Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change • Hacker News Board

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#141

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 3:04 PM UTC

thinkingemote wrote: post #37

jordn wrote: post #18

Is there any proof or details of how they did this? 350,000,000 is a lot of trees to source, distribute and plant in one day.

Planting a tree is as easy as planting a tiny seed in the ground. What all these headlines omit is that the majority of things planted won't survive. My back yard has a few thousand tree seedlings growing in it naturally. When we hear of tree planting we picture a mayor or rich person planting a four year old tree in a park. The reality is that trees grow from seed. In the case of commercial forestry all the trees pl…

Planting seeds is not "planting trees", thanks for the mention of seedlings -- that changes the complexion of the effort considerably.

Personally I'd expect a sapling to be the minimum developmental stage to qualify as "planting trees".

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#142

Post by lleolin » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 3:05 PM UTC

bencollier49 wrote: post #134

Smrchy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US already has the cleanest of water and air. No need to do anything when you are leading the others bigly.

Oh man, that just shot over a few heads..

So many people express such opinions straightfacedly, it more readily registers in my mind as tiresome than ironic.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#143

Post by adventured » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 3:07 PM UTC

tanto wrote: post #118

Smrchy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US already has the cleanest of water and air. No need to do anything when you are leading the others bigly.

Does the USA define "BEST" as first after reversing a list? > https://www.tripsavvy.com/the-worlds-cleanest-tap-water-4159...

The parent comment was of course sarcastic. However, your trip savvy list is seven countries long.

The US does not have the best tap water in the world, I think everyone here can guess that already. It does have extremely safe tap water overall however, save for a few examples like Flint (and fracking regions in West Texas or Oklahoma, both of which get bad ratings on water violations). Its rate of serious drinking water violations is low nationally going back over the last 20-30 years.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#144

Post by adventured » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 3:08 PM UTC

distances wrote: post #137

kevin_b_er wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now it does. Major financial/political interests are seeking to gut the laws that got us the cleanest water and air in order to make more money for themselves.

Just in case you weren't sarcastic: the parent was, and US is obviously nowhere near the top of the list in regards of clean air and water.

The air in the US is in fact as clean as Western Europe. Comparing it to individual smaller nations, then I'm sure there are many examples that are cleaner. Comparing the US to larger population regions however it does compare very well to the best.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#145

Post by glogla » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 3:08 PM UTC

MichaelApproved wrote: post #116

Smrchy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US already has the cleanest of water and air. No need to do anything when you are leading the others bigly.

Edit: Damn. I think OP was being sarcastic. A quick look through the comment history shows a different view than the one expressed in the comment. I removed the downvote. ---Original comment--- Here's why I downvoted you: - It doesn't matter if the water is clean or dirty because that's not what's causing climate change. - The United States was the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide in 2015. CO2 is a leading ca…

I genuinely expected it to be Trump quote. Is it not? It looks like one.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#146

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 3:09 PM UTC

bayesian_horse wrote: post #69

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waste of time, money, and resources. Appearance of fixing a problem without doing so reduces motivation to actually fix it. Global support might wane because "they fixed it". Seems like there are many reasons not to do a fix unless you know it works to some reasonable extent.

Again, the issue they want to address is not climate change but retention of soil and improving their regional climate and water cycle.

Yes, I assumed it was primarily erosion they're aiming to combat in a few years when the trees have decent root systems and enough foliage to provide wind-shelter.

Did I say something to the contrary?

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#147

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 3:11 PM UTC

mikeg8 wrote: post #122

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a scattergun approach, no? What's the survival rate? I'd guess 1:100 if you're not tending them. But, in Ethiopia many of those trees are going to need watering, surely? Protecting from people gathering firewood? Sweden and Ethiopia seem pretty different wrt tree planting?

Definitely a scattergun approach but that’s similar to how nature does it, I’ve heard the survival rate for seedlings in north American confirer forests to be about 1:1,000,000.

Is that for natural or manual (eg from helicopter) scattering?

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#148

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #99

But tell me again how the world's largest economy can't be bothered to do anything about climate change.

[deleted]

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#149

Post by iguy » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #8

I wish them luck. I'm a sort of history buff and Ethiopia has an amazing history. It's been a state (in various forms and with different names) for more than 2000 years, in a part of the world where such stability has been scarce. It has its own ancient alphabet. It was the only country in Africa to resist the Scramble for Africa and was only occupied by Italy for less than 10 years (after putting the Italian Army to…

> It was the only country in Africa to resist the Scramble for Africa

Indeed. In many ways you do better to think of Ethiopia (of that period) as a colonial power. Although there were no sailing ships involved, a fairly small center conquered lots of surrounding territory, inhabited by people who linguistically and culturally were about as foreign as could be.

> Their population went from 70 million in 2007 to 100 million in 2017. The current forecast is for about 200 million by 2050.

And from 20 million in 1960, when America was about 200 million.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#150

Post by lazyasciiart » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 3:13 PM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #127

Did anyone else find the 350M number implausible? They claim it happened in 12 hours. Unless they're talking about planting seeds, I find it hard to believe and take this story just as a political stunt. Ethiopia's population is 100M. Did 10% participate in this somehow, and each person plant 35 trees across the country? How would you even get that many trees to plant?

They've been planning this for a while. Lots of schools and government offices were closed so people could do this - I wouldn't be surprised if more than 10% of people were involved.