Reducing green house effect?

Question

There is a lot of desert unproductive land where sea water can used to grow salt resistant vegetation.

This would by evaporation alone and less heat radiated back into the atmosphere cool down the earth.Since vegetation also traps co2 less co2 is left over reducing the green house effect.

These vegetation again can again can have usefull other nutrient or chemical value yet to be exploted by advancing sceince.

Just read an article where sand is used to filter seawater to reduce the salinty in desalinisation plants. There is a lot of sand in deserts the world over and simply boring deep wells in areas supplied with seawater can be a source of getting potable water.

Answer 1

Nice idea, but you forget what would happen if you did transform deserts into forests...  what becomes of the desert's ecosystem?

Answer 2

It's a good idea, but it will ruin the desert environments. And, at this point, there is little we can do to completely stop global warming. In fact, the very most we can do is slow down when it happens completely. Remember that there are plenty of erupting volcanoes and naturally-caused forest fires to completely overcome any of our efforts to cut down on carbon emissions. Cutting down on carbon emissions is definately not a bad idea at all, but there's no need to make us do it by severely increasing the price of fuel.

Answer 3

Certainly more vegetation is good.

You need to be hyper careful on how you define "unproductive" - and you also need to determine how all of a sudden having a different bio-environment there will affect adjacent land.

There is equipment that will happily take sun and salt water and generate pure water from it - but it is slow and the equipment itself is expensive.

In any case, it isn't as simple as finding saltwater loving plants and trying to grow them in the desert, but this kind of thinking will be part of the solution.

Answer 4

How nerdy! :)    But who is going to pump all that ocean water into the low lying desert?  If anything ... the sea levels will have to rise due to natural and or global warming from human activity before the cycle is naturally reversed.  Pumping enough salt water into the deserts requires a lot of energy and if we had that much alternative renewable energy to do that we would not have this problem to begin with.  Even now with ethanol we are emitting more CO2 in its production than we get cleaner energy out of it.  What you posed here can not be a man made solution to reversing the green house emissions problem.

Answer 5

I may be a global warming skeptic, but the science is against the first part of your theory. Water vapor is a more significant greenhouse gas than CO2 but is not something that can readily be controlled so is rarely mentioned.