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Global greening is not a new discovery. NASA satellite observations reported 10 years ago that up to half of Earth’s vegetated lands had experienced significant greening over the preceding 35 years, with rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) identified as a major contributor.
In 2016, NASA reported that the increase in leaf area amounted to the equivalent of adding roughly two continental United States’ worth of greenery to the planet.
A decade later, the evidence continues. A 2026 paper in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, “Vegetation greenness in 2025,” reports record global vegetation greenness, including particularly strong results in croplands. The study reports that 77.6 percent of cropland area experienced a positive greenness anomaly in 2025.
For a world continually told that it is teetering on the edge of ecological catastrophe, a record-green planet seems like something worth mentioning. Plants, apparently, missed the memo that carbon dioxide is supposed to be an environmental villain.
The biology here is elementary. CO₂ is an essential raw material of photosynthesis. Plants combine carbon dioxide, water, and energy from sunlight to manufacture the compounds they need to grow. Increase atmospheric CO₂ and, when other requirements such as water and nutrients are available, many plants respond with increased growth and improved water-use efficiency.
More importantly, this isn’t merely a greenhouse experiment. Satellites have measured the effect on a planetary scale.
Other recent research attributed about 70 percent of observed global greening to CO₂ fertilization. Nitrogen deposition was attributed to another 9 percent.
Additional observations reinforce the point. Consider that a 14 percent increase in atmospheric CO₂ from 1982 to 2010 was associated with a 5 percent to 10 percent increase in green foliage cover in warm desert areas.
There is an important distinction here. Evidence that additional CO₂ benefits vegetation does not demonstrate that CO₂ has no effect on climate. Likewise, global greening does not mean every plant, crop, or ecosystem benefits equally. Rainfall, temperature, nutrients, land management, and numerous other factors matter.
But sound science and sound public policy require examining both sides of the ledger. That is where today’s climate debate so often goes off the rails.
Climate alarmists and green-energy campaigners routinely discuss atmospheric CO₂ almost exclusively in negative terms. We are told about emissions, warming, tipping points, catastrophes, and the supposedly urgent need to eliminate fossil fuels. Governments spend enormous sums subsidizing wind turbines, solar installations, batteries, and electric vehicles while imposing increasingly costly restrictions on conventional energy.
The benefits associated with increased atmospheric CO₂ rarely receive comparable billing. That omission becomes increasingly difficult to justify when the benefits are visible from orbit.
There is another irony. Modern agriculture, the system feeding more than eight billion people, depends heavily upon fossil fuels. Natural gas is the principal feedstock for ammonia fertilizer. Petroleum fuels tractors, harvesters, and transportation networks. Reliable energy powers irrigation, refrigeration, processing, and distribution.
Meanwhile, the carbon dioxide we have been instructed to regard as a planetary menace is contributing to increased plant growth.
One can debate the magnitude of that benefit. One can debate future warming, climate sensitivity, energy policy and the costs and benefits of different technologies. Those are legitimate arguments. Pretending that the benefit doesn’t exist isn’t.
For more than three decades, climate politics has been driven by increasingly dire predictions. We have endured an apparently inexhaustible procession of deadlines, tipping points, and declarations that only a handful of years remain to prevent disaster.
Yet here we are, looking down from satellites at a planet that has become greener. This should prompt some humility about the way climate information is presented to the public.
Before governments rapidly dismantle the energy infrastructure upon which modern civilization still overwhelmingly depends, policymakers ought to understand the full consequences, including benefits that rarely make it into political speeches.
The Earth is greener than it was several decades ago. Increased atmospheric CO₂ is a significant reason why. We’ve known the broad outlines of this for more than a decade, and the satellite evidence keeps accumulating.
Perhaps it’s time to notice the good news instead of endlessly preaching planetary doom. And if the public has grown tired of being lectured about the apocalypse, climate campaigners might consider another possibility before blaming “misinformation.”
After 30-plus years of climate doom-mongering, CNN recently reported a poll that suggests people may simply have stopped listening. There’s a lesson there too.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.
Gaia’s response to the Green Blob!? Now if the Korporate Klimate Komplex and the Lame Stream Media would just notice the wall they are close to running into!
Lemmings, when crossing the precipice, encounter a tipping point.
Seems a better analogy than a wall.
People like warmer weather, and plants like extra CO2.
Longer growing seasons, more rain and more arable are also desirable.
Food Production = permanent increase.
Greening = permanent increase.
Seems the climate emergency chaos crisis only happens above the Oceans
or
Nature has become the biggest climate denier of all.
For all practical purposes the efforts to fight CAGW have been a waste. Just think what we could have improved if all those trillions of dollars had been spent elsewhere? Proper water treatment and conservation, proper waste management, improved energy production and transmission, more efficient ICE vehicles, better roads, more efficient refining, more efficient farming and ranching, better food processing and on and on. Not to mention the damage done indoctrinating our students for the last few decades. One would think we are smarter than this.
We are smarter than this.
That’s why the deliberate dumbing down and scaremongering is being used on us.
We all deserve reparations payments paid in vegetables from the climate scammers and their advertising consultants and contractors.
Start the list of nonprofit headquarters and seaside mansions to throw tomatoes and eggs at.
What a glorious day today in the Hunter, as we start to head into Spring.
22ºC, slight breeze, shrubs all starting to flower…. blue skies after a rainy Friday.
Only trouble is, you can almost see the grass growing …
Which means someone has to do the mowing soon !!
Banksia?
Nope, That is a Grevillea !
They come in all sorts of colours and sizes.. from creepers to the might “Silky Oak” (Grevillea Robusta), which isn’t actually an oak as the English and Americans think of an oak.
ps.. if you do an image search on “Grevillea” you will see what I mean.. I have about a dozen different varieties growing..
Other main bush I have is the Callistemon or Bottle Brush.. Some of those are real show-offs !!
This one taken last year..
Ta.
A friend tells me that yellow tailed black cockatoos raid her bottle brush.
Yours too?
I mainly have rainbow lorikeets (by the dozens), olive honeyeaters, cockatoos, galahs, king parrots, minars…
Plus some butcher birds and kookaburras that like a bit of mince meat.
Yellow-tailed black cockatoos only visit occasionally.
Knew I had a pic I took somewhere.
Here is a black cockatoo sitting on a Banksia Robur in my back yard.
They have a distinctive cry, don’t they?
And their flying style is unlike white cockies?
yep, quite different…. lovely birds… beautiful plumage 🙂
Around here they usually group in 2s and 3, unlike those white cockatoos… which often occur in “gangs”… almost literally 😉
Looks more like a grevillea but I’m no expert.t
My wife and I are keen on ornamental horticulture. About 1984 we decided to specialise in the genus Camellia, made several private trips to west China to swap knowledge and to legally collect and import rare species to Australia, such as the yellow flowering C. tunghinensis. We have grown about 30 camellia plants under much the same conditions for the past 20 years and we are fairly certain that they now grow faster than 20 years ago. The leaves and flowers seem to be larger and the leaves deeper green even though fertilizer use has not really changed.
Of course, this is not solid scientific evidence backed by careful measurements but this visual effect could be real. Geoff S
Apart from 5 citrus trees, which don’t seem to like the
soil, I mean “dirt”, very much…….. all my garden is Australian native flowers 🙂
A little deeper biological explantation of the underlying greening mechanism.
About 4/5 of all plant species (and ~95% of plant biomass) use C3 photosynthesis. (Most of the rest are dryland ‘grasses’ that evolved a more efficient C4 photosynthesis only in the last about 30 million years as CO2 levels dropped significantly during the Oligocene. Interestingly, C4 separately evolved about 60 times in 19 different grass-like plant families. Of all food crops, only corn, sugarcane, and millet are C4. Everything else—rice, wheat, soy, all fruits and vegetables—are C3. All trees and shrubs are C3.)
To harvest a given amount of CO2 for photosynthesis, C3 plants must keep their leaf stomata open longer at lower CO2 ppm. That means they will lose more water to evapotranspiration. The greening is because their stomata need to be open less, resulting in greater water efficiency. The greening effect is most pronounced in dryish C3 shrublands like the sub Saharan Sahel in Africa, and least pronounced in regions with ample year round water. All visible to the NASA satellites.
Interesting. I read this after I had commented above
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/08/21/climate-news-worth-celebrating-the-earth-is-getting-greener/#comment-4232547
I’d be interested if you could give an opinion non the possible future consequences of continuing CO2 emissions.
I’m not Rud but will butt in anyway. The possible future consequences of continuing CO2 emissions are net positive.
Massively net positive. !!
The Church of Climastrology has always been a rather blatant attempt to subvert the last vestiges of free markets in favor of the world wide Marxist “economy” our benevolent lords and masters are so enamored with! Only the ignorant, the gullible, or the insane could stay in the cult, as even a modicum of research will prove that today’s climate is in fact colder than most of geologic history, and that modern warming is just cyclical variation coming out of the Little Ice Age due solar variation and major ocean current heat transfer, Equator to poles.
Trillions have been wasted, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives have been lost due to climate POLICY, not climate change! At some point a reckoning is due; those that destroy the environment and impoverish their neighbors for personal profit need to be held accountable! I pray that I live long enough to witness and/or help with the process!
As Wyatt says in ‘Tombstone,’ “You tell’ ‘em I’m coming! And Hell’s coming with me!”
Whose job was it to go to Hell and tell him he was needed for the show down? 🙂
I looked it up. Ike Clanton. Was just after the OK Corral showdown where his brother was killed, just like in the movie.
I believe having one brother assassinated in front of you while playing pool together, and one brother crippled in another attempt, would leave one in as close a proximity to Hell as I can imagine! He must have felt a bit of what I feel whenever I consider WGTs and my beloved Golden Eagles, and then some!
Your comment quite well made me think of Jesus Christ – whose pleasing “job” for the Father (and our salvation if we accept Him) was to go to hell for “the showdown”.
Stand by for studies that show “excessive vegetation” and shrinking deserts are endangering wildlife and will eventually kill us all.
“excessive vegetation”
Wow. May I use that? Another one of the catastrophic consequences of climate change.
There have been save the desert protests.
The Earth is getting greener. And the Net Zero greenies know it, at least the greenies that matter. So why are they not celebrating that fact? Because they don’t like it at all.
You see, at a concentration of 430 ppm Carbon dioxide produces bumper crops that can easily support a population of 10 billion or over. At the pre-industrial level of 300 ppm even with modern agricultural technology 2 billion would be pushing it. Therefore a greening Earth is bad news because that 5 times bigger population consumes ‘other resources’ which would become ‘scarce’ and therefore bad news for the Eloi. “Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi”.
Net Zero has nothing to do with climate or even Mother Earth, but everything with reducing the population back to 1900 levels. It’s the Club of Rome fascism in disguise.
Not quite.
In 1850 fossil fuel use was minimal, CO2 ppm was 280, crops had been failing for hundreds of years, emigration was high, because of cold and low CO2, then the cold phase, called Little Ice Age, started to end in 1700, and fossil fuel use increased, and crops became larger, CO2 ppm increased to 425, more people were born and stayed alive longer, and all of a sudden there were 8 billion of us, who also stay alive longer, many of them encouraged by their governments to illegally cross borders to cash in on all the pacifying freebies, but still cause criminal mayhem, violence and murdering to vent their frustrations.
“In 1850 fossil fuel use was minimal, CO2 ppm was 280ppm”
This is what make longer term tree ring studies so totally useless.
Before about 1900, trees were in CO2 “subsistence” mode, so even if it was warmer, it probably wouldn’t be reflected in the tree ring, making all those averaged tree ring fabrications by Mann, Moberg etc even more irrelevant and nonsensical, even if they hadn’t butchered the statistics (either deliberately or through ignorqance)
We have all seen the stunted growth of those pines in the CO2 study by Mr Idso (iircc)
Trees are more of a CO2-ometer than a thermometer.
There were legitimate scientific CO2 measurements made in the first half of the 19th century that revealed CO2 levels comparable to today.
Whatever warming has occurred due to man’s CO2 has been both slight as well as beneficial. Future historians will wonder at the sheer stupidity of attacking CO2, the gas of life.
Many REAL historians, geologists, and scientists are wondering already; the politicized ones, not so much!
I have experienced life with a shortage of energy availability. I have experienced life when cold.
I can say from personal experience, warm is better than cold and energy availability is better than scarcity every time.
We are progressing towards societal collapse, if we continue down the Net Zero path and with it imposed restrictions to life’s basic needs.
I distinctly remember suggesting to my sister 30 years ago that one outcome of increasing CO2 concentrations, together with a modest rise in temperatures, would be an increase in planetary fertility. It’s nice to see my theory confirmed, even if that confirmation is bound to be disregarded by the climate industrial complex, which loves feedbacks, but is unlikely to find this one to its taste.
Of course this greening is not only the consequence of a CO2 sink, it is an amplification of that sink, so that, subject to limits that, not being a botanist, I’m not qualified to determine, the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere may be expected to accelerate in the immediate future, before settling into some form of equilibrium. Maybe this benign feedback is the reason why earlier episodes of increasing CO2 have not led to the ‘runaway warming’ about which we used to hear so much?
Anthony, any chance you can find a botanist willing to scope this out?
The carbon dioxide is coming out of solution from the oceans, a VAST reservoir of dissolved gas which slowly presents it to the surface. Thus, the slow release from the warming oceans lags behind the start of the warming much more than a century.
Human use of fossil fuels, and even wood for that matter, is a very small fraction of the carbon cycles in nature. Carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere is a SUBJECT of the warming and cooling and NOT the CAUSE or the DRIVER.
No IPCC model omits programming it as a cause.
Phillip, I thank you will find Humlum’s annual climate review informative as he shows immediate CO2 growth following months after sea water warming and subsequent atmosphere warming. Thus, we don’t have to wait years for natural solar generated warming to see CO2 rise and resultant global greening.
Climate alarmism is political football. Alarmists care nothing whatsoever about climate.
It will become a great narrative when evidence shows that increased global vegetation, as discussed here, causes global warming.
I imagine that any grant money application to study global warming from global greening would have a difficult future.
It would be Sooo! unacceptable to those who do not know enough about the Scientific Method.
Geoff S
Activists who call themselves green demonise and seemingly hate the very thing that makes the planet green. What better proof that the whole thing is completely barking mad?
The NASA study did indeed attribute the major cause of the greening to increased CO2. What was the secondary cause of the greening according to the study? It was – drum roll please – global warming. Oh, the irony!