It looks like you can improve cooling by using trees with higher evaporation (due to lowered stomatal control) but surely the downside is higher watering requirements in an already arid region?

Anyone with knowledge in this domain care to weigh in?

There is a place in So Cal now called The Aspens South Coast we lived in 30 years ago. It has (had?) an incredibly dense concentration of trees, something I’ve not seen since in that region, which is of course desert.

This time of year when you opened the gate that separated the treed interior from the parking lot you felt like the air conditioning had been turned on. We have very fond memories of the place. Its only disadvantage for me was that spring caused my allergies to go crazy.

Totally worth it.

Genuine question for people in the field. My understanding is that the cooling effect of trees is primarily driven by evaporative cooling. That is, the shade effect only really exists because the plant does not shrivel up and die due to storing water. How much more effective are trees vs. big swamp coolers? Even in this article, they admit that daytime cooling of half a degree requires 3 times more water.

I recently bought some wooded land and unlike most people I know I've been extremely selective cutting down trees on it.

It's actually comfortable to be outside there. Even in the summer it's almost completely shaded. I was kind of surprised how extreme it is. I know trees make it harder to work and if you're hiring people they probably can't tolerate it but since I'm doing everything myself I don't have to clear everything and wait for it to grow back.

I'm sure any future endeavor to plant trees in the goddamn desert will have no negative environmental consequences at all. It's not as if the city in the goddamn desert is already in the middle of a regional water crisis as of last year or anything...

https://www.knpr.org/show/knprs-state-of-nevada/2024-08-29/w...

I don’t think planting trees is only for cooling things down. Sometimes it’s just about helping people feel like they can go outside. In really hot places, even a bit of shade can change your mind about stepping out.

This is a repeating study, seeing this again and again, so not sure about its novelty.

In Europe we even assigned our first "Chief Heat Officer", which makes total sense.

That captcha sure reduces the effectiveness of me reading that by 100%.

I saw video last week in India there was similar experiment done in sun the temperature 45 degrees C and 30 step walk under the tree the temperature 36 degrees C. We need more trees as an easy solution

I remember seeing similar heat reduction claims in a more tropical, non desert env. https://reasonstobecheerful.world/green-corridors-medellin-c...

As a matter of local trivia, today (2025.07.01) we had a wind storm in vegas that downed many trees. :)

Related:

Las Vegas is embracing a simple climate solution: More trees (npr.org) 21 days ago | 143 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44231151

Nights in Las Vegas Are Becoming Dangerously Hot (nytimes.com) 10 months ago | 1 comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41223831

I've just been presented with a captcha thingie asking me to select all things that can be picked up by a pair of chopsticks described as "the tool in the image"

Fuck off.

Then that vanished and another even more vapid effort appeared.

Fuck off.

If you need to piss around with this sort of nonsense, you probably shouldn't be entrusted with a website.

The best way to produce shade in the Nevada desert is with solar panels.

The sky is rarely cloudy and solar just blasts all day every day here.

I covered my backyard in Vegas with ground panels and now I charge my EV off of a 100% off grid solar system. The sun provides enough energy in my small yard for 2-3x my driving needs.

any group strategy to push back against the overuse of whole-page captchas ?

Do we all need to run an AI browser plugin now that auto-fills cloudflare captchas ?

Is it just me, or has anyone also noticed that trees in southern climates closer to the equator (not jungles) have very few leaves and shade as opposed to trees in climates away from the equator (not tundras)?

What happens if you import northern US trees, the ones that produce a lot of shade, into southern states? Has this been tried?

It is also why there is very little shade in, say, Florida. Only occasional parts of the Martin Grade “scenic” highway look like a regular scene in the north.

Surprise surprise, vegetation is way better than concrete when it comes to being comfortable in a city