Can new forests help fight global warming?
Jan 15, 2010 - by Staff
Leonard Ornstein, Igor Aleinov, and David Rind, Irrigated afforestation of the Sahara and Australian Outback to end global warming, Climatic Change 97, 409-437
If large-scale irrigated forests were planted in the Sahara and Australia deserts, the authors find that they could conceivably sequester amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide at least equal to that from burning fossil fuels. Capturing the global CO2 produced from gasoline requires adding about $1 to the per-gallon pump-price to cover the cost of irrigation using seawater desalinated through reverse osmosis. Such mature technology is economically competitive with proposed techniques for capturing and sequestering carbon at power plants.
MOUNT SINAI SCHOOL OF MEDICINE • COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY • NASA