THE VIDEO SHELF · geoengineering
Can We Terraform the Sahara to Stop Climate Change?
Real Engineering examines whether greening the Sahara could draw down carbon and slow climate change. It concludes that the effort would be enormously costly and that changes in albedo and other effects undercut the climate benefit.
Why HN readers recommended it
Recommended in tree-planting and carbon removal threads as a sourced explanation of why greening deserts is not a simple climate fix.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Real Engineering
- Topic
- geoengineering
- Format
- explainer
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 3
- HN mentions in dataset
- 4
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2018–2021
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
This video ("Can We Terraform the Sahara to Stop Climate Change?") examines how we might do just that. The conclusion is that it's technically possible (like many things), but the cost far outweighs the benefit. It also introduces new climate risks. [VIDEO]
cpeterso on Hacker News · 2019-04
In Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbonI recently saw a video about doing this - apparently the desert is actually a really bad option if we want to combat climate change - the core problem is that the desert currently reflects a lot of light from the sun. If we cover …
Latty on Hacker News · 2019-04
In Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 EmissionsGreening deserts is not a good solution for climate change. In fact it might worsen climate change due to albedo changes. A nice video about this: [VIDEO]
jarenmf on Hacker News · 2021-07
In Simple, solar-powered water desalination (2020)
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.