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China has planted so many trees around the Taklamakan Desert that it's turned this 'biological void' into a carbon sink (www.livescience.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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Mass tree planting in China is turning one of the world's largest and driest deserts into a carbon sink, meaning it absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits, new research reveals.

"We found, for the first time, that human-led intervention can effectively enhance carbon sequestration in even the most extreme arid landscapes, demonstrating the potential to transform a desert into a carbon sink and halt desertification," study co-author Yuk Yung, a professor of planetary science at Caltech and a senior research scientist in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Live Science in an email.

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[–] 14 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The other side of this is that they’ve been doing this since the late 70s and have a wealth of information about what works and what doesn’t work.

Something like a quarter of China is desert, so they have vested interest in actually making this work.

I agree you get a lot of propo, but what do you think the point of that is here?

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    To provide and example: You will easily find stories about Ford CEO Jim Farley saying that Chinese EVs are ahead of those by Western manufacturers - this story has been appearing in various (and also Western) outlets for some time now. The framing is always a bit different, but the story is always the same.

    Here we have the same pattern - one story, published with a slightly different framing (and often with a misleading title, as it is the case also here, because the survival rate of these trees might be too low in the long run as several of these article also say - see here -, but it's a bold headline).

    Another recent propaganda push is probably the (false) narrative that China has banned all investments in Israel over Gaza. I read headlines here on Lemmy and on many outlets, including Western media. But it is complete fantasy. It's a completely fabricated story as China-Israel ties are stronger than ever, with both investment and trade at record levels.

    Don't get me wrong, I don't say planting trees is a bad thing. It's good. But such headlines and the endless stream of always the same news don't aim at informing on climate policy, but rather to distort reality and serve authoritarian propaganda while creating narratives that are outright false. The only goal here is to promote "the West bad, only China good" stance, which is, of course, complete rubbish.

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