On those occasions when I’ve foolishly opted to try and debate climate alarmists instead of just patting them on the head and vaguely muttering, “Yes, kids… now, just go back to school and stop making dills of yourselves”, it’s been an exercise in frustration like no other. Imagine trying to explain the finer points of quantum theory in Latin to a Sentinalese tribesman, as you dodge the inevitable hail of arrows and spears.
That’s almost as frustrating as trying to talk sense with a climate alarmist.
The most striking thing about the green-left is just how utterly impervious they are to contrary facts. The more you try and persuade them that the sky is blue, the more stubbornly they will insist that it is in fact bright puce with lemon polka-dots.
One thing the green-left are utterly, unshakably convinced of is that the world’s forests are on the brink of disappearing forever. We’re teetering just one chainsaw rev away from the entire planet turning into a desert wasteland.
It just ain’t so. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Try and tell a climate alarmist that. They’ll smugly cross their arms and demand, “And just what’s your source for that?” Why, none other than climate alarmism central, the UN.
The quinquennial United Nations report Global Forest Resource Assessment (GFRA) was just released. It was filled with data and nuanced analysis on the State of the World’s Forests (another UN forestry report).
And the news is almost all good. Very good.
[It] shows that the rate of deforestation peaked in the 1980s. Since then, the rate at which humans burn, chop, cut, and replace forests with farms and cities has fallen. And it’s not just modern industrial humans who used the natural world to excess – half of all forest loss took place before the year 1900.
The corollary of that is that, yes, deforestation was a problem, almost as bad as the green loons imagine. In the 20th century, humans ramped up the tree-chopping to unimaginable levels. If half of all deforestation occurred before 1900, that means that what took thousands of years to do before 1900 was done in just a century afterwards.
That is most definitely not good. But the good – no, the great – news is that we stopped. Not just stopped: in many cases reversed. Britain today has more forest cover than at any time since the Domesday Book. Certainly, pockets of devastating forest loss persist – Borneo, for instance.
The very same chart that illustrates the stunning extent of forest loss during settled human civilization also indicates that, relatively speaking, we have barely lost any forest coverage in the last twenty years[…]
Plenty of us who are optimistic about nature and the state of human flourishing have predicted that the global deforestation rate will soon hit zero. In this GFRA report, we were almost right.
In the past decade, the yearly reduction in forest area was 0.12 percent – down from 0.19 percent in the 1990s and 0.35 percent in the 1980s. In other words, out of 100 hectares of forested area in 2010, 98.85 hectares still green the world today. Emphatically, we are not running out of forests.
What many of us fail to realise, too, is just how vast the world’s forests are. When alarmists talk of deforestation, they love to talk about “football fields” or areas “the size of New Jersey”. Frankly, that’s peanuts. The GFRA estimates the Earth’s forested area as four billion hectares – slightly less than one-third of all habitable land.
The decline in deforestation has slowly slightly in recent years – not because we’re still mowing down forests willy-nilly, but because the reforestation rate has slowed.
The silver lining to that observation is that regrowth and replanting is something that policymakers in the West and those of us who treasure the world’s forests can actually control, whereas persuading political leaders or poverty-stricken families of the Global South not to use the natural resources around them is a much more challenging and ethically dubious task.
Furthermore, while forest areas have declined, the remaining areas’ biomass has not. On the contrary, the biomass per unit of area increased by about 4 percent from 1990 to 2020, almost entirely offsetting the reduction in forest area (-4.2 percent) over that same period. Put differently, while the global forested area is smaller, forests have become greener and denser, nearly balancing out the total amount of biomass.
The world is greening so much because of the very thing that has the Krazy Klimate Kult so terrified: carbon dioxide.
The stock of sequestered carbon in roots, soil, branches, and trunks is today level with what it was in 2010, and only 1 percent less than what it was in 1990 – an annual rate of decline of 0.03 percent. While the world’s forests are not without their (largely local) problems, the amount of green in the world is tantalizingly close to stabilization. All of us, from climate alarmists to optimists, should cherish that.
Human Progress
While South America is often the whipping-boy for the deforestation alarmists (especially since Jair Bolsanaro was elected in Brazil), it’s actually Africa that’s the leading culprit today. As the GFRA report says, “the deforestation hotspot is now in Africa.”
There’s a relatively simple reason for that: Africa is the poorest continent today. Contrary to the green-left’s seething hatred of capitalism, the inconvenient truth is that rich, developed capitalist nations look after their environments, because they can afford to. Poor people are too busy stripping everything they can eat and burn from the landscape to worry about environmental concerns.
True, the early industrial-capitalist West inflicted devastating environmental damage. But, in what is called the Environmental Kuznets Curve, as societies climb past a certain level of wealth, their environmental performance increases dramatically. Rich people like a nice environment and can afford to have it.
So, instead of dismantling the capitalist economy, the truly environmental path is to build it up and export it. Make the world rich and an even greener tomorrow will follow.
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