Hacker News Reader

Comment by rybosworld | Hacker News Reader

Saw this posted the other day, and it seems like a potential way to offset some of the ice melt:

https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/seaflooding

The idea of flooding some desert at first seemed gobsmackingly useless to me. The article talks about a 6mm drop in ocean levels.

The article does say it could potentially increase total water evaporation by up to 6% though, and that could be useful.

If it's increasing local rainfall that means it's contributing a cooling effect via the albedo of the clouds, too. Don't know if it would be measurable other than locally, though.

Someone just posted an article above about how our climate models just got precise enough to model cloud layer changes as CO2 increases. Somehow I doubt we can model things effectively enough to really predict that more evaporation will make things better instead of worse. Moisture can also be effective at raising the wet bulb temperature above what we can survive if it hasn't condensed into clouds.

It will also contribute to a heating effect, because water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas.

The increased evaporation wouldn't really do that much re: sea levels. That water doesn't vanish, it falls as rain and goes back into the ocean, buffering a (relatively) miniscule additional amount of water in clouds.

It would do tons for the local ecosystem, though. That evaporated water would fall as rain across eastern Egypt and the Middle East.

Not to mention of course the truly incredible amount of hydropower.

A lot falls on earth & is absorbed too, is my understanding. There's plenty of talk about farmers flooding fields & what not to restore groundwater.

100% I think the main benefit of this project would be to restore some ecology & create power. There may be some small benefit to the earth as a whole too, but it seems silly to make this effort for somewhat enhanced evaporation.

Yeah this is cool

Reply on news.ycombinator.com