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So should we not try any ideas like this? Just give up and burn it all down, point fingers and say, "I told you it was too late. Look how right I am." I see no solutions offered in any of your written paragraphs and I welcome any and all alternatives.

When a house is on fire, worry about the new extension after the fire is out. Otherwise it's Jevons' paradox writ large. We're still destroying and emitting at ever faster rate. Effort should be going into circular sustainable economies, decarbonising, achieving carbon neutrality, assisting the developing world to carbon neutrality too.

That works under the assumption that we can't do both. We can absolutely work on carbon neutrality and getting the developing world off of coal and oil burning technologies while working on restoring a natural carbon capture system in the form of forests and ecosystems.

I just think the neutrality, reduction in resource use and sustainability has to come first. Otherwise Jevons. Of course there can be intelligent overlap. I would hope that as nations move near to neutrality they must have put effort into a rethink of agriculture and forestry (and every other human activity).

Now they can re-plant locally appropriate species and create new forest that will eventually appear to be entirely natural ancient woodland or rain forest. Forest that's destined to be mainly left alone as carbon sequestration. Along with wood production that's sympathetic to the planet and sustainable.

Greening deserts feels, to me, like a "near neutrality" re-wilding project. Something we can think of adding in a push to carbon negative, to undo some of the damage done. Something to do after we have sustainable, renewable electricity everywhere network to desalinate and irrigate. Something that can be carefully seeded to take account of species and that appears and acts natural, and stays put as national park or reservation. Without destroying yet another wilderness.

Not as a green project slapped down as Deus ex machina solution in a world that's not yet moving to neutrality. That risks making it worse. In fact it will almost certainly make it worse as coal and oil is still permitted to keep on looking for new markets and uses.

This is an all-of-the-above-all-hands-on-deck moment in human history, so I applaud you for focusing on the things you feel are most impactful.

Some of us are also looking beyond the challenges (e.g., coal power) that have known solutions for the most impactful thing we can do to buy more time. Large transportation, electricity, and agricultural infrastructure will take time and lots of political will to change.

Planting trees on unproductive land with desalinated ocean water that no one's fighting over is low-hanging fruit.

We should absolutely reforest on a large scale, but we also need to drastically cut emissions, and pursue other carbon sequestration strategies (olivine weathering for example).

I'm not sure trying to convert desert into forest is even a good idea. Some of these deserts have been around a long, long time and harbor their own unique organisms. And as the article mentions it could cause unpredictable disruptions in weather patterns.

It seems pretty clear that right now there isn't any one silver bullet strategy that is going to avert climate disaster. We absolutely have to reduce emissions and increase carbon sequestration to get to net-zero, then we need to go further into net-sequestration of carbon.

Am I naïve, but if people are busy replanting or doing nature related things (granted locally) they will probably less busy ordering items from the other side of the planet.

> Now had we created no-development zones around forests, to allow them to expand naturally, in a world not deforesting at ever increasing rate...

I am no fan of rainforest destruction and the ensuing loss of biodiversity, but globally the world is not deforesting:

https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years-offse...

Rather reinforces my point. Headline: "global forest loss over past 35 years has been more than offset by new forest growth"

Replacing the carbon storage of a single 100 metre mature rain forest meranti, and the diverse ecosystem below it by new growth requires how many square miles? It's a net loss for a century, perhaps more. Overall it's a colossal loss.

I note that article accounts for area covered only. No mention of the human activity, of the clear burning, size of trees, amount of other growth under the canopy etc.

Cutting growth could be carbon positive in some limited circumstances I guess. If it's used to build houses or other structures where the wood doesn't rot in terms of just the materials it /could/ be storage positive if the equivalent land is replanted.

> What will be the unintended consequences of foresting deserts

I think you are overly concerned but here you raise a good point: foresting a desert could lower the albedo of the Earth. If not offset by the CO2 uptake of the trees, this could have a net greenhouse effect on the climate.

If you’re really worried about albedo, perhaps start questions the impact of gigatons of soot flowing over the North Pole, blackening huge ice fields over the last few decades.

Such questions are not tolerated, so be warned.

> Such questions are not tolerated, so be warned.

These are fair questions. Where are they not tolerated? And by whom?

> Thanks politicians!

Strange that you would indict the State for failing to legislate Industry, as though the latter had no agency and were therefore uniquely blameless.

States can make regulations, introduce carbon taxes, ban unsafe or unsustainable activity. When was the first international industry emissions reduction summit? How are they doing in comparison to the politicians? Exxon, Shell and BP knew all about the harm they did in the mid 20th century. So they buried it, briefed against it, greenwash us with irrelevant and insignificant adverts.

I indict the states, particularly the developed states, for not bringing forth regulation requiring environmental consideration, emissions reduction, sustainability with penalties encompassing delisting, huge fines and exec imprisonment. Companies are quite happy to drive everyone off a cliff for a little more gold. We've known that since the first days of the Dutch East India Company (VOC).

> Companies are quite happy to drive everyone off a cliff for a little more gold.

Yet the denizens of this forum enthusiastically turn the crank while bemoaning the State's inability to stop us.

I'd assume growing trees would sequester far more carbon than mature trees? Grow, chop, grow perhaps?

I think this is a naive view. First, there isn't a shortage of land for planting trees. And land is a requirement for storing the sequestered trees anyway.

The most cost effective path to fixing more carbon is to plant right, and without cutting.

Data shows the opposite. Mature trees are more efficient at sequestration.

I like the idea of biodiversity as much as the next person but the climate paradigm is we have to do something or we're all going to die. "Green" causes are not guaranteed to align with each other and when they come head to head I think we should favor the one that is about continuing to exist over the one that is fundamentally an aesthetic or philosophical concern, the fruits of which we will be unable to enjoy if we die out.

"We" are not "all" going to die, but there are definitely going to be some very messy outcomes for large populations. (Bangladesh? India are already setting up to not take refugees from there) It's pretty much business as usual for the west to trigger death at a distance and then disclaim responsibility for the results.