By Kenneth Richard on 30. December 2024
The greening of the Earth’s vegetated areas is “attributed to CO2 fertilization, climate change, and land use changes.”
New remote sensing research (Gutiérrez-Hernández and García, 2025) uses robust statistical methods to eliminate false positives and spurious correlations in establishing vegetation trends in the satellite era.
The scientists find 38% of the Earth’s land surface has undergone statistically significant greening or browning trends over the last 42 years (1982-2023). Conventional methods (i.e., Mann-Kendall test) that had previously found 51% of the Earth’s surface experienced statistically significant vegetation trends in the satellite era may overlook crucial factors that produce less accurate, inflated results.
With this new analytical method, the True Significant Trends (TCT) test, the authors have robustly determined there has been a “striking global greening trend” attributed to CO2 fertilization and climate change.
“Applying a new proposed workflow methodology (True Significant Trends, TST) we reveal a striking global greening trend, with a significant portion of the Earth’s terrestrial land surface showing increases in vegetation cover over the past four decades, particularly in Eurasia.”
Specifically, 76.1% to 85.4% of statistically significant vegetation trends indicate greening, whereas browning trends account for 14.7 to 23.9%
“Among these significant trends identified using the TST workflow, 76.07% indicated greening, while 23.93% indicated browning. Notably, considering areas (pixels) with NDVI values above 0.15, greening accounted for 85.43% of the significant trends, with browning making up the remaining 14.57%. These findings strongly validate the ongoing global greening of vegetation.”
In other words, greening trends dominate over browning trends at a ratio of about 4:1, or 80% to 20%.
But of course there must be some dreadful thing about this greening, as all change is a Bad Thing? Anything people may be responsible for Offends Gaia!
They’re growing lots of weed in Canada now.
Weed or weeds or both, lol.
Perhaps the green being observed is some kind of algae growing on all the dead things killed by climate change?
Yeah well…umm…err…moving right along from the plant food meme what about soil degradation dooming?
Soil degradation threatens food supply and scientists are calling for action
You can’t get out of the dooming that easy lay folks.
A different topic altogether.
Since 2016 NASA and NOAA have web pages noting greening of the Earth due to Carbon dioxide.
They talk about trends in geographic areas…what we need is the change in planet Albedo, and precipitable water, that has resulted from this supposedly measured greening….which is always bereft of what physical units that were used to measure it.
The 29% of the planet that isn’t ice or water is already 85% “green”. What if increased average temperature of a degree over land increases green vegetation more than CO2 ? What if change in cloud cover has more effect than greening ? The “Greening” meme is running a very fine line close to pseudoscience and is in need of better “science”.
Agreed! See my post down thread, I posted before seeing yours.
It makes sense. As CO2 levels increase, so do the CO2 sinks. The earth is never in equilibrium but is always striving for it. It would be interesting to see some studies on phytoplankton, I imagine that they are expanding as well and in terms of CO2 removal probably more so than terrestrial greening. More importantly, phytoplankton is pretty much the base of the entire food chain.
Here’s what Copilot returns: 1www.ncei.noaa.gov2phytocat.org
Fraizer, See also:
Current CaCO3 dissolution at the seafloor caused by anthropogenic CO2
Olivier Sulpis et al
(abbreviated)
Seafloor dissolution of CaCO3 minerals will constitute primary feedback to ocean acidification over timescales of centuries to tens of millennia. The overall dissolution reaction is as follows: CaCO3 + CO2 + H 2 O → Ca 2+ + 2 HCO3−
As anthropogenic CO2 is absorbed by the ocean, it leads to a decrease in pH and carbonate ion concentration, which in turn causes increased dissolution of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) minerals at the seafloor
This dissolution acts as a feedback mechanism to ocean acidification over long timescales, helping to neutralize some of the excess CO2.
CaCO3 denotes solid carbonate in bottom sediments, mainly as calcite. CO 2 entering the ocean, including that of anthropogenic origin, can be neutralized permanently by conversion to dissolved bicarbonate ions (HCO3−)
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The upper oceans are wholly supersaturated with respect to calcite, despite the current acidification. Largely because of the increasing solubility of calcite with pressure, the deeper oceans become undersaturated, where after the rate of reaction 1 increases with oceanographic depth
Copilot
The dissolution of CaCO3 at the seafloor involves the breakdown of earlier deposited calcareous materials, which often include the shells and skeletons of marine organisms like foraminifera and coccolithophores—types of phytoplankton.
How does this dissolution not affect corals?
Some studies suggest that certain coral reefs are showing resilience and adapting to warmer ocean temperatures. For example, research from Stanford University has found evidence that some corals are able to resist bleaching by hosting heat-tolerant algae or by switching to more resilient strains1. This resilience might help some coral reefs thrive despite the challenges posed by climate change.
The phrase “ocean acidification” is pure propaganda. The oceans may become slightly less alkaline, but under no plausible scenario could they ever become acidic due to human activities.
Agree, but i quoted Sulpis, and he wanted to get published. IMHO he did a great job getting his “neutralization” Paper past the IPCC peer/pal reviewers.
If waters warm and carbon dioxide outgasses, aquatic photosynthesis may actually slow, alternatively the warmer temps and lowr carbon dioxide may balance out in rate of photosynthesis. Needs some measurement, of course.
Fraizer, here’s what Copilot/Bing/Microsoft returns
Recent research suggests that phytoplankton might actually become more efficient at taking up carbon as the ocean warms. However, this efficiency can be influenced by various factors such as nutrient availability, ocean circulation, and temperature2.
1www.ncei.noaa.gov2phytocat.org
Interesting.
But “robust statistical methods” give results reported in percentages to two decimal places?
I don’t see how.
Fortunately, someone set up their spreadsheet to only give two.
25 years ago I worked with FredPalmer’s Greening Earth Society and we predicted this greening. CO2 is the global food supply. Last thing we want to do is reduce it. Keep it coming!
This greening is not approved, and it must be stopped at all costs!
Happy New Year, even to the Green opponents of greening!
Just imagine India and China without the greening factor!
In 2007, Dan Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology
Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering
Co-Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program
argued with me that there was no benefit of increased CO2 to plant life. I was talking to a co-worker at the time about the benefits of CO2 being ignored and Schrag came up behind me trying to debunk that “lie”. Being the Highly Honored professor he seemed to be, people believed him. But I pointed out that he didn’t understand biology and that increased CO2 accelerated plant growth. Schrag was a paid consultant to the company I worked for at that time and I argued that he was incompetent at his assigned task. The Chief Technology Officer agreed with me but they kept Schrag on just for the air of respectability he gave the company.
We were working on a project to convert our abundant coal supply to hydrocarbon fuels via gasification and Fischer-Tropsch synthesis coupled with CCS to lower the CO2 footprint of the project. The CO2 would have been used to produce more crude via EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) making it a win-win for fuel production. But all the NGOs came out against using coal for anything which killed the project and nearly bankrupted Peabody Coal.
The company morphed into a biomass gasification to fuels project, but it was too early for that to work. Nowadays, this is a viable approach to using forest and agricultural waste instead of letting it rot in place.
I knew a Dr. Bob, back in the mid 80’s, where we both worked at the Great Plains Coal Gasification Project converting lignite into pipeline quality natural gas using Lurgi instead of Fisher-Tropsch. Is that you? Later, Great Plains, now Dakota Gas, also collected CO2 for EOR. Recently the CO2 stream was converted to local formation storage because it was more profitable to “dispose” under the federal program than to sell for EOR.
Anyone have a reference, outside of this paper, that details True Significant Trends, TST methodology?
My one minute search didn’t turn up anything specific.
The authors appear to have created the True Significant Trends methodology so it is unlikely there are other references. The best place to look is in the supplementary material at
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2352938524002416-mmc1.pdf
I also went looking and found nothing.
At end of day, they claim to have developed a more accurate way of deciding if pixels should be green, white or brown. From the paper:
we found that conventional workflow identified up to 50.96% of the Earth’s terrestrial land surface as experiencing statistically significant vegetation trends. In contrast, the TST workflow reduced this to 38.16%,
So, they actually begin by reducing the amount of earth surface that is changing at all. They the then show that within this reduced area, there is more greening that browning. They then say this could be attributed to CO2, climate change, or changes in land use. Let’s break that down.
It would have been nice to have a couple of overlays to refer to. Precipitation change over the same period for one, day temps over freezing per year (growing days) for the other. Jumping to CO2 as the driving factor might be premature.
But what was most curious about this paper is that the two largest “blobs” of greening are over Europe and what looks to me like mostly China. The rest is pretty spread out with the loan large brown spot in eastern Australia.
All in all an actually very interesting paper!
We Are in a CO2 Famine
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/we-are-in-a-co2-famine
By Willem Post
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Atmospheric CO2 ppm, human plus natural, it is near the lowest level in 600 million years.
Highly subsidized CO2 sequestering schemes and Net Zero by 2050 schemes are super-expensive, ineffective suicide programs.
Crops in open fields, with CO2 at 420 ppm, require fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and much machinery to have high yields/acre.
Crops in greenhouses, with CO2 at 1200 ppm, require minimal chemicals, have 2 to 3 times higher yields/acre
https://www.masterresource.org/carbon-dioxide/increased-plant-productivity-the-first-key-benefit-of-atmospheric-co2-enrichment/
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Plants are on a starvation diet with CO2 at 420 ppm
The image shows plant growth at 420 ppm; at 420 +150; at 420 +300; at 420+450
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Many plants have become weak or extinct, along with the fauna they support, due to CO2 at 420 ppm, or less.
As a result, many areas of the world lost resilience, became arid and deserts.
Current CO2 ppm needs to at least double or triple. Unfortunately, not enough fossil fuel is left over to make that CO2 increase happen.
Earth temperature increased about 1.2 C since 1900, due to many causes, such as long-term cycles, fossil CO2, and permafrost methane which converts to CO2.
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CO2 ppm increase from 1979 to 2023 was 421/336 = 1.25, greening increase about 12%, per NASA.
CO2 ppm increase from 1900 to 2023 was 421/296 = 1.42, greening increase about 19%
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Increased greening: 1) Produces oxygen by photosynthesis; 2) Increases world flora and fauna; 3) Increases crop yields per acre; 4) Reduces world desert areas
Our CO2 emissions are the free fertilization equity plan for any country looking for compensation.