TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Probably most people on lemmy aren’t biogeochemists. But this, especially at this scale, is actually a very interesting finding and I’m going to be sharing it with other biogeochemists. Its also a finding that makes basic, explainable sense: you reduce the windspeed at the earths surface and you reduce evaporation, evapotranspiration, etc. Not to mention shading the surface.
The difference is this offers a form of analysis at scale.
artifex@piefed.social 2 days ago
And I think scale is the critical thing for other reasons too. We know, for example, that dust from the Sahara circulates the globe and brings nutrients to US soils. While I don’t think there’s much harm from something even at the current scale of the Gobi deployments, at a certain point deploying anything en masse is basically geoengineering, with all of the potential unexpected consequences that that brings.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah I mean. How many internal combustion engines are running right now? In the course of me responding to your reply how many million tons of CO2 were being emitted?
I mean if were going to talk en masse geoengineering, lets talk en masse geoengineering. And lets just take the piss: Say for example there was an unintended consequence to mounting a bunch of solar panels in the desert. At least, if you had this consequences and wanted to undo it, you could un-mount the solar panels and move them some where else. There is no unburning fossil fuels once emitted. Or clear cutting millions of acres of forested lands and putting it into farm land. Or exterminating a key stone species like buffalo or beavers. Or leaving methane leaks uncapped. Like… We’ve been geoengineering the entire time. What are we even talking about?
There are some interesting questions around what something like mounting these solar panels does to the carbon cycle. Phenology would be a big one. Water storage. ET. Very interesting stuff.
tetrislife@leminal.space 2 days ago
You can’t call uncaring consumption or negligent cost-cutting measures geo-engineering. Geo-engineering is an expense, and whoever spends is looking at their returns, which is an incentive to do worse than uncaring consumption etc.
grue@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Eh, the Amazon rainforest survived the African Humid Period, so it’s probably fine.
More to the point, even if this thing is big compared to the average solar farm, it’s still small compared to the scale of geoengineering. For example, enough solar panels to power the entire US would only cover a small fraction of the Chihuahuan Desert:
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