The problem with our Greenie religious fanatics is – well, they have several, really. But one of their major problems is that they’ve never quite twigged to the realization that there’s an entire industry dedicated to scaring the money out of them. Which is pretty much the entire global warming / climate change / Mother Earth Goddess Rages business, right there. Couple that with an inability to do higher math* and to realize that there was actual history before 1950** and you get people profitably panicking that we’re one burning coal pile away from Venus.
Fortunately, there’s objective reality.
The latest and most detailed satellite data, which is yet to be published but was summarized in an online lecture last July by Ranga Myneni of Boston University, confirms that the greening of the Earth has now been going on for 30 years. Between 1982 and 2011, 20.5% of the world’s vegetated area got greener, while just 3% grew browner; the rest showed no change.
What explains this trend? Man-made nitrogen fertilizer causes crops to grow faster, but it is having little effect on forests. There are essentially two possibilities: climate and carbon dioxide itself. Warmer, wetter weather should cause more vegetation to grow. But even without warming, an increase in carbon dioxide should itself accelerate growth rates of plants. CO2 is a scarce resource that plants have trouble scavenging from the air, and plants grow faster with higher levels of CO2 to inhale.
This shouldn’t shock even the people who actually believe that there’s significant warming going on (I can’t help but notice that the global warming advocates are starting to get the reputation of having a generally poor record when it comes to the transparency of their data sets). After all, under their model they’re postulating a greenhouse effect: which is to say higher temperatures, increased humidity, and more carbon dioxide. But then the global warming people stop there, and never take the next step; which is remember what greenhouses are actually designed to do.
Which is to GROW PLANTS.
Yeah, yeah, I know: the problem is that there’s going to be a ‘runaway’ greenhouse effect, and the only way to stop it is to give these nice folks your credit card information…
Via Samizdata, via Instapundit.
Moe Lane
*A flaw that I share.
**A flaw that I do not share.
Historically speaking, objective reality has never gotten in the way of false gods. The Greenies prove that anew very time they open their mouths.
Indeed. The Greenies are a textbook example of the power of ‘Dead men DO bleed!’.
Ah, Anthropogenic Global Warming. Few things will get me on my high horse faster than someone calling me “anti-science” while implicitly arguing that Geology is invalid.
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That said, you’re not quite correct. Early in his career, Michael Mann wrote a paper about how tree ring data was a terrible temperature proxy, because increasing temperature and increasing CO2 are both good for plant growth.
He then turned around and wrote his infamous “hockey stick” paper, in which he used tree ring data as a temperature proxy, and argued that increasing CO2 was increasing temperature. He *still* had to cherry pick his data and use flawed statistical methods to get his published result.
It would be hard for professional proponents of the AGW “theory” to be entirely ignorant of the shaky foundation their faith is built upon. They’ve actively tried to move away from it. They’re now arguing that the CO2 warming merely kicks off a vicious cycle of warming by increasing vegetation, which increases water vapor, which increases warming…