Greening the Sahara: A Simple Idea

reply to post by ANNED

What a fantastic idea, especially for mountainous regions where getting water "uphill" is a real problem. Thanks for posting the links.

It might also be a good survival tool for people living in costal regions or mariners, who have access to a lot of fog.

I spent about eight years of my young life living on the coast of the Bay of Fundy in eastern Canada, which must be one of the foggiest areas in the world. These fog harvesters could be a real boon to people who have problems accessing well water or even to communities with water infrastructure problems.

Originally posted by ipsedixit
Desalinization of sea water, if a cheap and easy way of doing it could be found, could well lead to a dramatic upsurge in world food production and also to the creation of vast new areas of agricultural production, particularly in the regions of the great deserts of North Africa, China and North America. (And the land down under, of course. Apologies to HossBog for missing Oz on the first draft.)

I don't know much about this subject but I was wondering if the problem might be simpler to solve, particularly in the region of the Sahara desert, than it seems at first glance.

Wouldn't it be possible to simply pump seawater through a pipeline to large flat, plastic covered containment ponds, where the natural heat of the desert sun evaporated the fresh water out of the sea water and channeled it into local irrigation systems?

Obviously there would be hurdles to overcome. Pumping sea water undoubtely requires special pumps and no doubt a sea water pipeline would have to be constructed in ways that would resist corrosion, but the main point, simply getting a lot of water into the desert where it could be desalinated by the sun, seems to be a valid one to me, unless there is something I just don't know about the basic process of evaporating sea water.

The containment ponds would have to have the leftover salt removed of course and something would have to be done with it, but I can't myself, see any great insurmountable reason why such a scheme shouldn't work very well.

It seems too simple. There must be serious objections to such a simple plan. Any reactions to this?

edit on 13-12-2011 by ipsedixit because: (no reason given)

greening the sahara?

does any of the dictators in africa care about such things?

all they care about stealing all our aid money into swiss bank accounts,buying arms to suppress the population and using torture.

we need stop the evil swiss in Switzerland and end their wicked and evil practice of giving harbour to dictators stolen assets.
they really are nasty people for doing this.

in ww2 they gave aid to the nazis.

i would enforce sanctions on them until they stop and get them to return all the 18 trillion dollars stolen money to their rightful owners.

the Israelis by using their amazing brains have already turned back the desert and grow oranges unlike the arabs who just pray to god and expect god to turn sand into gardens.


anger.

Originally posted by nobodysavedme
greening the sahara?

does any of the dictators in africa care about such things?

Gaddhafi was interested in the idea.

all they care about stealing all our aid money into swiss bank accounts,buying arms to suppress the population and using torture.

You should check out a movie called The Dogs of War. It is only a Hollywood movie, not a documentary, but it is entertaining and lays out one of the continuing paradigms of our involvement in Africa, which is to do a deal with a crook in order to steal African resources in exchange for helping the crook knock off all opposition to his rule.

we need stop the evil swiss in Switzerland and end their wicked and evil practice of giving harbour to dictators stolen assets.
they really are nasty people for doing this.

Are you advocating sanctions against Switzerland, or a quick, easy, roll em over regime change, like Libya? You should remember that in Switzerland people are actually educated and huge numbers of them do military service. They spend a lot of money preparing Switzerland to eat an invading army alive.

You have to remember that these evil dictators wouldn't have any money in the first place if we didn't give it to them. Wouldn't it be easier to stop our evil selves from giving them money in the first place.

in ww2 they gave aid to the nazis.

They were neutral. They gave aid to everybody. America gave aid to the Nazis too and even helped a lot of Nazi war criminals to escape punishment after the war.

i would enforce sanctions on them until they stop and get them to return all the 18 trillion dollars stolen money to their rightful owners.

Good for you.

the Israelis by using their amazing brains have already turned back the desert and grow oranges unlike the arabs who just pray to god and expect god to turn sand into gardens.

Are you a bigot? You sound like one.

I agree with the basic point that thieves should not be able to hide money in foreign bank accounts. That's not really the topic of this thread though.

quote:-
Desalinization of sea water, if a cheap and easy way of doing it could be found, could well lead to a dramatic upsurge in world food production

I don't know much about this subject but I was wondering if the problem might be simpler to solve, particularly in the region of the Sahara desert, than it seems at first glance.
---------------------------------------------

ain't gonna happen.ever.

a arab sheikh once had the idea of towing icebergs from antarctica to saudia arabia.

he spent a million $ on it.

he was ridiculed by his dictators/peers and forced to abandon the idea after being humiliated.


simply no immediate profit in it.

no profit = death to the idea.

it must make money quickly and be approved by your peers.

otherwise dead as a dodo.

Originally posted by nobodysavedme
no profit = death to the idea.

it must make money quickly and be approved by your peers.

You might be onto something, but I would amend it as follows, no way to funnel profit to a small number of recipients = death to the idea.

It's like the old idea of legalizing drugs. It will never be done in most countries because it would distribute profit rather than keeping it narrowly streamed.