TED Community » Craig Embleton

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Environmental restoration especially reversing desertification and climate change.

An idea worth spreading

I want to use solar-desalinated water to irrigate the Sahara and Arabian deserts in order to grow vegetation and lower atmospheric CO2 by creating a net carbon sink. In a recent thesis.

An outline of my idea is available in my thesis: http://www.greenfrontier.org/thesis-completed-what-is-the-potential-for-reducing-atmospheric-co2-levels-through-solar-desalinated-irrigated-vegetation-of-the-sahara-and-arabian-deserts/

Comments

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• A comment on Talk: Damian Palin: Mining minerals from seawater

  Jun 16 2012: Damian could you please clarify a couple of points from your talk?
  You say that Singapore will desalinate 900,000,000 litres a day (900,000 m3 a day or 328,500,000 m3 a year) in 2060 which will generate a US$4.5 billion industry in Magnesium alone.
  My questions are:
  is this US$4.5 billion an annual sum or over a longer time period?
  is this sum based on the value of 2012 US dollars rather than a predicted 2060 value.
  Thanks
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Damian Palin: Mining minerals from seawater

  Jun 14 2012: Could this technology be used to mine land-leached phosphate from the oceans? The constant flow of phosphate fertilizer from the land to the ocean (including phosphate originally mined from off shore deposits) is predicted to lead to 'peak 'phosphorus' resulting in a limiting factor in agricultural production.

• A reply on Talk: Damian Palin: Mining minerals from seawater

  Jun 14 2012: Hi Jeraime. Electrodeposition of minerals to build 'biorock' corals is a demonstrable way of rebuilding coral reefs - http://www.biorock.net/Technologies/.
  The bacteria Damian refers to in his talk can be used to aggregate sand particles together - see http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/magnus_larsson_turning_dunes_into_architecture.html
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: PHYTO GLOBAL CLEAN-UP

  Mar 29 2011: Hi Maggie. Paul Staments has produced an important paper called "Myco-remediation of the Japanese Landscape After Radioactive Fallout". Well worth reading and implementing. http://coalitionforpositivechange.com/stamets-fallout-mycoremediation.pdf I think the integrated use of fungi with plants is essential.
  
  I really like this conversation. It would be great to get a list together of all the bioaccumulators.
  Best wishes,
  Craig

• A comment on Conversation: Is it possible to build a modern pyramid in the Sahara desert?

  Feb 22 2011: Hi Karl
  
  As part of my recent thesis, and to help illustrate the problem of the size of anthropongenic CO2 emissions I created some illustrations using Google Sketchup and Google Earth that showed how large pyramids of timber would need to be if that timber was to sequester all the carbon that we pump into the atmosphere.
  You can view the pyramids here:
  http://www.greenfrontier.org/350ppm-pyramid-illustration/
  
  You may also be interested in my whole thesis on greening the Sahara and Arabian deserts. It is available here:
  
  http://www.greenfrontier.org/thesis-completed-what-is-the-potential-for-reducing-atmospheric-co2-levels-through-solar-desalinated-irrigated-vegetation-of-the-sahara-and-arabian-deserts/
  
  Look at Appendix C - Visualising the problem for the dimensions of the pyramid.
  
  Best wishes
  Craig