New NASA satellite data prove carbon dioxide is still GREENING the Earth
By Paul Homewood
Satellite data shows the per cent amount that foliage cover has changed around the world from 1982 to 2010.
https://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-co2.html
Scientists have known for many years that increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) have helped boost green foliage across the world’s arid regions. Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), for instance, published a study in 2013, which found that CO2 fertilisation correlated with an 11 per cent increase in foliage cover from 1982-2010 across parts of the arid areas studied in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa.
They explain:
The fertilisation effect occurs where elevated CO2 enables a leaf during photosynthesis, the process by which green plants convert sunlight into sugar, to extract more carbon from the air or lose less water to the air, or both.
If elevated CO2 causes the water use of individual leaves to drop, plants in arid environments will respond by increasing their total numbers of leaves. These changes in leaf cover can be detected by satellite, particularly in deserts and savannas where the cover is less complete than in wet locations.
Another study from Boston University in 2016 discovered that carbon dioxide emissions from industrial society had driven a huge growth in trees and other plants. Satellites showed that there had been significant greening of something between 25% and 50% of the Earth’s vegetated land over the last 33 years, Just 4% of vegetated land has suffered from plant loss.
Other studies have found that the Sahara has shrunk by 8% in the same period.
Now up to date data from NASA confirms that these trends have continued, and that the planet is 10% greener than in 2000.
In any sane world, this fact would be welcomed. It may be one of the reasons why the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation is forecasting a record world grain harvest this year.
Instead we demonise carbon dioxide.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Source:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-stopped-getting-greener-20-years-ago/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does-rising-co2-benefit-plants1/
I wonder how the climate change nutters will explain this away?!
They’ll simply ignore it.
and a stupified population say nothing for fear of being cancelled….
During every warm epoch the size of the population grows, presumably because a warmer earth is capable of supporting better crops and the co2 outgassing from the oceans greens the planet, creating more verdant crops
Which beggars the question as to how many people the earth could support at the levels the IPCC believes is optimal-pre industrial 280ppm
They may claim that increasing global temperatures promote greening.
In a way they do because warmer seas outgas more CO2, just like a cold fizzy drink goes flat at room temperature. This is standard physics.
Nobody is allowed to claim any benefits form carbon dioxide “pollution”. If you dare to mention any benefit, you are labelled a climate denier.
and a liar
This is of course something which Prince Charles discovered and promoted years ago: If you talk to your plants – indoor or outdoor – they respond by growing faster. This was confirmed by a Royal Horticultural Society study. If you talk to them you breathe CO2 over their leaves.
Tony
Oh dear, the poor plants. Fancy having to listen to that moron!
I am surprised they do not wither up and die.
Are we sure he doesn’t get his butler to do the talking for him?
supercalefragilisticprincelyhaletosis
Eeuw!
Off topic here.
I was reading an article about the incineration of recycling and the emissions it produced.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/07/revealed-why-hundreds-of-thousands-of-tonnes-of-recycling-are-going-up-in-smoke
This bit caught my eye and alarmed me.
“If net zero is to be achieved nationally, it has to be achieved, on average, in every locality,” says Shlomo Dowen, spokesperson for the United Kingdom Without Incineration Network (UKWIN). “So if a locality is cursed with an incinerator, then that locality has to do without something else in order to pay for the carbon burden. Will local people be restricted in terms of how often they are able to use their cars or how often they go on holiday? The question becomes: what are local people prepared to do without to accommodate the emissions from an incinerator?”
This is a step up to make net zero personal. Its very clever as it would pass on the pressure to go neutral to locality residence who will be punished for not forcing who ever is in charge of their locality to get to net zero. Its straight out of the Chinese communist handbook from Mao’s time. Red guards and all.
How many people would have to stop breathing to offset the incinerator emissions?
the question was rhetorical ! what he is saying is ,it would be fairer to get rid of incinerator than put all the burden on regular people !
Do tell. More than a year ago, I watched a lecture from the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada by John Harris of the George C. Page Museum of the La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angeles: “Pleistocene Mammals of North America–Treasures from the La Brea Tar Pits.”
Towards the end of the lecture, Harris brings information from plant materials of the very low CO2 levels at the end of the Pleistocene. It caused plants to have little growth and even not produce seed. This led to the demise in numbers of herbivores who were dependent on the plants. In turn, the carnivores disappeared as they also had little to eat. Likely this produced the extinction of the megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene.
Dr Patrick Moore (PhD ecology), a founder of Green Peace, left that group when they turned towards environmental issues. In a lecture and an interview, Dr. Moore also posits the dangerously low CO2 concentrations at the end of the Pleistocene and states that we are still in recovery of the optimum levels for plant growth.
@ Joan Gibson — Wasn’t Greenpeace ALWAYS concerned with “environmental issues”? Dr Moore himself said he left because “By the mid-1980s, the environmental movement had abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism.”
I think it started as an anti-nuclear movement.
Yes, Hivemind, Moore stated that it was a movement against nuclear war, but when they picked up the environmental nonsense, he left. Here is his interview with former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYQ6eZDXXRE
Thank you for this.
The greening will come in handy as you return to a hunter/gatherer economy (Net Zero).
Well, God bless the Indians and Chinese for maintaining and enhancing CO2.
Well I never ….
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144540/china-and-india-lead-the-way-in-greening
Truly remarkable and alarming that since pre-industrial time a 50% increase in atmospheric CO2 by eight billion humans (and their domesticated animals) could cause a 6% increase in global mean temperature. A climate emergency and existential crisis for certain. Capture and store as much as you can before it’s too late. The planet is turning green.
@ Broadlands: What happens to the % increase in temperature if the temperatures are measured in Kelvin?
Can you please define “climate emerhency”?
If not, it remains a mere political-type slogan and without any convincing reality.
(Just like all (other) political slogans
carbon dioxide emissions from industrial society had driven a huge growth in trees and other plants
Better get those carbon capture schemes running asap 🙄
Those carbon capture schemes are capturing lots of subsidies, but do very little. The most current data from the Global CCS Institute reveals that world-wide amounts of CO2 stored are now at ~40 million tons per annum. Completely trivial when compared to the 7,800 million that one part-per-million represents. Follow the money to see how much the climate is changing. Bill Gates, Elon Musk?
What is your basis for a 6% increase in global mean temperature? Calculated how? Is 10°C twice as ‘hot’ as 5°C for example?
Pre-Industrial temperature was 14.0°C. At the end of 2016 (according to NOAA) it was 14.83°C, an increase of 0.83°C in the global anomaly.
I just went back to check the numbers… NOAA has changed them once again…
2016 in 2020:
“With a slightly cooler end to the year, the year 2020 secured the rank of second warmest year in the 141-year record, with a global land and ocean surface temperature departure from average of +0.98°C (+1.76°F). This value is only 0.02°C (0.04°F) shy of tying the record high value of +1.00°C (+1.80°F) set in 2016.”
2016 in 2016:
“The average global temperature across land and ocean surface areas for 2016 was 0.94°C (1.69°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9°C (57.0°F).”
From plus 0.94°C to plus 1.00°C in four years. Difficult to do any historical studies when the numbers are changing from year to year.
To some fools it is! The BBC interviews one of them who was running a Green group who claimed that a winter’s day that was 10 degrees was twice as hot as one that was 5 degrees and so we were seeing Climate Change double temperatures. He then warned us that in summer that meant we would have days that were 40 degrees. The BBC just nodded along.
Time to buy some property just outside the oceanfront and snow country.
Then when it greens up you are sweet.
We have inadvertently temporarily stalled, not stopped the occurrence of the next global extinction which will be caused not by too much CO2 as the climate zealots baselessly claim but by too little CO2 something which is not a claim because this interpretation is based on a wealth of empirical data.
What is the problem? Put simply, from evolution sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
Evolution is a big roll of the dice.
About 160 million years ago a plethora of marine organisms evolved with the ability to sequestrate CO2 and combined with calcium to produce hard protective shells. When those organisms died their shells did not dissolve en mass because what are today’s incredible volume world wide of organic Shelly limestones. The problem is that the CO2 was taken out of the Carbon Cycle and not returned upon death to any great degree.
The consequences of this evolutionary event is that The Carbon Cycle has been out of sync now for 160 million years. In a gross sense there has been a linear decline in the atmospheric CO2 concentration since the Late Jurassic which you and I driving our SUVs have helped pause for a mere instant in geological time before it resumes. Mankind deserves to congratulate it’s self for that happenstance.
During the depths of the first part of the current Ice Age, levels of CO2 in the atmosphere fell to around 180ppm or put another way, 20ppm above the death of plants because photosynthesis is compromised at and below 160ppm.
The main take away from the oft promoted 800K years of ice core derived saw tooth temperature and CO2 concentration curves is not the fact that CO2 rise in the atmosphere follows temperature (not the other way around as is continuously being falsely claimed) but rather that the planet has diced with a global extinction eighth times during the last 800K years…. Do not take my word for it. Google ice core temperature data and look how close the CO2 values got to the 160ppm death line on eight occasions during the last 1 million years.
The simple empirical data based fact (not modelled ) is that right now at around 410ppm plants are still running on lean. The average atmospheric concentration of CO2 over geological time is 2500ppm which is where it was when the angiosperms we eat evolved. If I was asked to therefore choose an “optimum” level for CO2 in the atmosphere then I would choose 2500ppm citing geological precedent.
The current anti CO2 craze is NOT based in science but in ideology. They do not actually know what they are asking for because it is based not in science but pure ideology which needs a simple bogeyman for their moronic followers to latch onto. Sadly there are new recruits added in the West every single day to this ideology by means of the totally baseless thinly disguised left wing climate “education” which our children are receiving in schools across the whole of Western Civilization where socialism is promoted time and time again to children as young as 5 years old as the solution to everything.
It is easy to calculate what has happened to CO2 over geological time. The atmosphere in the early Archean was very low in oxygen but rich in CO2 and H20 to keep the planet warm when the Sun’s luminosity was dim. Over time as photosynthesis evolved to capture and bury CO2 as organic matter and carbonate, the oxygen rose. Today the percentage ratio between O2 and CO2 is now about 525 to one. It is the massive amounts of bio-carbonates and “fossil fuels” that were buried over billions of years that have lowered the atmospheric value of CO2 to a trace gas. And that has given us reliable energy to improve our lives.
Correct but the underlying problem is not going away. We need to deal honestly with science and not abuse bits of it for political ends. Science is the pursuit of truth, not a political tool or as it is today, a weapon.
As Patrick Moore points out, what we need to do is to find away to keep the atmospheric level of CO2 up and as far away from 160ppm as possible.
What the pious lunatics want is to reach that extinction event as quickly as possible because their ignorance believes in a static Earth with static properties. The “ since the start of the industrial revolution” mantra is everywhere. It is the prerequisite of choice for all greentard commentary as they try to invent a hard link between the very welcome warming which ended the Little Ice Age, it’s idiot child klimut chaenge and the industrial revolution. Our industry BAD (not China or India industry) is the clear message from the marxists!. I wonder why……..
Jonathan Scott
Very well said, pardonme!
This greening is more of a greenhouse effect than the so-called “Greenhouse effect”. Large greenhouses have burned fuels to provide extra CO2 to increase yields for many years: this is often from the flues of heating boilers. Thus, double whammy of CCS and yield increase!
More good news.
Back in 2004, astronomers found an asteroid. which they named Apophis, which would closely approach the Earth in 2029. They said it might collide with us. That was just a sober statement of the known facts.
Further studies of its orbit have increased the accuracy of the prediction, and now it is certain that it will miss us by 29,000 kilometers. Really close! But “a miss is as good as a mile.”
Wow the Sahel is amazing – my Geography O Level in the late 1970s was full of scare stories about desertification there. And look at Australia – wonder if all that greening might make it more prone to fires?