Back in 2010, during a trip to the Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy — i.e. the Washington D.C. metropolitan area — I paid a visit to my old neighborhood in the town of Takoma Park, Maryland (not to be confused with an adjacent neighborhood of the same name just across the District line). I could remember the street grid well enough, and made my way to the apartment building I had lived in some thirty-five years previously, just to see what the place looked like. The area was recognizable enough — it was totally Hispanic by then, but it had been moving in that direction even when I lived there. Salvadoran restaurants. Mexican grocery stores. Cuban barber shops, where “razor cut” might have more than one meaning.
So the neighborhood was familiar, except for the growth of trees. What was it with the foliage hanging over every street, and dense greenery blocking the view around every corner? It’s not like it had been a newly-developed area when I lived there — it was an old established suburb by then, with forty- and fifty-year-old buildings and trees that had long since reached their maturity. So what was it with all that mass of greenery? It made navigation more confusing than it should have been.
It got me to thinking about the possibility that increased CO2 in the atmosphere had stimulated all that luxuriant new growth in the trees and shrubs of Takoma Park. The possibility made me look at the landscape in a different way in other places, including the remote countryside here in the boondocks of the Central Virginia Piedmont. Yes, it did seem like all the hedgerows and second-growth areas were choked with densely-packed shrubs and small trees. When I cast my mind back to the way things had looked in the same places thirty or forty years before, it seemed that the landscape back in those days had been more spare, more austere. The view was more wide open then driving along the back roads. But that was a very subjective observation, and could have been ascribed to the power of suggestion.
Or maybe not. Just a few years after my return to the barrios of Takoma Park, NASA published a report about the increase in green biomass across the globe between 1982 and 2015. Posted in 2016, it was entitled “CO2 is making Earth greener — for now”. The weaselly qualification “for now” had to be included to make sure the piece adhered to the Climate Crisis narrative. Sure, it’s nice that the Earth is experiencing more plant growth — but don’t get used to it! It won’t last, and before too long we will all fry, or drown, or freeze, or whatever the latest fashionable apocalyptic scenario is.
According to this report, my subjective impressions about the flora of the East Coast were based on very real changes:
A quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.
An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions. The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.
Green leaves use energy from sunlight through photosynthesis to chemically combine carbon dioxide drawn in from the air with water and nutrients tapped from the ground to produce sugars, which are the main source of food, fiber and fuel for life on Earth. Studies have shown that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide increase photosynthesis, spurring plant growth.
While rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the air can be beneficial for plants, it is also the chief culprit of climate change. The gas, which traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere, has been increasing since the industrial age due to the burning of oil, gas, coal and wood for energy and is continuing to reach concentrations not seen in at least 500,000 years. The impacts of climate change include global warming, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and sea ice as well as more severe weather events.
Carbon dioxide fertilization isn’t the only cause of the increased plant growth—nitrogen, land cover change and climate change by way of global temperature, precipitation and sunlight changes all contribute to the greening effect. To determine the extent of carbon dioxide’s contribution, researchers ran the data for carbon dioxide and each of the other variables in isolation through several computer models that mimic the plant growth observed in the satellite data.
Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect, said co-author Ranga Myneni, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University. “The second most important driver is nitrogen, at 9 percent. So we see what an outsized role CO2 plays in this process.”
About 85 percent of Earth’s ice-free lands is covered by vegetation. The area covered by all the green leaves on Earth is equal to, on average, 32 percent of Earth’s total surface area — oceans, lands and permanent ice sheets combined. The extent of the greening over the past 35 years “has the ability to fundamentally change the cycling of water and carbon in the climate system,” said lead author Zaichun Zhu, a researcher from Peking University, China, who did the first half of this study with Myneni as a visiting scholar at Boston University.
Every year, about half of the 10 billion tons of carbon emitted into the atmosphere from human activities remains temporarily stored, in about equal parts, in the oceans and plants. “While our study did not address the connection between greening and carbon storage in plants, other studies have reported an increasing carbon sink on land since the 1980s, which is entirely consistent with the idea of a greening Earth,” said co-author Shilong Piao of the College of Urban and Environmental Sciences at Peking University.
The beneficial impacts of carbon dioxide on plants may be limited, said co-author Dr. Philippe Ciais, associate director of the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, Gif-suv-Yvette [sic — should be Gif-sur-Yvette], France. “Studies have shown that plants acclimatize, or adjust, to rising carbon dioxide concentration and the fertilization effect diminishes over time.”
“While the detection of greening is based on data, the attribution to various drivers is based on models,” said co-author Josep Canadell of the Oceans and Atmosphere Division in the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Canberra, Australia. Canadell added that while the models represent the best possible simulation of Earth system components, they are continually being improved.
The process described in the article above is a natural form of carbon sequestration. Nowadays, when you read the term “carbon sequestration”, it usually refers to the technical process of removing carbon dioxide from industrial emissions and transferring it by pipeline to underground storage facilities. This, like “renewable energy”, is a lucrative business for well-connected firms that receive federal subsidies.
Strictly speaking, however, such operations are more accurately described as CCS — carbon capture and storage. Wikipedia does a fairly good job at explaining both processes.
Mother Earth is quite adept at carbon sequestration, and carries it out with great efficiency. A surplus of CO2 in the atmosphere is absorbed by green plants during photosynthesis, and stimulates the growth of additional plant biomass to take advantage of all the ambient CO2.
I don’t see why this is considered a bad thing. More CO2 leads to more plant growth. More plant growth means greater crop yields and more acreage put into cultivation. The planet produces more food, which means that fewer poor people will starve.
Mind you, that last part may not be considered a negative outcome by the “Visualize Industrial Collapse” crowd. When you consider the human race to be a harmful virus infecting Gaia, the starvation and death of billions of people is something to be desired.
For everyone but the depopulation fanatics, however, more food production is a good thing, and the increase in atmospheric CO2 is something to be applauded.
Furthermore, if you want to be fully politically incorrect, an objective case has never been made against a modest increase in mean planetary surface temperatures. A rise of one degree Celsius is simply asserted to be catastrophic.
Why is that? Yes, it’s possible that sea level may rise slightly — although it hasn’t happened yet — and the tropics may become a little hotter. But millions of square miles of Siberia and northern Canada would become cultivable, and what used to be endless taiga could be transformed into wheatfields rippling in the breeze. Those coniferous forests in the Northwest Territories could be turned into farmland, so that northern Canada’s principal export would no longer be woodsmoke, but wheat and barley instead.
How do we know the planet, and the humans who reside on it, wouldn’t be better off under those conditions?
Yes, it may be true that a slight temperature rise would be a net negative, and that the planet would be better off if the warming could be held in check. But there has been no substantive cost-benefit analysis of the issue. And there can’t be any substantive cost-benefit analysis of the issue, not as long as the shrieking apocalyptics control the arena of public discussion. No rational, truly scientific analysis is possible. It could never be funded, and it could never be published if it were somehow carried out. And any scientist who participated would be unemployable afterwards.
Nevertheless, the planet is indisputably greening. Even NASA acknowledges the fact.
Hat tip: Hellequin GB.
That’s right. Carbon Dioxide is a plant growth gas.
Gotta love it. The more the merrier. Especially for us gardeners. 🙂
Plants need CO2. They give off oxygen in return.
Actually plants need Brawndo. Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes.
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The Greens are coming to get you
1/9-23
By Lars Hedegaard / snaphanen.dk
Human activities contribute only 1 percent to climate change.
The success of climate propagandists has been unprecedented. The vast majority of American youth – 84% – believe that climate change will cause severe unrest and make parts of the world uninhabitable within their lifetime. And when the climate preachers can convince them that all disasters are caused by human carbon dioxide emissions, it is hardly surprising that the masses of people are happy to go along with the demands of those in power for one attack or another on freedom and living standards.
Against this background, it is interesting to hear what Dr. Steven Koonin has to say. He has had a distinguished career, including as Secretary of State in President Obama’s Department of Energy and as President of one of America’s most prestigious universities, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He is currently a professor at New York University. Trained as a theoretical physicist, Koonin’s research interests also include computational physics, nuclear astrophysics and environmental science. At first glance, one might think he is a systems man, but this is far from the case.
Video: https://youtu.be/l90FpjPGLBE
Two years ago, Koonin made a name for himself with the book ‘Unsettled’, which dismissed most of the climate claims served up to the public.
Interestingly, Koonin accepts the reports published every few years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on which politicians, do-gooders, bureaucrats and journalists rely. But, as he notes in an interview with Uncommon Knowledge, how many of them can even read the reports? The last one came in 2022 and was 3,000 pages long, which Dan Jørgensen and the journalists at Politiken, “Denmark’s climate newspaper”, surely haven’t chewed their way through. And if they did, they probably didn’t understand anything.
The “climate fight” is a brilliant psychological operation aimed at plundering taxpayers to enrich big business.
What we are served in the media are brief summaries commissioned by politicians who need something to use to implement their car and hamburger bans and their new taxes. The same summaries are for the journalists who make their living writing sensational stories about the impending collapse. If a journalist came to her editor with a story that everything was going well, she would quickly be transferred to another job.
Koonin does not give much credence to various predictions about the future climate. As he says, they are based on computer models that are “demonstrably unfit for purpose”.
Strong words from a computer expert.
Here are some excerpts from the interview on Uncommon Knowledge:
Human activities contribute only 1 percent to climate change.
Global warming has been going on for 400 years – long before there were industries or gasoline-powered cars.
The warming since 1900 of about 1.3 degrees has been a gift to humanity. Since 1900, life expectancy has increased from 32 to 73 years and the world population has increased by a factor of five. But we are supposed to believe that the expected increase of 1.2-1.4 degrees by 2100 will destroy life as we know it.
We are constantly bombarded with stories of people dying from the heat, but as Koonin points out, many more people are dying from the cold and therefore warming means fewer people are dying.
Contrary to the horror stories in the press, there is no evidence that tornadoes and typhoons have become more frequent or more powerful. The same is true for floods.
Koonin also rejects the claim that the world’s food supply is threatened by a warmer climate.
Here is my (LH) conclusion, for which I will not criticize Steve Koonin:
Weather and climate are confused in media sensationalism. Any strange weather is taken as proof that Klaus Schwab, Greta Thunberg, Al Gore and Dan Jørgensen are right.
And like hungry wolves, the climate preachers are ready to devour the last of the freedom you thought you had.
The “climate fight” is a brilliant psychological operation aimed at looting taxpayers’ money to enrich big business and the unscrupulous politicians who can laugh all the way to the bank in the Bahamas.
yea right is this a pro lockdown article? gmafb!
All that coal and oil that powers modern civilization came about from a much warmer time in the planet’s history when there was a far higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Indisputably it caused a greening of the planet and a far higher amount of biomass which accumulated so fast it wasn’t able to rot and instead turned into seams of coal.
Same goes for the dinosaurs, which grew to their impressive sizes precisely because there was such an abundance of food.
Were there to be such a beneficial climate which resulted in increased food production worldwide, africans would still breed like rats and roaches while simultaneously starving due to ineffective organizational skills and tribalism.
Jordan Peterson says said that net zero is zero for the masses. The whole of the in green thinking has nothing to do with actual Earth climate, and everything to do with the reducing of the human population to a level where the elite have enough serfs.
“The whole of the in green thinking has nothing to do with actual Earth climate, and everything to do with the reducing of the human population to a level where the elite have enough serfs.”
I’m not a big Jordan Peterson fan, but he’s not altogether wrong in this case. It’s Brutals vs Eternals—see “Zardoz”.
That anti-Christ devil Al Gore created the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on planet earth.
Every lie he tells is contrary to what the Holy Bible says.
He has grown wealthy with his false carbon offsets. .
Al Gore is an evil man.
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The choice is yours!
https://voca.ro/1nQmXoJkg0u1
The sea is a sink of CO2. The warmer the sea the more CO2 it out gasses.What drives the temperature of the earth is that great big thing in the sky called the sun.At times the sun is in a Maunder Minimum and it puts out less energy n ,at times it is at a Maunder Maximum and puts out more energy.the sun cycles through more active phases follwed by more inactive phases.Each phase lasting between approximately 30 and 50 years
When the sun warms the oceans the ocean releases CO2 , the peak in CO2 follows the peak in warming ,with a lag of approximately 800 years .When the sun is in a less
energetic phase the oceans begin to cool and absorb more CO2 and atmospheric CO2 levels start to fall.
It’s all there complete with graphs in Proff Plimer’s book (“On heaven and earth”)
There are times according to the geological record when the earth has been 5 degrees hotter than today and CO2 has been lower than it is today.There are times ,according to the geological record when the earth has been 5 degrees cooler but CO2 levels have been 4 times highr than they are today.
CO2 driven global warming is a hoax ,but a very profitable hoax..
Agree completely.
General illiteracy and particularly scientific illiteracy is rampant in western nations. Likely the dumbing down of generations of schoolkids is a conscious plan on the part of our elites, but it also happens when the teachers themselves don’t have a clue and their only credentials are four years of indoctrination in a teaching college.
I always found it fascinating that the Sahara was once green and lush. However it became desert not from human activity but from an orbital phenomenon known as “precession of the equinoxes”. The earth wobbles around it’s axis similar to a top over many thousands of years; approx 26,000. As it wobbles the apparent Pole Star changes, and so while we use Polaris as the Pole Star, ten thousand years ago it would have been Vega. And this change in Earth’s inclination resulted in the Sahara receiving far more sunlight and thus resulting in desertification over thousands of years.
And there are many more long term cycles like this which have all kinds of influence over weather, temperature, climate, etc. But scientific illiteracy means that very few outside of actual scientists have heard of such things or comprehend that human efforts are just far too meager compared to orbital, geological, and solar forces to have any meaningful impact one way or the other upon factors like CO2 or global temperature.
Btw, any relation to the polar explorer of the same last name?
Actually, overgrazing by goats and sheep during the Neolithic and afterwards greatly contributed to the desertification of the Sahara. Before that it had been arid grassland — dry, but not full desert. Sheep and goats, unlike cattle, crop grass down to the roots, removing the binding which holds the topsoil together and keeps it from blowing away.
The topsoil dust was blown away in great clouds by the prevailing winds, travelling west across the Atlantic and settling on the Amazon basin. The Amazon was largely savanna back then, but the addition of all that rich red topsoil dust in a rainy climate created a layer of new fertile topsoil that allowed the rainforest to grow. That layer of alien topsoil can still be seen when excavating below the surface in the Amazon.
The arrival of the Arabs in North Africa in the 7th century exacerbated the desertification of the Sahara. Prior to that time, the natives (whose descendants are the Berbers, among others) used horticultural practices established by the Romans, which helped preserve what topsoil remained. The soldiers of Allah had no use for such niceties — they allowed their goats and sheep to graze as they would until the grass cover was all gone, and then moved on to the next fertile valley. Hence the desert that now extends all the way to the Mediterranean littoral.
Interestingly enough, something similar happened to produce some of the deserts of the American Southwest. Those had been dry grassland, but the settlements set up by the Church under Spanish rule allowed sheep to overgraze the area, desertifying it.
Hi Moon ,absolutely true that we suffer worldwide from indoctrination ,pseudoscience and a complete ignorance of scientific principles .I understand that my husband’s family are a cadet branch of Sir Ernest’s family.
Thank-you for adding the influence of the earth’s wobble on its axis ,it’s a vital piece of the picture
Hi Baron,no doubt overgrazing does lead to erosion.Local
farmers generally know how many cows per hectare their land ,can sustain.Higher number with high rainfall ,lower number with lower rainfall.
Cows are much less likely to destroy the topsoil, because they don’t graze down to the roots like sheep and goats. With those you have to take care in order to preserve the grassland.
I contemplated mentioning the goats but that is a relatively recent development considering the cycle is 26,000 years or so. Certainly Islam is destructive of the lands it has conquered, which were breadbaskets of the Mediterranean and for the Byzantine Empire.
There is a good deal of study that suggests the Sphinx is far older than Egyptian civilization and the out-of-proportion head is due to it being recarved from some other previous depiction; perhaps the head of a lion.
Suggestive of the incredibly great age is channels down the sides of the Sphinx which suggest liquid water once flowed on it, implying that Egypt once received regular rainfall.
I have witnessed first hand how destructive one goat can be, when I lived in the Caribbean my next door neighbour kept a goat on about one acre of land, you could see right across to the houses on the other side. After he left, the trees and bushes grew so tall they pulled down the cable for the TV !
Also, I believe Graham Hancock authored a book about the age of the pyramids and the sphinx, which included details of the Earth’s wobble, to explain the alignment of the shafts in the pyramids, and the way they’re laid out on the ground.
Hi Moon , agree children these days are indoctrinated rather than educated, by teachers who are often not qualified to teach the subjects they are drafted in to teach.
Thanks for the bit on the earth’s wobble on its axis.I doubt anyone could have explained it better.
I understand that my husband’s family are a cadet branch of Sir Ernest’s.
Husband’s family is a cadet branch