From DOE/OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., June 29, 2016 — A multinational team led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory Climate Change Science Institute has found the first positive correlation between human activity and enhanced vegetation growth.
The research team, led by Jiafu Mao of the Ecosystem Simulation Science group in the Environmental Sciences Division, used new environmental data and strict statistical methods to discover a significant human-vegetation interaction in the northern extratropical latitudes, the section of the planet spanning 30 to 75 degrees north, roughly between the Tropic of Cancer and the North Frigid Zone above the Arctic Circle.
“This is the first clear evidence of a discernible human fingerprint on physiological vegetation changes at the continental scale,” Mao said.
With the absence of long-term observational records and suitable Earth system model (ESM) simulations, the human “touch” on northern latitude greening had not been previously identified. The team used two recently available 30-year-long leaf area index data sets, 19 ESM simulations and a formal “detection and attribution” statistical algorithm to positively attribute changes in vegetation activity in the extratropical Northern Hemisphere to anthropogenic forcings, or human-induced climate inputs such as well-mixed greenhouse gas emissions.
Leaf area index — the ratio of leaf surface area to ground area — is an indicator of vegetation growth and productivity derived from satellite imaging. The remote-sensing-based LAI datasets and ESM simulations showed a significant “greening” trend over the northern extratropical latitudes vegetated area between 1982 and 2011, indicating increased vegetative productivity.
When Mao and his colleagues accounted for internal climate variability and responses to natural forcings such as volcanic eruptions and incoming solar radiation, it was clear that the greening was inconsistent with simulations of purely natural factors and could only be explained by anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcings, particularly elevated carbon dioxide concentrations.
This anthropogenic greening effect has the potential to alter natural processes on a planetary scale. Continent-wide changes in vegetative productivity, such as those in the study, impact energy exchanges, water use and carbon budgets, accelerating or slowing the pace of climate change.
Accurate detection and attribution of changes in vegetation growth patterns are essential for strategic decision-making in ecosystem management, agricultural applications and sustainable development and conservation. This is the first time the detection and attribution algorithm has been applied to terrestrial ecosystem changes such as leaf area index trends, as it is typically used to study physical climate data such as extreme events and variations in temperature or precipitation.
Mao would like to see these long-term regional- and global-scale observational data sets used in similar studies as they become available. He says the detection and attribution algorithm could be applied to study broad-scale terrestrial ecosystem dynamics, and the framework developed for this study could be used to identify and correct potential errors in next-generation ESM simulations.
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The study and its results are reported in the article “Human-induced greening of the northern extratropical land surface” in Nature Climate Change. Other ORNL participants and coauthors were Xiaoying Shi, Peter Thornton, Dan Ricciuto and Forrest Hoffman.
“…found the first positive correlation between human activity and enhanced vegetation growth…”
What about the NVDVI maps that NASA have been displaying for years? What about the recent paper regarding a similar study using the leaf index?
The benefits of CO2 have been there for all to see. But they did not want to see benefits.
At around 150 ppm plants cease to grow because the partial pressure is too low and because evapo-transpiration is too high. The optimum is at least double the present level of 400 ppm.
What is not yet known is how much of the global effect results from limits on photosynthesis and how much from the impact on evapo-transpiration.
It is known that C3 and C4 plants respond differently to elevated CO2. So the evolution ot the C4 photosynthetic pathway is probably a response to falling CO2 levels on geological time scales.
Plant physiologists have been curiously quiet about how these questions relate to cost-benefit studies. Not absolutely silent, as some skeptics have noted spin doctors active upon that field too. But that would be another blog.
The world is greening. Things are improving. Here’s a link to a story that presents ten charts that show how the world is getting better. Here’s the list:
We could be heading for an Earthly paradise … as long as the eco-loons don’t derail the process.
Item #3 is in regard to USA. When I have to hire farm laborers in poor countries the men almost always show up without having eaten, the local wage is never so high in relation to cost of food as in the USA. I usually provide something to eat after the 1st hour or so to tide workers over until mid-day meal. For that matter, at hiring the men always prefer that meal to be explicitly
included as part of the agreed deal. If I “pay” too much above prevailing wage then that causes problems in the social realm & my being a foreigner becomes more of an issue than what I hoped to be achieving.
I can see the possible effects of rising Co2 in my own area. Plant growth in our yard seems to be quite a bit higher compared to many years past and the area cottonwoods may see their cotton fly into July for the first time I can remember (and Spring came early this year).
Of course, that is on top of our Mulberry trees producing longer than usual with more berries (to the point where it overlapped into black walnut season). A lot of trees in the area also have larger than usual leaves in many spots (this has been happening in cases for a while now, but the increase in size seems to be coming earlier and earlier in the year).
I also wonder about the possible effects of adding fertilizer to the Co2 enrichment because a friend of ours is seeing her hostas grow out of control (in that they’re just massive). Ours are not as big, but we don’t fertilize them that much either. Our clemetis also doesn’t seem to be going dormant so much in the Summer either (like it used to).
In conclusion though, I don’t see how gardeners are going to suffer because their plants keep getting bigger (the big garden companies will just create smaller varieties). It’s actually nice to see things becoming bigger and greener regardless of temperature.
This is a Trojan Horse report. They slip in the “fact” that they can distinguish the effect of human produced CO2 inside a report that has a conclusion that will gather the acceptance of skeptics. If this “fact” goes unchallenged it will be used over and over as if it were indeed proven to be so.
+1.. I have a lot of problems with the co2 story. This is a feel good story and we ( the skeptics) are buying into it. It’s a smoke screen for something else. It has the CAGW qualities of a set up. I’m not buying a cook book here. I think you’re right Tom.
Perhaps but then there is the ever present concern by any government funded research group as to who will butter their bread tomorrow. Mentioning the human fingerprint nonsense is a “foot in the door” for future funding.
Oh, come on! About ten years ago, UK gardeners had noticed that, while the temperature was the same as it was 40 years before, the Spring flowers were blooming two weeks earlier. It was the higher CO2 which made plants more able to grow at cooler temperatures and thus they can bloom earlier in the Spring, in effect extending the growing season. This is not news, guys. It is completely logical and expected.
It probably will take a miracle before somebody actually states that warming, which simply means longer summers and less chilly winters, and CO2 enrichment BOTH extend the growing season. The dishonest agitprop that says that warming will hurt crops is so wrong. They want the public to have no idea what real world climate and growing seasons are about.
Has anybody considered the effect increased CO2 will have on growth rate of kudzu? The damned stuff pretty much takes over as it is; it doesn’t need any more help. Maybe more CO2 plus more warming will result in winter-hardy kudzu. Then human civilization is doomed; the only survivors will be goats.
Cute llamas will also survive; how can that be bad? 🙂
Similar to many other plants, kudzu grows like crazy where you don’t want it and can be hard to grow where you do want it. The solution is obvious. Promote kudzu’s use as a hangover remedy and people will try to grow it. Once it becomes desirable, it will die out everywhere. This is similar to the way we can cause rain by washing our cars.
Why only goats? http://www.thekitchn.com/did-you-know-you-can-eat-kudzu-92488
Models again?
Maybe OT, but I must get my friend the Pawnbroker to paint his balls like that instead of the traditional gold colour.
And yes, I did mean to say exactly that.
Reblogged this on Climate Collections and commented:
Yes, Greening. Ergo, good news.
Tying it to Anthropogenic causes, weak.
Top commenter:
Janice Moore June 29, 2016 at 1:16 pm
… correlation between human activity and enhanced vegetation growth.
So, no causation.
This article touts a grossly misleading half-truth: the well-known CO2 = greening link is the truth; that human CO2 emissions are the cause is the l1e (I say “l1e” because they KNOW that they do not know to be true what they are asserting as fact).
btw: How is this bogus study “Good news?” It is not good news or bad news. It is just junk.
Well! Thank you, very much, Hifast! Cool! 🙂
[…] has found the first positive correlation between human activity and enhanced vegetation growth.
Absolute nonsense. Are you really suggesting that providing more food for plants will actually make them grow more? Science, at least 97% of it, has long ago proven that CO2 is a major pollutant.
That study didn’t find anything except that their model of natural change is still short a few bricks.
Heh. Yup!
After witnessing years of statistical malpractice by environmentalists and climate ‘scientists’, I see little reason to trust ‘a formal “detection and attribution” statistical algorithm’ without further details.
Amen.
But all these extra plants are bad, not good.
For one, they’ve got no protein in them.
Not even the green photosynthetic enzyme rubisco, so they don’t even photosynthesize, oil-industry funded den1ers just run around spray-painting them green.
Plus they’re den1er plants with incorrect political views.
So no – this is not good news for our planet at all.
Of course, the obvious spin will be that, since the ‘greening’ has a human finger print, than THAT is the new threat that will destroy the planet and kill us all.
The world will be overrun with herbivores! Flee, fly to the remaining arid deserts while you can!
In 100 years, we should be back to the CO2 levels of the dinosaurs. You know what that means!
It is distressing to see so many negative comments about this paper, and its lead author. The fact is that this paper is one of a large number that support the best argument against the climate alarmists; namely, that in fact more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is good, not bad. See http://co2science.org/ for many more research papers that show the same results.
Higher levels of CO2 greatly improve plant growth, and substantially reduce the need for water for irrigation of food crops. There is no dispute that human activities have resulted in increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the air. It is in dispute whether this is good or bad. Papers like this one support the position that this is good, and go directly against the position of the climate action activists.
We should be pleased to see papers like this that argue so strongly against the idea that we need to cut CO2 emissions, and especially to see them in major journals like this one. This paper is not an outlier: the science is supported by hundreds of others, and by basic concepts in plant science, such as how plants absorb CO2 and lose water, as well by as the fact that the plants evolved under conditions of much higher CO2 concentrations.
I hope that the next time a paper like this is highlighted on WUWT the comments will be more positive and informed about the science.
There are two separate issues. Skeptics have been arguing for years that co2 is beneficial to plant growth. That is not what we are finding fault with. CAGW has been good at combining 2 issues so that it is difficult to refute one but not the other. For example, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was warm at least in the US. Basically the way GW was presented, you couldn’t say it was warming without saying in a 50 page thesis as to why it wasn’t co2 causing it. Warming yes, co2 causing it no.
The second issue here is ” human fingerprint ” . The way this is worded is to get skeptics to agree that humans are the major source of additional co2. I’m not agreeing to that. And that is the cause of negative comments about this paper. In 20 years I’ve gone from thinking that they don’t know all the sources of co2, to thinking that maybe CAGW is right about the ratio of isotopes ( and the argument I presented early on that ( again a detailed explaination) that radioactive materials reside in the earth, skewing the line of thought that since it’s buried it’s not subject to solar and cosmic radation)…. back to they really don’t know. And the reason they don’t know is because of the ratio of the sinks to anthropogenic co2, and that from the 1850s, there are no negative numbers in the co2 added per year.
CAGW has been trying through different papers to use that line of thought of ” human fingerprints “. As to say… we’ll over here you agreed, when it was helpful to the skeptic side of the argument, that co2 has a human fingerprint, but when it’s negative you dont…. that’s the problem. With regards to this paper, the only thing I’m agreeing with is that the increased co2 has been beneficial to plant life.
CAGW uses a lot of speculation in their statements. None of which has stood.
Everything CAGW has done has been to try to prove how bad co2 is. I have documentation from PEI where research was granted to try to prove that co2 caused plants to uptake an increase in heavy metals. (It didnt). Not one word of increased plant growth or hardiness. Nearly all of the research has been slanted that way. Very biased research. I’m not jumping up and down over a report that skeptics have been claiming for the last 20 years. In fact some of the warmist have claimed just the opposite. It’s all in the archives on watts up.
rishrac, Thank you for your thoughtful comment.
In fact there are hundreds (indeed, probably thousands) of research papers in reputable journals that demonstrate that higher CO2 improves plant growth and greatly improves plant hardiness against drought. See http://co2science.org/ for links to many of these papers. I don’t see any reason to criticize a paper in a major journal that says this is true, based on new information and modeling. The authors of this paper and the one that preceded it in Nature Climate Change are not warmists. They should be thanked for being willing to do research and publish papers that argue strongly against the warmist argument that increased CO2 concentration is uniformly bad.
There is no question that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere worldwide is higher today than it was 100 years ago. And there is no question that there is far more combustion of carbon-containing fuels, mostly fossil fuels, today than there was 100 years ago. So, what is the cause of the increased concentration of CO2? Does the increased burning of fossil fuels not contribute in any way to the increased CO2 concentration? To claim this requires finding an alternative source of all of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere. This source would have had to come into being within the past century, and would have to be easy to identify, given the large magnitude of its contribution. I’m not aware of any such source. Are you?
We need to recognize that there are many scientists who are doing objective research in the climate field, and getting it published, and not automatically criticize them for saying that humans are producing some of the added CO2 in the atmosphere. Another very important group of scientists are studying the impact of a warmer climate on health. There are many research papers that demonstrate that more deaths occur in cool or cold weather than in warm or hot weather, and that warmer weather will reduce the number of deaths. Again, this is an area that we should applaud.
To answer your question about other sources of co2. The amount we emit in comparison on a planetary scale is amazingly small. To show, even in the smallest amounts of increase from 1850 to 1900 is not logical without some other source. We produce in 1 year what it took 30. The earth and it’s systems are finite. There is no way of producing a balanced co2 system or knowing what it is.
Pattern recognitions and number sequence does not come easily to most. I didn’t start out looking at co2 levels per year. I was looking at temperature increase associated with co2. The dimensional array of the pattern of co2 is what caused me to start looking at the function of the logarithmic rise. There are some major problems with the co2 record to attribute it all to anthropogenic co2.
NOAA currently had 19 bmt (billion metric tons) being sunk of the 38 bmt produced. When you do the math with how much ends up in the atmosphere, there is a lot of missing carbon that is unaccounted for. Every year from 1998 1.5 ppm/v, and some years over 2.. missing. That is a very large amount of the co2 produced. To put that in prespective, at least 6 bmt net (minus the sinking) went missing in 2006.
What has alarmed me about studying the co2 story are 2 things. The first is how large, or potentially large the co2 sink is. And the second, is that in view of sink, how close we may have been in going under. In my mind there is no question that if the sinks are variable, then so too are the sources. I don’t know which is a function of the other, whether they are mutually interdependent or independent of each other.
It has occured to me that the record could be in error.