By Lee Harding of Western Standard on February 03, 2024
The world is growing greener and greener thanks to carbon emissions, researchers have found.
The global greening continues despite increased drought stress since 2000 reads the article’s title, published in Global Ecology and Conservation in January.
The study, which was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province, wanted a more accurate read following recent studies that found both greening and browning trends.
“CO2 fertilization along with land management determined that greening is dominant. However, recently global browning signals due to drought stress have also been widely reported,” the researchers explained.
“We used the four latest leaf area index (LAI) datasets to explore this controversial topic, and found that global greening continued from 2001 to 2020. Greening acceleration occurred in 55.15% of the globe, while browning acceleration occurred in only 7.28%.”
The accelerated greening was mainly concentrated in India and the European plains.
The researchers, four of whom are affiliated with universities in China and one in Australia, said both climate change and carbon emissions were helping the greening and that in some places it was occurring despite drought.
“The global greening is an indisputable fact,” the researchers insisted.
“Combined with meteorological variables, we found that CO2 change dominated the LAI trend, while climate change largely determined the LAI growth rate trend. Importantly, our study highlighted that drought trend did not necessarily trigger vegetation browning, but slowed down the rate of greening.”
The researchers said in some circumstances, lower moisture levels helps crops grow. Vapor pressure deficit (VPD) is the difference between the amount of moisture that’s actually in the air and the amount of moisture that air could hold at saturation.
“A growing body of research shows that vegetation growth is enhanced by moisture constraints due to increased VPD and decreased soil moisture caused by climate warming,” the researchers said.
A “drought trend could not lead to global browning as it could not overtake the positive effect of CO2 fertilization that contributed to global vegetation. Our study explains the rise in VPD offsets only a small fraction of the increase in productivity caused by warming and CO2 and gross primary productivity is still increasing globally.”
Although the changes weren’t uniform across the globe, positive trends dominated growth and acceleration of growth. This was borne out in two different kinds of analyses.
“We counted areas with the consistent trend and growth rate trend in four LAI datasets, 60.29% of the areas in the globe were inconsistent, however in the consistent areas, 64.06% of the areas showed accelerated greening, mainly distributed in India, the European plain and East Africa. The areas that browning was accelerating was only 2.07% and most of them were distributed in Eastern area in Brazil,” the researchers explained.
“We further took the mean of the four data sets as a reference and analyzed the trend and growth rate trend. Greening was accelerating in 55.15% of the globe, among which the greening acceleration of India and European plains was the most obvious, while the greening of China and North America plains was slowing down.”
“Only 14.44% of the globe was browning, with the accelerating (7.28%) and slowing down (7.16%) roughly equal.”
In a post to Twitter (“X”) Canadian Jordan Peterson said the study proves if people weren’t “hysterical” they would realize more atmospheric CO2 is good. He said U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum should “give up” and their time was “seriously and irrevocably over.”
“The evidence now suggests that the change is positive and large environmentally and economically. So I guess I’m not just a climate denier anymore. I therefore believe that the climate apocalypse-mongers are purveying an actual anti-truth,” Peterson said.
“The greening data are of overwhelming significance compared to all counter-consequences. Rapidly shrinking arid and semi-arid areas. Higher crop yields. An area twice the size of the US has greened in the last few decades. A more thorough falsification of the doom-sayers narrative could hardly be imagined.”
The study is not the first to find potential upsides to climate change and carbon emissions. A 2018 study published in Nature found that global warming could make substantial new swaths of land able grow crops in the northern hemisphere, with Canada and Russia being the biggest winners.
Below, maps from the Chinese study.
CO2 is the dominant driver of LAI trend (a) and growth rate trend (b) compared to other factorsFigure 3, The global greening continues despite increased drought stress since 2000
Spatial distribution of trend and growth rate trend based on the mean of four LAI datasets. Yellow and blue indicate that LAI shows a positive trend, yellow indicates a negative trend in LAI growth rate, and blue indicates a positive trend in LAI growth rate; Red and green indicate that LAI shows a negative trend, red indicates a negative trend in LAI growth rate, and green indicates a positive trend in LAI growth rate.Figure 2, The global greening continues despite increased drought stress since 2000
