Good News Sucks for Climate Cultists

There’s a war against happiness. Climate alarmists bury good news and exaggerate bad news. They have made up their minds to be miserable and they’re determined to take the rest of us down with them.

For example, have you heard that over the past 30 years there has been a 14 percent increase in the Earth’s green vegetation? Deserts are getting smaller and forests are getting lusher. That gain even has a name: “Earth Greening.” Not surprisingly, 70 percent of it stems from the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere! Zaichun Zhu, one of the scientists who measured the greening, says it’s equivalent to adding a new continent of green vegetation twice the size of the mainland United States.

The benefits of the increased vegetation are widespread: “It means more food for insects and deer, for elephants and mice, for fish and whales. It means higher yields for farmers; the effect has probably added about $3 trillion to farm incomes over the past 30 years, so less land is needed to feed the human population and more can be spared for wildlife instead.” We’ve given a raise to all commercial farmers around the world. Increased supply eventually results in reduced prices.

The connection between increased carbon dioxide and increased plant growth is a perfect example of “negative feedback” in that the added vegetation from Earth Greening takes CO2 out of the atmosphere. A physicist friend of mine reminds his students, “We live in a negative-feedback world. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.”

Nevertheless, every single catastrophic climate prediction idiotically assumes a world of positive feedbacks, a world of runaway changes. The renowned physicist and climatologist Richard Lindzen says he knows of not a single large-scale positive feedback in the physical world or the biosphere. Insofar as that’s true, it annihilates the entire argument of the climate catastrophists.

There are billions of examples of negative feedback in the physical and biological worlds, yet positive feedback is what climate catastrophists stake their predictions and reputations on. If you know of an example of a large-scale long-term runaway change, what is it?

Ironically, negative feedback is doing its own “carbon capture” and “sequestration” thousands of times more effectively than humans do deliberately. And it’s doing so without massive subsidies or carbon taxes.

Changes occur everywhere, constantly, but changes never continue in the same direction indefinitely. That’s kind of interesting if you think about it. Why can’t any given species grow until it covers the globe? Answer: negative feedback.

Some other good news you may not know about if you rely on the media and catastrophists is that snow cover in the northern hemisphere is now at a 56-year high (for this time of year). The population of polar bears is increasing and is currently estimated to be over 30,000. You won’t learn that from Al Gore.

We are currently ten years into a “global-warming hiatus.” The climate-change cultists are falling all over one another trying to explain why that pause means absolutely nothing about long-term warming. That they have so many excuses shows the Earth’s climate is extremely complex and impossible to effectively model or predict. There’s no way they can know how long the hiatus will last. Their list of excuses does not include Earth Greening. That would require saying something nice about CO2.

Unlike the Earth’s climate, Earth Greening was an easily predictable outcome of the CO2 increase. Life itself is carbon based. Commercial greenhouses pump in additional CO2 to stimulate plant growth.

The alarmists’ hysterical hostility toward carbon dioxide shows their ignorance and tunnel vision. They are willfully blind to anything beneficial deriving from CO2, a compound essential to life itself. When someone doesn’t tell the whole truth, he’s lying.