what would it take to make the Sinai Green?

more or less what the can says, how much water would it take to make the Sinai Green? could it be done? if not how much irrigation could be brought into the Sinai?
 
Prevent Egypt from becoming a socialist-tendency government? At least, that'll stop the environmental destruction
 
Prevent Egypt from becoming a socialist-tendency government? At least, that'll stop the environmental destruction

Right, because it was a real land of milk and honey until the 1950s...

Oh wait, that's Canaan.:rolleyes:

Seriously, I'm willing to believe that Nasser might not have managed that particular chunk of desert in the very best possible manner and so might deserve some blame for making it a bit worse, but has the Sinai ever been "green" any time since 4000 BC (when the Sahara turned into a desert) if it even was then?

Why blame socialism (not that Nasser was much of a socialist) for this?:confused:
 
It'd take generations of work and billions of dollars for the Sinai to be minimally agriculturally productive and that''s with nuclear power plants working as distillation stills and powering groundwater pumps to bring up up yet more water.
The problem is that deserts, once they form, are very difficult to get rid of.
For grasslands to stick around, you need an annual rainfall of roughly 10" or 25 cm/yr. The Sinai barely gets 5cm on a good year. That's 25cm over 60000 km^2 not including topography, so by my calcs, you'd have to pump 137M L a day to cover that area due to evaporation, leakage, etc.
I'm guessing it would take 20 years and 50 billion dollars' capital investment, not to mention intensive soil culturing and so forth for 20% to be covered by sparse grassland. One thing that would deliver insane amounts of fertilizer would be farming carp, catfish, or other food fish in various water tanks along the distribution network.
In 50 years, and 250 billion dollars capital investment you'd maybe get 50% covered by 45% short grassland, 4% tallgrass prairie, and 1% chaparral with the balance being wet desert without dust storms and slowly accumulating nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other goodies plants need to flourish.
In 100 years and 500 billion dollars total investment, you'd see the Sinai mostly covered with 50% shortgrass prairie, a quarter as much tallgrass prairie, 10% chaparral/scrubland and 1% softwood trees.
By this time, you have enough ground cover to counter the desert heat island effect and for rain to keep dropping on the area to at least keep the short-stem grassland alive year to year, drought or flood. The longstem prairie might have some issues, but with more ground cover, less albedo, therefore, attracting more rain.
After 200 years and 1 trillion dollars, you'd probably see 40% of the area with chaparral covering it, with 45% of it being softwood trees and 5% hardwoods as you saw in Lebanon.

The reason nobody''s really gotten anywhere with de-desertification is because of the titanic amounts of energy needed to treat and move the water, how slowly soil forms, and how nature rarely follows a straight line of forward progress. There's diebacks, there's blooms of one species or another as conditions change and niches appear and disappear in the local ecology. Nature moves at her pace by her rules, not subject to the whims of politics or our collective wishes.
More food for thought...
 
Well, another alternative is make Egypt effectively trading its oil and other natural resources
Well, basically make Egypt an industrial nation

I heard the Saudis made a de-desertification project for agriculture, but I don't know the infos
 
Well, another alternative is make Egypt effectively trading its oil and other natural resources
Well, basically make Egypt an industrial nation

I heard the Saudis made a de-desertification project for agriculture, but I don't know the infos

What oil? I do believe they have a little bit, but not much! The Saudi projects would be stemming from their still-tremendous oil wealth. But all of these territories, Arabia, the Sahara, and oh yes, Sinai, are part of the desert belt and have been throughout recorded history. I've poked around the Net a little since people here are talking as though the desertification of Sinai is some kind of recent thing, but there are no rivers, no lakes, hardly any water of any kind there. It's desert, it was desert during the most ancient Egyptian dynasties, to make it anything else requires either the right kind of global climate change (and several thousand years of ecological development and stabilization, once the rains start to actually fall) or a massive technological tour de force of fuel-extravagant desalination of sea water and uphill irrigation! One which, should the power sources fail or political disruption derange the infrastructure, would collapse back into desert immediately.

I don't know what prompts the question of greening this particular piece of desert rather than some other, but I do find the insinuations that the current state of the place has something to do with political and economic mismanagement quite irritating! It's all very well to recommend that people should get rich I guess. Even if they do, why should they try to expend their wealth on forcing an environment that doesn't want to be anything but desert into artificially blooming? Particularly when Egypt already has the Nile valley?

If some other state were to hold Sinai instead, say one that has been in de facto occupation for most of the time since the allegedly socialist-hence-incompetent Nasser first took power (Israel's occupation of Sinai after the Six-Day War has gone on far longer than Nasser was in power) I guess it might make more sense for them to make the most of it. But the cost-benefit ratio seems low for anyone, compared to what the same effort might get them on more promising land.

Only if Sinai were an independent state that also had some really valuable resources to exploit would I expect anyone to make a big effort to make it other than what nature has made it for longer than human civilization, of any political/economic philosophy, has existed.:rolleyes:
 
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