While carbon dioxide and its supposed detrimental climate change effects have become the media’s favorite bogeyman for seemingly anything that happens these days, new data from NASA’s Vegetation Index – measured by satellites – show remarkable benefits for global plant life.
NASA writes about the index:
“Our lives depend upon plants and trees. They feed us and give us clothes. They absorb carbon dioxide and give off the oxygen we need to breathe. Plants even provide many of our medicines and building materials.
“So when the plants and trees around us change, these changes can affect our health, our environment, and our economy. For these reasons and more, scientists monitor plant life around the world.
“Today, scientists use NASA satellites to map the “greenness” of all Earth’s lands. These vegetation index maps show where and how much green leaf vegetation was growing for the time period shown.”
This is what the Earth’s greening looks like today.
When you download and plot the vegetation index data that are publicly available from NASA, you find a clear upward trend since the year 2000, when the data were first measured:
The data in the year 2000 is at 0.0936 and in February 2021 it is 0.1029, making a difference of 9.94%. A ~10% gain in just over 20 years is an impressive feat for our planet.
This is especially good news because we know this ultimately means greater crop production area, increased crop yields, and expansion of forests and grasslands.
The Sahara Desert is becoming smaller as a result. A 2018 study by Venter et al found the Sahara desert had shrunk in area by 8% over the previous three decades.
This is profound because the Sahara covers a vast area of some 9.2 million square kilometers. That translates to more than 700,000 square kilometers more area that’s become green.
There’s more. A 2020 study by Haverd et al found that
“…about 70% of the Earth’s post-1980s vegetative greening trend has been driven by CO2 fertilization.”
The Haverd study also indicates this greening will offset an equivalent of 17 years of man-made carbon dioxide emissions by 2100.
So while climate alarmists are screaming about the latest imagined doom and gloom from “climate change,” the Earth’s vegetation is using that to its advantage. Of course, the media won’t tell you about this good news because it goes against the alarmist narrative.
Update: The original analyst, Zoe Phin, later used a different method of analysis, with the same vegetation index data set, but used a subset measured more often than 16 days, and using linear regression rather than a 1-year running average. She says the greening over 20 years is reduced to just over 5% rather than 10%. While it doesn’t change the fact that the Earth is greening, it does illustrate that different statistical methods can give different answers, something we run across every day in “climate science”.
Read more at Climate Realism
CO2 = plant fertilizer. That is why greenhouses use it to boost the growth rate of plants. CO2 is NOT a pollutant.
The East coast of Australia is experiencing floods. Therefore, global warming causes floods.
Two years ago it was drought. Then bushfires. However, bushfires are now passé, hence the current claim that floods claim more lives than do bushfires. That’s something we definitely did not hear during the bushfire period for some reason…
Who knows what tomorrow’s global warming apocalypse shall be? But whatever it is, it will reshape the narrative by being worse than the floods of today. For one thing is sure, each apocalypse is worse than the last, just as each decade is hotter than the last. Even when it isn’t.
If only the doomsayers could work out how the greening of the planet is bad, they could use that for the next scare…
Perhaps they could read The Day of the Triffids for inspiration?
G’Day Gumnut. I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember the 1950/60’s. About every four years floods on the north coast of NSW forced all Brisbane – Sydney road traffic to use the inland route, over the New England Tableland. Personal experience. Nothing new. Come to think of it, weren’t there floods south of the Tweed in early ’95?
A number of years ago I read about an experiment by two researchers who supported the climate change narrative. They increased the level of carbon dioxide in a small section of forest. Their conclusion was that CO2 does stimulate plant growth. However, they also concluded that the faster plant growth would deplete the soil of minerals. The additional growth was said to be temporary due to mineral depletion. Now we have the entire earth as an experiment and it is obvious that a higher level of CO2 is an important factor is increasing growth.
The researchers’ conclusion didn’t make sense and shows just how unreliable research by those with political motives is. Consider an arid environment. On a small piece of ground run a garden sprinkler for an hour twice a week. Will that section end up not too different from the surrounding area because of depletion the soil of minerals? Of course not. That small piece of ground would be very green in comparison to its surroundings.
Banning or regulating CO2 would be like trying to stop the tide from coming in impossible and foolish King Canute could,nt make the tide go out and amitted to the fact he could,nt make the tide go out
What I find in online discussions is that in environmentalism CO2 is pollution and so therefore the climate change issue is an environmentalism issue and thetefore a social justice issue.
https://wp.me/pTN8Y-6Gv