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Comment by anon291 | Hacker News Reader

It seems crazy to me that after we've had so many unintended consequences preventing earth's natural processes using technology, the same crowd is now celebrating using technology to prevent yet another of earth's natural processes. Regardless of your position on the Sahara desert, it's been growing since Roman times.

Personally, I'm in favor of the use of technology to affect the planet, but it seems to me that the public reception to these ideas is mostly around who's doing the deed. Often, when someone in a rich country proposes something like this, the argument will be something about capitalism. However, when a poor country does it, despite it also being about wealth at the end of the day, it's lauded. Now again, I'm totally in favor of all these efforts and totally understand why people do it. It's just a duality I've noticed; and I'm not sure what to think about it.

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Why does that seem crazy to you? Some artificial interventions in the earth's natural processes are bad for humans (global warming, increased rate of desertification) and some interventions are good for humans (increasing land available for sustainable food production, killing malaria carrying mosquitos).

There isn't some "human interventions good/human interventions bad" duality. Some are good some are bad. We should stop doing to bad things and do more of the good things. We should continuously audit for new effects caused by our actions are adjust accordingly to achieve the best outcomes for human life.

Exactly this. I think we have to wrestle with the fact that, as consumers of media, we sometimes become possessed by Trick Question Syndrome. So even if nothing about the facts indicates than an intervention is bad, treating it like at trick question feels like healthy skepticism.

Do hand-dug berms planted with native and non-invasive plants count as technology?

And is increasing desertification one of earth's natural processes or is it an effect of technology, specifically technology we've used to pull massive amounts of carbon out of the ground and add it to the atmosphere?

Not trying to be hostile, just questioning some of your assumptions.

Hand-dug berms are certainly technology, but perhaps not “high technology”.

And desertification is a natural process, see the Middle East or the Sahara itself, but perhaps accelerated by human impact.

Technology means the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. It is a technology. If this is good or bad, is a rather Victorian notion called the appeal to nature.

Hard to imagine a framework for thinking about this where "hand-dug" matters, but unfortunately I think it comes down to things like this.

Humans and technology have been around a lot longer than Rome. Do you think desertification is a completely natural process that has nothing to do with the humans who live in the area and what they do with the land?

Yes. There were deserts before humans.

It's not about "who does the deed". It's about who accrues the benefits, and who has a stake.

Without a strong local stake, the only projects that work are resource extraction projects. These have a tendency to create dependencies, and strong political instability.

There's also the fact that many technocratic proposals from rich countries never progress past first order thinking: "Trees missing, add trees here". Again, a function of skin in the game - rich nations overwhelmingly operate on a form of capitalism that prioritizes short term wins, and they're not around for the cleanup after that. This is why you want a local stake - not due to theoretical arguments around capitalism or colonialism, but because you want to make sure the people who own the consequences are part of the process. Which usually leads to better outcomes.

> using technology to prevent yet another of earth's natural processes.

Agriculture prevents a lot of earth's natural processes and has been doing so for millennia. We, as humans living in a relatively advanced civilization prevent earth's natural process just by living an urban area. I really don't see your point.

Everyone is okay with building walls to hold off rising sea waters. Why is this any different?

> using technology to prevent yet another of earth's natural processes

I mean it's literally just planting trees, grasses, and shrubs. This isn't dumping a cargo ship of iron filings into the sea or putting a solar sail in front of the sun, it's putting seeds in the ground. If you want to call that "technology" I suppose it's technically true, but it's almost laughable.

I respect the right of Africa to try and reforest, but logically the most likely outcome is that the Amazon will start to die from the lack of the 30 million tons of dust and sand that fall on the Amazon each year from the Sahara.

Should Africa's desert be preserved to feed the Amazon? That's a question humanity seems ill equipped to answer.

The Sahara desert is 3.5 million square miles. That will never be re-forested.

Never is a pretty long time. One of my favorite authors: Doris Lessing, wrote a book called: "Mara and Dan" which has a very interesting take on climate change. I would recommend all of her books to anyone who wants to stretch their perception of our world.

Okay, sure, if you look at geologic timescales then eventually Africa will move and the region of northern Africa will cease to be desert.

Within a human timescale, I think "never" is an acceptable term.

Atmospheric circulation means that the latitude of the Sahara is blasted with cool dry air from the upper atmosphere. Humans planting trees might slow the spread of the desert, but will not vanquish it.

To disrupt the effects of atmospheric circulation (ie Hadley cells) creating deserts at those latitudes, you'd need mountain ranges and oceans.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_cell

"For several hundred thousand years, the Sahara has alternated between desert and savanna grassland in a 20,000-year cycle caused by the precession of Earth's axis (about 26,000 years) as it rotates around the Sun, which changes the location of the North African monsoon."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara#:~:text=For%20several%2....

Why are we working in human timescales? It's like saying the sun will never burn out because humans won't be around to see it happen.

To me, that's a pretty bold and naive claim.

Because this project is about humans and the environment's impact on them, and what they can do to improve it. So naturally human timescales are the measure on which we judge it. What happens in 10 million years is not something we can even pretend to comprehend or influence in a meaningful way. But what happens in the next 100 is.

It is cultural human hubris to bother, in any way whatsoever, to be worried about the sun burning out. It’s an interesting curiosity but we your life, if you lived to be 2000 years old (you won’t), you will have moved yourself 0.0000571428% closer to the time when that will happen. We DO need to actually be worried about our planet overheating, our agricultural spaces becoming despoiled, and other things that can actually happen in our lives. One of these things is not like the other.

Not with that attitude.

Found the Shai-Hulud.

> logically the most likely outcome is that the Amazon will start to die

This seems like a very large leap of reasoning to "logically" make.

My understanding is that Saharan dust clouds carry phosphorus across the Atlantic, which nourish the Amazon.

It doesn't follow that Africa stopping the expansion of the Sahara will kill this cycle. The Sahel has historically been used for agriculture (with periods of massive drought in between) and preventing the Sahara from expanding into it does not mean erasing the rest of the Sahara.

> I respect the right of Africa to try and reforest, but logically the most likely outcome is that the Amazon will start to die from the lack of the 30 million tons of dust and sand that fall on the Amazon each year from the Sahara.

Math. Stopping the Sahara from expanding doesn't change how much dust and sand are going over to the Amazon, it just caps it at the current amount.

There is plenty of evidence that the Amazon was largely a geo-engineering project, seems like that one worked out.

The green wall isn’t in the Sahara. It’s across sub-Saharan Africa, trying to keep the Sahara from spreading, not cover it with trees.

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