[ExI] Greening the Sahara

[Dan]

--- On Fri, 7/17/09, Brent Neal <brentn at freeshell.org> wrote:
> On 17 Jul, 2009, at 17:41, Dan wrote:
> 
> > I'll have to look this up. Thanks for recommendation!
> > 
> > Prima facie, though, I'm thinking this would be slow
> and take a long, long time. Warming up the desert would
> quickly draw in moist air, increasing rainfall. (I reckon
> the problem then would be keeping this rainfall high and
> then making sure the water doesn't just runoff and away from
> the desert area.)
> > 
> 
> The Jordan project showed significant results in 2 years.
> The beauty of it is that success causes an acceleration in
> rate. As you get more canopy cover to slow evaporation and
> more organic matter to hold water down, you get the band of
> cooling necessary to take that warm moist air and get it to
> dump its water where you want it.
> 
> You're exactly right about the runoff being a problem. The
> way the permies handle that is to build large swales on
> contour to hold the water in and force it to soak into the
> ground.

Thanks again, Brent. I'll have to look into this and learn more about it. This seems to me actually a good way of going about it.

Regards,

Dan