This greening story – a tale that gets more impressive every year – is largely absent from the mainstream media. It was certainly missing from a recent climate contribution from Sandwich-board Stanley (a.k.a. Tim Stanley of the Telegraph) who made an unsourced claim that one third of the agricultural production of Bangladesh “is feared to vanish by 2050”. Happily, there is no sign of that invented fear coming true since agricultural production has more than doubled in the country since the turn of the century. Notes Stanley: “The evidence is stacking up – we only have to look out of our windows,” a comment that suggests journalists hired to broadcast opinions and beliefs should steer well clear of science where data and facts are given a higher priority.
Back in the real increasingly verdant world, the Nature-published scientists note that herbaceous ecosystems such as grasslands and crop fields dominate the greening signal. 72.1% of grasslands showed greening while the overall satellite data reveal 68.% of the total vegetation area showed improvement, up from the previous record set last year of 67.7%. Greening ‘hotspots’ were observed in southern Africa, southern South America, northern Australia, Europe, central North America and northern China. Some ‘browning’ was observed in eastern Siberia, and this was attributed to anomalously cold growing-season temperatures.
Two different satellite measurements are commonly used to track global greening. The recently published study used Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), which measures how green the land surface appears. Other studies use the Leaf Area Index (LAI), which estimates the total leaf area covering the ground, and therefore provides a measure of the amount of vegetation. Although they measure different aspects of plant growth, both datasets help point to a significant increase of more than 15% in global greening over the past 40 years, with around 70% of the increase attributed to carbon dioxide fertilisation.
Current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are very low compared with amounts seen in the past going back 600 million years. In fact, the recent increases in plant growth are unsurprising as the planet moves away from the dangerous and near denuded CO2 levels of the recent past. Plants have evolved to thrive at levels of atmospheric CO2 about three times higher than the current 420 parts per million, and scientific evidence is clearly showing rising levels are leading to faster growth in flora that is both healthier and more resistant to nature’s hazards such as droughts.
Plants of course include trees, and these have been piling on the pounds, aided by more plentiful helpings of plant food. When self-identifying environmentalists are not cutting a highway through the Amazon rainforest to ease transport to a COP conference, or looting the place of balsa to build wind turbines, the remaining trees are getting measurably larger and fatter. Recent research published in Nature Plants shows that higher CO2 levels have led to substantial growth in the remaining Amazon trees with mature specimens growing by over 6% a decade. ‘Forward with Carbon Dioxide, not Chainsaws’, will not, alas, be a new United Nations slogan.
As noted, mainstream media is largely absent from covering the sensational greening of the Earth – for obvious reasons, of course, since it detracts from the hard Left political message hammered home daily to promote the Net Zero fantasy. Sandwich-board Stanley is just one of countless useful idiots who comment on complex atmospheric science by suggesting that people look out of a window when any extreme weather event occurs. So far as one can see, the BBC has written nothing about the Earth greening in the last few years. The Guardian meanwhile takes a different tack and has written about growing vegetation in Greenland and Antarctica as what it describes as global ‘heating’ takes hold. But this Comic Cuts reporting is a world away from the reality of famine being pushed aside by thriving crops, or from fatter trees making up for the plundering of saintly green loggers. It is instead a story of extra moss growth along with other simple vegetation along exposed shorelines. The wider issue of global greening was covered in a February 2025 article with the gloomy title: ‘Plants losing appetite for carbon dioxide amid effects of warming climate.’
At this point, the last words should go to Jordan Peterson who followed up Stanley’s comments by writing the following in the Telegraph a few days later:
Back in the real increasingly verdant world, the Nature-published scientists note that herbaceous ecosystems such as grasslands and crop fields dominate the greening signal. 72.1% of grasslands showed greening while the overall satellite data reveal 68.% of the total vegetation area showed improvement, up from the previous record set last year of 67.7%. Greening ‘hotspots’ were observed in southern Africa, southern South America, northern Australia, Europe, central North America and northern China. Some ‘browning’ was observed in eastern Siberia, and this was attributed to anomalously cold growing-season temperatures.
Two different satellite measurements are commonly used to track global greening. The recently published study used Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), which measures how green the land surface appears. Other studies use the Leaf Area Index (LAI), which estimates the total leaf area covering the ground, and therefore provides a measure of the amount of vegetation. Although they measure different aspects of plant growth, both datasets help point to a significant increase of more than 15% in global greening over the past 40 years, with around 70% of the increase attributed to carbon dioxide fertilisation.
Current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are very low compared with amounts seen in the past going back 600 million years. In fact, the recent increases in plant growth are unsurprising as the planet moves away from the dangerous and near denuded CO2 levels of the recent past. Plants have evolved to thrive at levels of atmospheric CO2 about three times higher than the current 420 parts per million, and scientific evidence is clearly showing rising levels are leading to faster growth in flora that is both healthier and more resistant to nature’s hazards such as droughts.
Plants of course include trees, and these have been piling on the pounds, aided by more plentiful helpings of plant food. When self-identifying environmentalists are not cutting a highway through the Amazon rainforest to ease transport to a COP conference, or looting the place of balsa to build wind turbines, the remaining trees are getting measurably larger and fatter. Recent research published in Nature Plants shows that higher CO2 levels have led to substantial growth in the remaining Amazon trees with mature specimens growing by over 6% a decade. ‘Forward with Carbon Dioxide, not Chainsaws’, will not, alas, be a new United Nations slogan.
As noted, mainstream media is largely absent from covering the sensational greening of the Earth – for obvious reasons, of course, since it detracts from the hard Left political message hammered home daily to promote the Net Zero fantasy. Sandwich-board Stanley is just one of countless useful idiots who comment on complex atmospheric science by suggesting that people look out of a window when any extreme weather event occurs. So far as one can see, the BBC has written nothing about the Earth greening in the last few years. The Guardian meanwhile takes a different tack and has written about growing vegetation in Greenland and Antarctica as what it describes as global ‘heating’ takes hold. But this Comic Cuts reporting is a world away from the reality of famine being pushed aside by thriving crops, or from fatter trees making up for the plundering of saintly green loggers. It is instead a story of extra moss growth along with other simple vegetation along exposed shorelines. The wider issue of global greening was covered in a February 2025 article with the gloomy title: ‘Plants losing appetite for carbon dioxide amid effects of warming climate.’
At this point, the last words should go to Jordan Peterson who followed up Stanley’s comments by writing the following in the Telegraph a few days later:
Widespread catastrophic desertification and system wide crop failure have largely failed to materialise. Instead, the broader trend has been of increasing agricultural yields and vegetation density. What actually happened did not follow the predictions and should force a drastic re-evaluation of the entire climate narrative, not least among those committed to honesty and scientific integrity.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. He is a freelance journalist who started in financial journalism in the late 1970s and for nearly 20 years ran a company – Evandale Publishing. This article was sourced HERE
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