do you have more information on how Russia's Eastern regions are becoming more habitable? I know they have a development fund to incentive people from other regions to move and develop small businesses (especially in agriculture).

They're much better for agriculture than they used to be (though still pretty poor in Siberia). The change in productivity is wholly due to climate change. Warmer weather leads to a longer growing season, rain instead of snow, etc.

A lot of this land is nutrient packed as well. Siberia could be prime growing land if it gets warm enough. Similar to Ukraine today.

Saying that, there are a number of concerns about soil resilience in Siberia. If soil resilience doesn't improve, Siberia will remain very poor for agriculture.

many chinese have started to live in Siberia's russian towns bordering China

Guess climate change isn't a Chinese conspiracy after all*

*https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/26589529219124838...

I would like to see research of which nations stand to gain the most due to climate change. My guesses are Russia and Canada. Perhaps in the future, Canadians will want to build a wall to keep out Americans, assuming they don't want that already. ;)

Everything is China's fault. Blame it on China, as the politicians like to do during each and every election. :)

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