Forestation of the desert, and general terraforming thread

[Dis]

Originally posted by Azazel
Not always you have the right species that is suitable for the conditions. Sometimes they have to be imported.

These are facts, dissident. In Israel, many areas, previousy bare, are now covered with forests.

well Israel I find gets more rainfall than the desert southwest. I have only been there once- err make that twice- I was at the Tel Aviv airport- but I never left the tarmac- they didn't even let us inside the airport. In Israel's case they were an area that may have once had trees, but they were cleared away. Other deserts never had trees.

It's so dry where I live I struggle to keep cactus alive. I can't even keep cactus alive in the desert without watering them!

[Heresson]

One of the cities close to mine have an opposite problem.
Once, there was a forest next to it, growing on sands. When
coal mines were built there, the forest was destroyed, and the area turned to desert... The only desert in Europe. There were even fatamorganas, and sand storms, and Africa Corps trained there before going to Africa... But later on, bad bad plants started growing there again and now poor desert is hardly desert anymore. The city treats the desert as a possible tourist attraction, and so, they plan to get funds from EU to turn it to desert. The plans include getting camels to eat the plants... From Kazakhstan or wherever.

[Provost Harrison]

Now that is quite an interesting fact...you want to watch out or you may get those pesky trees growing there

[Sandman]

What happens to the inhabitants of the deserts?

[Heresson]

There are none humans there... It's a small desert, You know. As I said before, army used to practice there... The area is said to be full of mines and unexploded bombs, like all Poland, in fact.
It may add an additional valour to the sight-seeing of the desert, as one said.

[Sandman]

No, I mean the deserts in Israel. It could be a way of uprooting desert nomads, by destroying the ecosystem they depend on.

[Heresson]

Thanks for another reason to dislike Israel
Hm... No-one cares about nomad traditional way of life...
Every Arabic country tried, and I think they succeeded, in settling them on one place.

[Provost Harrison]

Originally posted by Sandman
No, I mean the deserts in Israel. It could be a way of uprooting desert nomads, by destroying the ecosystem they depend on.

They could just switch to forest dwelling

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Sandman
It could be a way of uprooting desert nomads, by destroying the ecosystem they depend on.

Are there really desert nomads? AFAIK, they live on arid land and steppes, because there's nothing their herds can graze on in a desert.

[Dinner]

Over the last 100 years several of the mountains in the Los Angles area have been planted with far more trees then would have naturally occured there. The result is that during recent droughts the bark beetle, a native tree pest which normally only kills weak or dying trees, has seen such a massive population boom that even healthy trees dye from it and whole forest are being wipped out.

The point is nature determined certain things because they worked best over the long run and when we try to change things because we think the result will be more astitically pleasing then we often end up making things worse. The current reforestation attempts of the Israeli highlands maybe simply trying to restore historical forests though since many of these areas used to have large tree coverings. As I recall the Turks cut down vast forests in the early 20th century in Israel because they were trying to build a rail way through to Mecca.

[Ecthy]

all I can say about terraforming is we should create a borehole on top of where Jerusalem is today

[realpolitic]

Originally posted by Azazel
Not always you have the right species that is suitable for the conditions. Sometimes they have to be imported.

These are facts, dissident. In Israel, many areas, previousy bare, are now covered with forests.

With global warming we're going to have climactic changes. Once viable forests will be hotter than the trees can handle, unless we introduce new species. We may also have to introduce more flame retardant species. Individual weather patterns may be dirupted, as happened in The Little Ice Age, where Canadian glaciers melted, dirupted the Gulf Steam, and cooled Europe. Climatogists disagree on whether a new Little Ice Age withh hit Europe when Greenland melts.