Unlike gigiachad America, which cuts down all its trees to build data centers.
Ugh seriously stop trying to paint China's achievements as disasters because every where else is succumbing to fascism.
It's not about attacking China. It's a lesson that large scale terraforming needs to be done thoughtfully and may have unintended consequences.
Or simply that humans can keep learning about ways our activities effect the environment
Uhm China is very fascist.
Can we just... try to use words correctly?
What do you mean?
Fascism - 1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
Which part doesn’t apply to china’s current government?
What does that have to do with trees? Or research about trees?
Right, the Americans...
Scientists from Tianjin University, China Agricultural University in Beijing, and Utrecht University in the Netherlands found that between 2001 and 2020, increased vegetation reduced water resources in both the eastern monsoon region and the northwestern arid region.
The whole intro to the article even puts China in a favorable light. Why are you so ready to go to the mat for China without even trying to read what they're saying?
They clearly only read the headline
And also has no water
Arizona town facing severe water restrictions as supply could run out by summer
There are all too many cities in the world that are poorly located or have outgrown their resources. This article was not about that
However I do remember seeing that discussion a few days ago. Perhaps you want to search for that and add your comments there
Whataboutism activated!
Did you even read the article? Chinese researchers found that reforesting areas like grasslands into forest (as an example), redistributed water from the water cycle.
Nowhere in the article doesn't it say "China bad". The researchers said they should take into account how water availability could change when planning future deforestation efforts.
Not everything is political...you're the one making it political.
The US plants around 1.3 billion a year, so...
Your ignorance is astounding.
Nitpick, but:
have increased evapotranspiration, which is a portmanteau of evaporation and transpiration
Bruh, if you're going to explain a not-at-all unclear fancy word, why not just use the explanation in the article (e.g. "have increased evaporation and transpiration")
This smells of AI writing.
Yeah I mean if you are trying to clarify you might want to point out it happens through plant leaves.
Right, I mean why would you ever want to learn a new word while reading a science article???
Not much substance to this article. But it is noteworthy that the trees also increased precipitation for their own benefit. The bluish haze you see as trees fade away toward the horizon is from compounds they release that act as nuclei for rain drops - yes forests do their own cloud seeding. You know who else has really messed up their water cycle? California, or probably most of the western states. Anyway.
I think this will get worked out pretty quickly. They need to get the water to the land, that's all. Planting trees is a great thing, not sure why this article tries to make it sound like "China fucked up."
According to the study, the country’s northern regions contain roughly 46 percent of its population and more than half of the arable land, but only 20 percent of water availability. The authors argue that these altered hydrological cycles need to be taken into account when planning future reforestation efforts.
Moving water is like the hardest of the infrastructure projects.
Wait.... 78 Billion trees. As in with a 'b' billion? In all seriousness, how?
It's since 1980, they've had almost half a century to do it.
That's still 1,695,652,173 trees per year (78,000,000,000/46 years).
"In all seriousness, how?"
The us plants about 2.3 trillion corn plants per year. 25,000 per acre, 95,000,000 acres. Considering they plant 68,000,000 trees per year just for paper, in the US, the numbers aren't shocking. Worldwide tree nurseries probably dwarf that 1.6 billion, maybe.
68 million is a pretty far cry from 1,695 million.
But the US plants around 1.3 billion a year, so China's number isn't shocking
It's not vastly more than every Chinese person planting 1 tree a year. If you pay people to plant 10 trees a day, 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year you only need to employ one person in every 2400 to get close.
That's still over a billion trees a year. Actually that's over 1,500,000,000 trees a year. Again...HOW?
And this begs a side question. Out of those 78 Billion trees, how many are alive now?
Just a matter of scale. Every seventh person lives in China.
Or to recontextualize: The article talks about a time span of around 45 years. That's around 1.7 billion trees. Remember, that's an english (short) billion, 1700 million. (In other languages a billion is a million millions, and not just a thousand millions.)
If a worker can plant 20 trees a day and works 200 days a year, that means around half a million people are more than enough to do it. In a country with around 1400 million people, that's 0.035% of the population, or roughly one in 3000 people.
Suddenly, it's not all that crazy anymore.
In Estonia we plant about 20-40 millions of trees every year.
RMK ( State Forest Management Center) alone plants about 20-25 million trees every year.
And we are nation with 1,3 million people. So for China that number over the years isn’t big at all.
I always laugh when in the western news there is some organization, what makes big words that they planted 2 million trees and if that is something of a big achivments what should be boasted around the news.
I should check out Estonia
Yes, I was shocked too. But in 1949 apparently 8.6% of the country was forested; in 2022 it was 24%.
In 2005 they launched the "Greening China" initiative to plant 13 Trillion (yes Trillion with a T) trees in 10 years. They didn't succeed but in 2021 the People's Daily claimed 78.1bn trees planted in 40 years Link.
However - China is known for inflating statistics to suit the communist party's own ends, and the People's Daily is part of the country's propaganda system. It's probably far less than 78bn, and that figure doesn't count replants and commerically logged trees. But it seems that whatever the figure there really has been a concerted long term reforestation effort in China.
There are around 3 trillion trees on earth, so planting another 13 trillion is quite ambitious
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly... She planted 78 billion trees to combat soil erosion. They swayed and grew and and fucked up her water.
I wonder why she swallowed the fly, perhaps she'll die.
Wail til she gets to the horse.
Horse: Humanity's own ridiculous self elimination. She's dead of course.
.... but at what cost?
Reforest the oceans, shrubs and grasses are good enough for land.
China racking up those Ws
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