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Comment by newsclues | Hacker News Reader

What if Humans focused most climate change efforts into reforesting the Sahara desert?

Build up a system of desalination, irrigation and slowly turn the desert into grassland as a giant carbon sink. Lots of hard work, and it will take a long time, but why try to reinvent the planets natural systems when it comes to climate change?

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The situation in Sahara worsened even more with climate changes, so I think it's best to act globally, as everything is connected, not on a specific & hostile place which will require a lot of efforts (so pollution since I doubt it'll be done without any machine, plastics, oil). Best to work on individual level, spending much less, voting well, let tree grow where they can grow more easily instead of putting tennis courts, swimming pools, oversized houses, etc..

High altitude dust from the Sahara acts as fertilizer to the Amazon.[1] The biosphere is a complex, interconnected system.

1. https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasa-sat...

Yeah... everything is way too complex and interconnected for any of these "let's just do X to solve everything at once" plans to work.

I don't get how people can still be so guilible after we basically shown over and over again that we don't have much control on what's happening, virtually every breakthrough we had brought more issues we have no idea how to fix in the long run.

Not sure I subscribe to a totally fatalistic view here. Complex and interconnected systems can still yield solutions to careful study, and even without total foresight and control, some outcomes can be preferable to others.

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