NBC News is reporting on a new study that found that the Amazon rainforest is benefiting from increased carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere. The findings of the study, while informative, are unsurprising. [emphasis, links added]
Multiple studies have confirmed what agronomists, botanists, farmers, and greenhouse operators have long known: higher CO2 makes plants grow faster, stronger, and more lushly, and as a result, recent increases in CO2 have contributed to a general greening of the Earth.
The NBC News story, “Giant trees of the Amazon get taller as forests fatten up on carbon dioxide,” reports on a study published in the journal Nature Plants, which found trees in the Amazon were growing larger and, when undisturbed by deforestation, increasing in number due to rising atmospheric CO2 levels.
“The giants of the Amazon are getting even bigger,” says NBC News.
“A sweeping, new study has found the rainforest’s largest trees are not only holding their ground, but they’re thriving — growing, multiplying in number and continuing to play a major role in mitigating the impacts of climate change.”
The study, which included participation by more than 100 researchers from more than 60 universities and research institutes in Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, and the United Kingdom, among other countries, tracked changes across 188 plots in the Amazonian rainforest for more than 30 years.
It found, in the words of the study, “trees have become larger over time, with mean tree basal area increasing by 3.3% per decade.
“Larger trees have increased in both number and size, yet we observed similar rates of relative size gain in large and small trees,” said the study.
As NBC News admits, the researchers explicitly credit the increasing amounts of atmospheric CO2 concentrations from the use of coal, natural gas, and oil for energy for increased tree growth (in both size and number) across the Amazon.
“There was an understanding that big trees were ‘expected to be vulnerable to climate change,’ Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert, one of the study’s lead authors, told NBC News. … ‘What we see here is actually they seem to be showing quite a resilience.’
“‘We’re not seeing signs of them dying off,’ said Esquivel-Muelbert [continued], . . . . ‘They are increasing in size and number as well.’”
It’s puzzling why Esquivel-Mulbert and her co-authors were surprised at their findings – why they thought trees in the Amazon would be “vulnerable” to climate change.
Perhaps it’s because they relied on climate model projections concerning climate change impacts, rather than long-term knowledge, thousands of studies and experiments, and hundreds of reports detailing the benefits of higher CO2 for plants.
There is no logical reason for believing trees in the Amazon would behave any differently or benefit any less from CO2 increases than other plants do and have.
As detailed in Climate at a Glance: Global Greening and in dozens of previous Climate Realism posts, NASA data shows and multiple studies confirm that the area of leaf coverage and plant life on Earth has increased by as much or more than 10 percent between 2000 and 2020 alone, with studies showing a similar increase since 1982.
This measured increase in plant life covered nearly all parts of the globe, including the Amazon basin, having even contributed to a shrinking of the Sahara desert.
The large-scale survey of the literature by the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts, examines in detail the biological basis for CO2’s beneficial impacts on plant and animal life.
Many of today’s plants evolved during geologic periods of time ago when CO2 levels were higher than today and are benefiting now from the recovery from glacial CO2 levels that neared the minimal limits needed for continued photosynthesis.
NBC News is to be credited for publishing good news about tree growth in the Amazon, a rare admission of the benefits of climate change amid the normal “climate change causes everything bad” narrative that the media outlet normally pushes.
Global climate change is benefiting plant life, which, as this new study shows, extends to trees in the Amazon.
This is great news in the face of waxing and waning but nearly continuous deforestation there.
Top photo by Basil MK via Pexels
Read more at Climate Realism
Very early in the global warming movement researchers who supported the narrative did an experiment where they increased the carbon dioxide in a test forest. I still wonder how they did this. The result was increased growth. The researchers were loyal to the political movement and concluded that the additional grow would be come to an end due to limited minerals. Now it is obvious that we get vigorous growth with higher concentrations of CO2.
Save the Rain Forest Drive your Gasoline Cars and take a Breath