cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/58909207
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.
Yeah, that’s great ‘news.’
Just two months ago, in December 2025, the same news has been published by the same outlet and written by the same author (see here).
Reuters new agency reported about that already in November 2024.
And this is by far not everything. The web is full with it. This same story has been appearing in the various outlets for several years now, mostly citing a ‘new’ study or ‘Chinese state media’ reports so that there is a reason to present it as ‘new.’
And it’s not the first time that OP is repeatedly posting the same ‘news’ over and again, just with a different framing, and obviously only to make China look good and to promote its propaganda.
First time i hear of this great news and happy for once to hear a little bit about propaganda that is not from USA and pro environment.
Now : Tiananmen Square massacre has been an atrocious tragedy and China’s help in ruSSia invasion of Ukraine is horrible.
While I applaud any government for attempting to better the environment, I really wish this project was done with more forethought.
Unfortunately they have done this forestation primarily with fast growing poplar and willow trees, making a vast monoculture that wont likely last in such a harsh climate for more than a decade.
Without the natural biodiversity that supports a living Forrest ecology, it only takes one disease or pest to wipe all that effort. In the end it might do more harm than good when considering the amount of ground water something like this will take out of the water cycle.
Yes, but both tree species tend to live fast and die young, so they can be used to provide first-generation forest protection until the second-generation trees can grow up.
Yeah. Pioneer species providing shade, soil retention, and water slowing. Very important.
Lol, I was gonna say this account has made 3.4k posts in 7 months. It’s just an unlabeled bot to throw on the pile of blocked accounts.
Nice observation : at least 10k comments should back these 3k+ posts, allas, only about 50 (so 0.05k) comments there … a bit concerning i say.
My rule of thumb is if a user has more than one post a day on average, I block them. At least on my other account I did that.
I don’t think regular people post that frequently. If they do, it’s likely just manual irritating spam.
I post a lot some days, nothing others. Am I blocked?
Haha, probably. I’m sorry about that.
The issue I think is mostly due to people thinking they need to crosspost or post the same content in multiple communities like this is Reddit. Since Lemmy is so small, people are likely to see both posts back to back in their feeds, so it’s just redundant and spammy. That’s mostly why I block accounts that post a lot.
It would be a really nice quality of life feature for Lemmy to add filtering so this kind of thing could be dealt with without blocking.
you wrote :
" … the main issue is that Lemmy is a fraction of the size of Reddit …"
let me guess that you are feed up with censorship at Reddit … i left it about 3 years (4?) ago … after they blocked access through “api” so that Teddit was blocked.Haha, yea. I also left Reddit when the API change happened.
I thought I was breaking the Voyager app with the number of accounts and communities I was blocking on my original account, so I made this new one. I needed to force close the app whenever I tried viewing the whole blocked list…
Currently i only block about 125 users and out of these 11 have been banned … at one point, maybe a year ago, i may have blocked 500 … never used an application though.
Too much an intensive use (of social madium) may lead to stress and tendency to downVote, i went through that.I rarely down vote, but apparently I’ve blocked 7148 users/communities/instances on my first account.
That sounds awesome, can an independent third party news agency go into China and take pictures to confirm?
Am on mobile rn and can’t easily search myself but such a large endeavour could be visible from google maps maybe? Even between 2 snapshots ?
There’s people in China that put sticks in the ground to make it look like vegetation, and they even paint vegetation green to make it look more healthy. Looking at low quality satellite pictures like Google Maps is unreliable.
Yo at some point that very idea seems more efforts than planting actual trees… few months ago a French YouTuber (Tev) went deeeeeeeep into one of those Chinese desert and filmed greenery in the middle of it. Like a whole garden thingy built just for the lols or something.
Chinese are crafty and industrious fuckers, once they set to something they generally make it happen. Sometimes it’s swallows sometimes it’s trees I guess…
But at what cost?
COMMUNISM!
So technically no cost?
deleted by creator
… How do they grow with no water?
Edit: Ah, the “around” bit means the edges. This is more to stop it from spreading.
I suppose irrigated tree farming could be used to fix carbon, too, although I’m not sure how it stacks up relative to other approaches, and you’d need abundant fresh water near a desert.
CCP greenwashing.
But but… “China bad” remember?
I know is not all good, but still seem better than US in so many ways.
Don’t worry, there’s plenty of “bad” to go around. It’s not the human rights violations Olympics.
human rights violations Olympics
Dunno, kinda feels like it.
Angry upvote.
I’m sure if we try hard, like really really hard, we could also find something nice in the USA. China plants trees and ushers green energy, USA… well… I’m sure there is something. Moon program for example…
The USA was one of the first countries to ever do a green belt, China isn’t necessarily copying the USA but they are definitely building off the body of work that occurred before.
China is also committing a genocide on the Uyghurs.
USA is starting its own ethnic cleansing.
Everyone sucks.
So just celebrate the little good we do have.
I really don’t think China is committing a genocide on the Uyghurs, the story just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Thanks for your contribution, the world largely disagrees but neat!
Thanks for your contribution, the
worldWest largely disagrees but neat!FTFY
This is from 2019, but is one of the few articles I found actually listing countries, instead of just saying “51 UN member states” with no further detail. Do take a look at the respective lists. No conclusions are drawn, but it’s interesting nonetheless: https://thediplomat.com/2019/07/which-countries-are-for-or-against-chinas-xinjiang-policies/
Yeah I asked Winnie, he said it’s fake news and docked me -300 social credit for asking, case closed
Here’s the Amnesty International report if you want to give it a bit more scrutiny. I think it’s China’s attempts to discredit it that don’t hold up to scrutiny:
www.amnesty.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Amnesty-International_China-Report_FINAL.pdf
Here’s another thing I noticed. A little farther down, it mentions they interviewed “dozens” of people, and that this represents a significant portion of all available testimonial evidence. Of course they attribute this to the Chinese government trying to keep information from getting out.
Here’s the thing: there’s absolutely no way they could be that successful in keeping this hidden. Just look at Gaza. It’s tiny, literally walled in, and israel all the best tech for oppression and surveillance (it’s like their whole thing) plus the infinite money glitch via the USA. And still, we have countless videos of the horrors perpetrated against Palestinians. Xinjiang is HUGE, and there are something like 10 million Uyghurs. Stuff would absolutely get out.
So right off the bat, the executive summary goes
Since 2017, under the guise of a campaign against “terrorism”,
So this “terrorism” did actually happen, I’m not sure why it’s in quotes, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2014_Ürümqi_attack
Note the reference at the top to another incident only one month earlier. Unfortunately there were several more.
This tone certainly suggests a foregone conclusion, but anyway. It goes on to describe various abuses, do they amount to genocide? They sure wouldn’t if israel was the perpetrator, but I guess when it’s China we can throw around the G word no problem. Perhaps I can give it more scrutiny later, gotta work now.
