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Comment by bayareanative | Hacker News Reader

The recommendation for arboreal permafrost is to remove all the trees because grassland tundra hard freezes easier than forests, and this is necessary to maintain soil stability in the summer months. And to do so, reintroducing large megafauna herds that destroy trees are necessary, potentially with a mammoth/elephant hybrid; or with logging.

Interestingly, large managed herds of grazing animals is a solution to grassland health for avoiding and reversing desertification.

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Reminds me of what Sergey Zimov has been trying to do in Siberia with his "Pleistocene park" [0], which afaik ties into attempts to bring back the woolly mammoth to act as the megafauna [1]

[0] https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/2017/03/23/ice-age-ecosyst...

[1] https://gizmodo.com/scientists-could-soon-resurrect-the-wool...

Uh, removing trees is apparently what initiated the melting of the Batagaika crater, the scary effects of which are shown in the photograph. And allowing grazing will not only remove much of the remaining ground cover but will also cause soil disturbance from pawing and digging done by the animals, both of which may initiate melting.

It may be true, though, that there's a necessary balance here. Which is to say, that at least some surface melting may occur under conditions which also allow deeper freezing to occur.

Allan Savory talks about the use of intensive grazing as a method for combatting desertification in Africa [0]. Herd fertilize while eating grasses that would otherwise fall into senescence and create pockets of erosion.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI

Alas their experiment concluded without significant difference between the treatment and non-treatment zones. Basically the guy (and holistic grazing) is a quack(ery). :/

https://www.truthordrought.com/holistic-grazing-myths

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holistic_management_(agricultu...

Thanks for that, I believed this. I've got to stop trusting TED talks.

I loved TED Talks, but .. it turns out 20 minutes is rarely enough to get new and complex issues topped out with very unheard of solutions across. [0] And it became a ripe ground for crackpots and PR stuntfolk.

There are great and amazing TED talks, and Chris Anderson and the whole team seems to be able to pick great stories. But they probably lacked a scientific review panel back then. (They have a guideline nowadays: https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization/our-policies-term... and it talks about advisors and a science curator, etc.)

They would probably go a long way to supporting real proper 100% real world science by having a redactions list. (So a list of talks that turned out to be completely wrong or partially flawed.)

[0] topics like cosmology, quantum-computing-anything, artificial intelligence, energy (carbon capture, nuclear [especially thorium]), bio/sustainable/green/animal-friendly anything (recycling, food, plastics, construction, energy again), medical/health, and of course psychology (also behavioral economics) are all very much still work in progress, so accurately reporting on them would require at least 1-2 hours. unless we're talking about something very concrete like a picture of a black hole 53 million light years away reconstructed from petabytes of radio interferometry.

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