By P Gosselin on 24. February 2021
Looking at NASA’s Vegetation Index data, the news is good: the globe has greened 10% so far this century.
That’s good news because we know this ultimately means greater crop production area and forest expansion. Ironically, what many “experts claim to be a huge problem (CO2) is in fact one of the major reasons behind the greening.
Zoe Phin has a post on this topic at her site which really warrants attention.
Global Vegetation Index surges 10% in 20 years
Zoe downloaded all of NASA’s available 16-day-increment vegetation data from 2000 to 2021. Here’s her result:
NASA’s Vegetation Index has risen from 0.0936 to 0.1029, which is a 9.94% increase. Chart by Zoe Phin
“10% global greening in 20 years! We are incredibly fortunate!” Zoe comments on the results. “I just wish everyone felt that way. But you know not everyone does. To the extent that humans enhance global greening is precisely what social parasites want to tax and regulate. No good deed goes unpunished.”
Been greening 30 years!
This is not unexpected news to cool-headed climate realists. In August, 2019, we reported on a German study showing how the globe had been greening for 3 decades. Based on satellite imagery, German Wissenschaft reported, “Vegetation on earth has been expanding for decades, satellite data show.”
Sahara shrinking, becoming greener
Also not long ago a study by Venter et al (2018) found the Sahara desert had shrunk by 8% over the previous three decades. This is profound because the Sahara covers a vast area of some 9.2 million square kilometers. Eight percent means more than 700,000 square kilometers more area that’s become green – an area almost as big as Germany and France combined.
So in terms of vegetation, the planet probably hasn’t had it this nice in about 1000 years.
70% driven by CO2
And there’s more good news if you think CO2 is a problem as a greenhouse gas (it isn’t).
Last August, NTZ weekly contributor Kenneth Richard cited a study by Haverd et al, 2020), and wrote that “about 70% of the Earth’s post-1980s vegetative greening trend has been driven by CO2 fertilization” and that this greening will offset 17 years (equivalent) of the Earth’s anthropogenic CO2 emissions by 2100.
There are many more studies underpinning the good news of the greening planet – thanks in large part to mankind. It’s not as bad as the crybaby activists and media depict it to be. Not even close.
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How much was due to climate and how much was due to terrorist affiliates claiming the region?
Yes, but food produced under increased atmospheric CO2 is less nutritious.
Here’s a link:
https://climate.ai/podcast/dr-lewis-ziska-rising-co2-levels-makes-our-food-less-nutritious/
They are real scientists with real PhDs, they wouldn’t lie. They leave no stone un-turned, and their studies have the Good Housekeeping seal of approval and are advertised in “LIFE” magazine. Dr. Michael Mann even has them on his rolodex.
Yes, but food produced under increased atmospheric CO2 is less nutritious.
Ecofascist hogwash and infantile nonsense. Go to the website CO2 science and there are collected scores of paper that show that nutrient responses in plants to elevated CO2 are varied but positive as often as negative.
Not this nonsense again.
As to your claim that real scientists wouldn’t lie. Just check up on the reproducibility crisis.
Any way, a plant grows 20% bigger, but at the same time has 1% less nutrition by unit volume.
Only a problem to those who are desperate to prove that CO2 can’t possibly have any good properties.
Since most grains produce seeds, wheat/milo/corn/etc, you can’t use the entire volume of the plant to determine how nutritious it is. What does the CO2 do to the actual head of the wheat or to the amount of corn on the cob? I think you’ll find that higher CO2 produces more *harvest* weight.
I’m pretty sure you need to rein in your indignation on this obviously sarcastic comment!
Christ greenhouses with co2 enriched air must be lethal for the human race then, 600 years weve been wrongly using them for, its a wonder the human race ever got above a billion population.
Did you actually *read* this link?
“ Well Guess what it’s not, you know, it’s not the wheat, it’s the weeds.”
The guy is saying the wheat provides less food with high CO2 because weeds grow faster than the wheat!
I guess the guy never heard of using a broadleaf herbicide on you crops!
“…a study by Venter et. al. (2018) found the Sahara desert had shrunk by 8% over the previous 3 decades.”
Tomorrows headline: “World shortage of sand looms due to Global Warming!”
Here’s what is being hidden and denied
Some more papers on global greening and a re-greening Sahara. Look out for the African monsoon starting up again.
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/co2-fertilisation-and-the-greening-of-the-sahara/
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/10/24/world-wheat-crop-heads-for-new-record/
CO2 increase is so devastating that we’ve just had a record (large) global wheat harvest. That’s gotta be bad, right?
There is a flaw in the estimate. The satellites track only terrestrial greening. There is also provable greening in the oceans by significantly more as a percent based on North Atlantic trawls.And this ocean greening is more of a permanent carbon sink thanks to things like greening coccolithophores.
Rud
Coccolithophores are suffering in these low-CO2 conditions. Their peak abundance and diversity were in the late Cretaceous with 1000 ppm CO2.
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/09/11/coccolithophores-calcified-plankton-who-like-it-hot-and-hate-our-ice-age-cold/
Hence, the Cretaceous Period, thanks to the chalk deposited.
Yes you would think that huge and very conspicuous white cliffs at Dover, a nation-defining symbol even, would be a clue that CO2 at 1000 ppm is about optimal for planet earth. But no. Politics wins out over intelligence and common sense which are now right-wing attributes and censored across the internet.
The Sahel is Greening
https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/48621298/Greening_the_Sahel_mueller-sahel.pdf?1473189950
If not for stupid bio-fuels, we would have reached peak farmland..
I don’t think the term “crybaby” is particularly appropriate. I prefer Monckton’s bedwetter metaphor.
Apparently, Zoe’s plot of NASA’s vegetation index (VI) unduly favors the northern hemisphere.
The actual real-world net primary productivity (NPP), which was determined for 1987-2015 by the International Global Biosphere Programme, indicates higher year-round tropical NPP and Dec-Jan southern NPP than is indicated on the NASA vegetative index plot relative to mid-year, as shown by this map of global NPP (g C m-2yr-1):
Gross primary productivity (GPP) and Leaf Area Index (LAI) tell a similar story.
It seems the dense year-round tropical LAI with higher GPP/NPP should lead to a higher Dec-Jan vegetation index than just a quarter of the annual NH peaks as Zoe plotted, near zero.
Zoe figured out it’s easier to use a fraction of the globe than fraction of the land. The intensity of the index is not as important as the trend. Thank you.
…it’s easier to use a fraction of the globe than fraction of the land.
Where does your ‘fraction of the globe’ come into this?
The intensity of the index is not as important as the trend.
The trend is interesting of course to the greening storyline but incidental to the relative seasonal magnitudes (intensity) I’m asking about. This gets to Dec-Jan, where you show minima. Why is the index so low then? Do you really think the NH summer is 4X the SH summer considering the year-round tropical vegetation and Dec-Jan southern LAI/GPP/NPP is still high?
On the other hand, NASA also produced this image of LAI trending upward for 2000-2017, with new growth dominated by the NH, consistent with Zoe’s vegetative index plot upward trend.
While the % NH growth shown here is impressive, the overall tropical/southern absolute LAI/GPP/NPP is still large.
Oh no, not her. Please check all work and claims carefully !
Too late Greg, the opposite has happened; skepticism has evaporated like a morning fog in the Sahara, or Sahel as Alexander Vissers above points out. Howls of deluded joy and “what could possibly go wrong” have already rung out from monitor-lit bedrooms across the nation for the unplanned, uncontrolled injection of a teratonne of CO2.
S. Piao, et al. (2020) Characteristics, drivers and feedbacks of global greening Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 1,14–27
[Relevant] Key points
What has gone wrong, Loydo?
Can you factually point to any aspect of the climate that has deteriorated due to human CO2 emissions?
Many, but the question was: What could go wrong?
Let’s see them.
Thanks.
I am equally skeptical about human CO2 improving things through greening as I am about climatic deterioration due to human CO2. I seem to be alone with that opinion.
“…as I am about climatic deterioration due to human CO2”
It is to laugh.
Yes we know you are TOTALLY IGNORANT about basic BIOLOGY of plants Loy-dodo.
He/She/It is totally ignorant about pretty much everything.
Oh so that is why you keep making mindless innuendos about CO2 causing atmospheric warming.
I guess that you must KNOW by now that there is absolutely NO EVIDENCE of warming by atmospheric CO2.
You should also know that the increase in atmospheric CO2 has a massive effect on plant life, proven, measured in THOUSANDS of studies.
Or you could just keep living your pitiful life in abject DENIAL of the FACTS.
You *really* need to get out of the basement more. Go visit an actual greenhouse and actually talk to the manager about what they do to maximize their harvests!
What part of photosynthesis don’t you get?
More CO2, ie plant nutrient, in the air, the more sugar plants can make. Also, they need leave their stomata open for less time to get the CO2 they require, saving water. Hence, vegetation has advanced into drier regions, like the Sahel, thanks to human activities having enriching the air with more vital plant food.
This is a fact, not theoretical. Experiments show the effect on plants of having sufficient CO2. They do best at three times the current level. Experience has taught greenhouse owners to maintain air at 1000 to 1300 ppm.
That the planet has improved thanks to more CO2 is proven. The data is unequivocal.
The claims that CO2 is harming the planet remain hypothetical despite 50 years of searching for the data.
You didn’t answer the question, Loydo. The question to you was what had gone wrong.
As to “what could go wrong,” we have a very large empirical data base addressing that very question: the geological history of atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Co2 much higher than now. No evidence of CO2 as a driver of air temperature. Life throve the entire time.
That history says, no evidence of a bad outcome from human CO2 emissions.
Really? Which 200 year long, teratonne plume are you basing that on?
How about the PETM?
Just a few tens of millions of years ago, CO2 levels were between 5000 and 7000 ppm, and life thrived.
Once again, we have data, you have climate models.
Here you go, Loydo:
I’m sure your fetid, ignorant ACDS infected little mind can come up with all sorts of FANTASIES. !
None of them will have the tiniest bit of evidence to back them up
Grimm Bros fairy-tales were far better.
I am equally as skeptical of these models as I am of general circulation models.
More CO2 makes leaves bigger.
It makes those leaves bigger quicker.
It makes little trees into bigger trees quicker.
It does not make seeds germinate and flourish.
Seeds will germinate most anywhere they land. Many tiny sprouts are seen each spring even in dry areas. Most soon die due to lack of water. Only those seeds which receive adequate moisture where they happened to fall will live through the summer. Plants thrive beside rivers in the desert not because that is the only place they could germinate, but because that is where they continue to receive water throughout the summer. Increased CO2 enables sprouts to survive farther away from the river where they would have died before due to lack of summer moisture.
In the face of actual data, skepticism naturally fades.
When the climate scientists are able to come up with some actual data, they will be taken more seriously as well.
Good idea, Greg. I provide source code. No one else does. Maybe I’m wrong, but compared to what? A black box?
Please come to my blog and critique to your hearts content.
This is great news! So when can we lock up Bill Gates and all the other globohomo world order satanic fascist for their man made global warming hoax.
Zoe the code-cutting queen.
We were C++ for machine control and CAD engines.
Nice to see Zoe’s elegant data crunching forays.
There’d be the odd prof and NASA hack trembling every time she digs into their data; ha ha!
Before we injure our arm patting our self on the back, there is something else that might be considered. North Africa had a problem with over grazing that stripped the ground bare. They started erecting fences to control where the animals grazed and the difference was noticeable. Areas controlled by the fences had vegetation and outside that area, the ground was bare. We need to understand exactly where the greening is taking place to understand what has changed.
experts claim to be a huge problem (CO2) is in fact one of the major reasons behind the greening.
ive yet to see any evidence that increasing co2 caused this. the earths been green before
That CO2 causes plants to grow bigger and to grow in areas where they couldn’t survive before is a claim that is backed by thousands of studies.
That Steve refuses to believe stuff that is backed by data, yet on the other hand fervently pushes his AGW beliefs, despite a total lack of data, is just more proof that he never was serious about this science thing.
Astonishingly to me, I find myself in agreement with sm, (sometimes SM).
I haven’t seen any evidence that a gradual increase in CO2 has greened the dry regions.
I’m a little surprised that the warmers don’t claim that it’s indirectly caused by CO2 changing rainfall in the warm zones and heating the temperate, but then that would be conceding benefits from the evil gas.
On the other side, the determination to have CO2 leap over every tall building is just tedious.
Steve
ive yet to see any evidence that increasing co2 caused this. the earths been green before
Chu et al 2016 in Nature had this to say:
Here we use three long-term satellite leaf area index (LAI) records and ten global ecosystem models to investigate four key drivers of LAI trends during 1982–2009. We show a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing LAI (browning). Factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (LCC) (4%). CO2 fertilization effects explain most of the greening trends in the tropics, whereas climate change resulted in greening of the high latitudes and the Tibetan Plateau.
But I understand your reservation that models aren’t really data 😁
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004
As to the mechanism, Rebecca Thomas and colleagues (2016) explored the mechanism for CO2 greening, finding it to be attributable to increased light use efficiency by photosynthesising leaves:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016GL070710
I can imagine how this will be spun in the news headlines: Carbon emissions cause Sahara to shrink, local wildlife threatened. Species native to the Sahara will have to migrate because their natural habitat has shrunk. This is a direct result of man’s carbon emissions, experts say.
Here’s more proof that we’ve only got 12 more years (or is it 11 already?) before the extinction of humanity:
The Greening of the Sahara: Past Changes and Future Implications – ScienceDirect
In the future, the Sahara and Sahelian regions could experience more rainfall than today as a result of climate change. Wetter periods, termed African humid periods, occurred in the past and witnessed a mesic landscape in place of today’s hyper-arid and semiarid environment. Such large past changes raise the question of whether the near future might hold in store similar environmental transformations, particularly in view of the growing human-induced climate, land-use, and land-cover changes. In the last decades, geoengineering initiatives (in the form of active re-greening projects of the Sahara and Sahel) have been proposed and could have significant effects on the climate of the region. Here, we synthesize the literature on past and projected changes in the hydroclimate of the Sahelian-Saharan region and the associated feedbacks. We further address the current state of knowledge concerning Saharan and Sahelian afforestation projects and their consequences. Our review underscores the importance of vegetation in land-atmosphere-ocean feedback processes and the far-field impacts of northern African ecosystem changes.
A warmer world means a greener world…just a short 13,000 years ago, the world was locked in an ice-age that spanned the globe. It warmed up, thank goodness…and the world saw an amazing flourishing of life, not to mention the rise of human civilization as a result.
Michael Crichton:
You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There’s been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away — all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time.
It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. Might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It’s powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. You think this is the first time that’s happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine.
When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. Hundred years ago we didn’t have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We’ve been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we’re gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
A great man and greatly missed.
Such insight and wisdom would get you cancelled nowadays.
The climate news today reminds me of the cartoon in playboy magazine decades ago of Christopher Columbus coming ashore with ships in the background, sees a viking helmet in the sand and says “Quick hide it and don’t say anything”.
The media chronicling a false narrative is criminal especially during a time in the earth’s weather that is more favorable to life.
My apology to Columbus who’s achievements cannot be diminished.
Hatter Eggburn
Re.: ‘The Sahel is greening’
Your link doesn’t work properly. Maybe you need some help?
https://www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/mueller-sahel.pdf
But… did you notice that the document doesn’t contain any publication date at its beginning?
The only way to have an idea of how thoroughly old it is, is to look at the reference list.
Nothing newer than… 2009, most recent access to sources was… 2011.
Brand new info indeed!
I propose a somewhat more recent paper:
Changes in rainfall distribution promote woody foliage production in the Sahel
Brandt & al. (2019)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-019-0383-9
J.-P. D.
Bindidon
This paper by Vanessa Haverd et al 2020 is one of the most important recent ones cited by the Pierre Gosselin NTZ article above:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.14950
Of the recent papers it was the Nature article by Chu et al 2016 that really got the ball rolling:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004
A few more are summarised here:
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/co2-fertilisation-and-the-greening-of-the-sahara/
Maybe there really is a God helping out once in a while.
“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you get what you need.” Rolling Stones as quoted often by DJT
Vegtables are good for you. Except when it’s your “p”resident like china joe
Global warming sure is a b#%(* lol. Can we get it up a few more degrees it appear to be working out. Oh yeah, we’re also still coming out of an ice age.
Guess what’s the next petition, “SAVE THE SAND!” There will soon be a shortage of sand… which will … KILL EVERYONE!