Opinion
If the thought of the Earth being greener than it’s ever been in our lifetimes makes you clutch your pearls in horror, you just may be a Climate Cultist.
Wait, hold on, I hear you say — climate change activists are environmentalists, surely they’d welcome a greener world. Oh, you poor, darling innocent.
Environmentalism is a very distance last on the list of concerns of your average climate change activist. Somewhere between wealth redistribution, and “Is this real wagyu they’re serving in Business Class?” Moreover, these cultist ninnies are so absolutely addicted to millenarian gloom that everything is a bad news story for them.
This, after all, is the Climate Cult’s litany:
Earth, our planet, is not doing great. Tropical forests are getting cut down. Parking lots are replacing bird-filled grasslands. Climate change is fueling forest-razing wildfires. On the whole, natural, plant-filled habitats, seem to be disappearing.
Yet, for once, even a Climate Cultist grudgingly admits facts:
The Earth is growing greener. Not green in the metaphorical “sustainable” sense, but in the literal color green.
In the last four decades, the extent of green vegetation — i.e., the amount of leaves in a given area — has substantially increased across the planet, according to a number of recent scientific studies based on satellite data. There’s actually more green space today, not less. And this “global greening” phenomenon is not just occurring on land. Large parts of the oceans are getting greener, too, research shows. Our blue planet, it seems, is increasingly a green planet.
Understanding Earth’s color is key to understanding Earth and our future on it. “Greenness” often corresponds to the planet’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas that drives climate change. The more leaves, the more photosynthesis, a chemical reaction that gobbles up CO2. That’s the good news in global greening: It’s helping offset some of the impacts of climate change.
Even better, the greening is so huge that it’s equivalent to the entire Amazon rainforest growing a new canopy of leaves. And the greening is accelerating.
So, is it time to turn Greta’s scowl upside-down? Nope — it’s time to spin what should be unalloyed good news into yet another green Jeremiad.
And, you guessed it, it’s their favourite bogeyman, carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide is not only a pollutant but a fertilizer — a key ingredient in photosynthesis that helps plants grow. Some farmers inject CO2 into their greenhouses to accelerate plant growth. But now we’re fertilizing plants on a global scale: In the last two centuries, NASA reports, humans have increased the CO2 content in the air by roughly 50 percent. All that extra CO2 is accelerating leaf growth, and satellites can see it.
Humans are also just growing more plants. The 2019 Nature Sustainability study found that the dominant driver of recent global greening is a combination of more farming and, to a lesser extent, more tree planting. People are growing more crops on the same amount of land and turning barren patches of soil into verdant farms.
These trends are especially prominent in China and India. Together, these two countries account for roughly one-third of all greening, the study found.
Vox
Yes: these mardy-arsed nitwits actually think that’s a bad thing.
Face it, they won’t be happy until all this glorious new green growth is paved under continent-sized fields of solar panels and wind turbines.
