Climate Change
Out of context: Reply #243
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- Nairn9
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Amazonians spent hundreds of years turning a basin with frequently low quality soils into one of the most fertile places on earth.
They burned wood to make charcoal, which they broke up and mixed with organic/faecal waste and existing earth to make what we now know as 'terra preta'.
Modern societies, particularly western ones, need to learn from this lesson.
We should be growing huge amounts of quick growth trees (or grasses, whatever - I don't care), then turning it into charocal, releasing useful heat energy, then using that 'biochar' to improve soil quality globally. If we do this, we can teeter ecosystems that are beyond the brink back into useful areas of plant growth, rebooting weather systems and increasing the scope of precipitation over dry inland areas.
Useful waste utilisation(esopecially for cities etc), atmosphereic carbon extraction, heat energy generation, carbon sequestration, environmental/topsoil improvement. i've been thinking a lot about this over the past couple of days and it strikes me now as being an incredibly obvious fix to a lot of our problems.
Not an easy fix, but a good one.
If I was independently wealthy, I'd drop everything and spend the rest of my life on this.
- Gates should do this with his farmlandmonospaced
- how did they think of this hack?
sounds like it was done on purpose.uan - It was definitely done on purpose. It's EVERYWHERE across the Amazon. As to how - well, you dump food waste and fire waste in a midden and then...Nairn
- .. in subsequent years you see plants growing liberally on it, and you take note. No smartphones = lots of time to notice otherwise mundane things! :)Nairn
- Amazon Rainforest 5.5 million km²
Sahara Desert 9.2 million km²
Let's do this!palimpsest - I remember seeing a video of a man dedicating most of his life to planting trees in the desert in Africa, and the impact that created. I'll look for it.monospaced
- Not Africa (not even close), but good stuff.
https://www.youtube.…monospaced - I worked out that London generates 3600 tons of shit every day. Shit that is significantly underutilised. Shit isn't even a main constituent of soil.Nairn
- ok, this is a bit handwavy, but LDN could generate enough soil to cover 3/4 the size of Wales each year.Nairn
- That's assuming about 30cm addition to that surface, which is quite a lot.Nairn
- Obviously soil need more inputs beyond shit, so they would be the more complex aspect to get to whatever tera-factory would be required to process it allNairn
- #terraformtheearthscarabin
- Nairn, your explanation about how they acquired the knowhow makes total sense. In India they recorded this kind of knowledge in a village book, a sutra.uan
- The sad/hopeful thing is - Humans ARE The Absolute Agents of Change on this planet. We have the potential to make things wholly better, if only we choose to.Nairn
- @Scarabin - absolutely. Just, not on the scales we saw in Star Trek. But we can absolutely modify things within a century or so.Nairn
- All this info is already known for generations here also in countryside.
But you can't really scale all that worldwide.******** - Any solution to climate change needs to be able to scale in under a decade and anywhere, worldwide. Almost impossible in the current political climate.********
- Gates should do this with Hoes in his stable.utopian
- Contrast this with all the hand-wringing about farmers burning the Amazon rainforest.monNom
- the problem there is they burn it down to build mines or roads or mono cultures. burning and regrowing jungle would work.uan