A lot of people don't know this, but not all that long ago, much of the Sahara desert was a grass-covered savannah rather than a bleak wasteland. There are a number of things that led to the Sahara becoming what it is now. Poor grazing practices, changes in ocean and air currents, and the climate's slow warming after the last ice age all contributed to the Sahara being, well, a desert.
There may be hope for the Sahara now, along with other desert areas. The Earth's slight rise in CO2 is resulting in something good for the environment and good for people: global greening. An increase in plant life is a good thing, not a bad one, and it's hard for even the most dedicated climate scolds to find a downside in this.
The Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor, Chris Morrison, has the details.
Significant new evidence has emerged of widespread and significant increases in plant vegetation across the Earth due to the recent rise of the trace gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Using what they describe as True Significant Trends – a workflow programme integrating sophisticated spatial and time-period data – a geographer and an agrobiologist in Spain found “robust quantitative evidence” of widespread global greening, describing it as “striking” – “with a significant portion of Earth’s terrestrial land surface showing measurable increases in vegetation cover over the last four decades”.
A great graphic from the article shows the extent of this greening:
Global greening is a good thing: pic.twitter.com/C9JNVfvc3w
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) June 6, 2025
Now, to be fair - and in any scientific inquiry, we have to be scrupulous about analyzing facts, not wishful thinking - we'll leave that last part to the climate scolds - some of this greening is due to the expansion of agriculture, which isn't the same as natural expansion of forest or grassland. If it's carbon sequestration one is worried about, crop plants don't really do that; they are, after all, harvested. Grasslands and forests do. But sequestration of carbon isn't a really huge concern if it's greening we want, as CO2 helps that.
We shouldn't expect the legacy media to report this honestly:
Global greening helps reduce world famine and reclaim desert areas but it is not of the slightest interest in the mainstream since it disrupts the fake claims of a climate in crisis due to humans burning hydrocarbons. It is easier to stick with the witch doctor attribution pronouncements of extreme weather and all the dodgy temperature data pumped out at unnaturally heat-ravaged measuring sites. To consider all the data that show extreme events are not getting worse, with or without human involvement, risks the punters concluding that a little extra warmth and CO2 in the atmosphere is probably a good thing. Perish the thought that the climate is currently in a rather pleasant and benign phase of Earth’s existence. If that is the uplifting take, cue, of course, the end of Net Zero and that would never do. Net Zero relies on fake science and much of the real stuff is fatal to the collectivist ambitions of its hard-Left promoters.
In that last comment, Mr. Morisson is spot-on.
See Also: All Over the World, Green Energy Is Being Shunned
The Scolds Are Wrong Again: Nights, Not Days, Are Driving Warming
But then, we knew that. The legacy media and the climate scolds - a Venn diagram there would be very nearly a circle - aren't interested in these numbers. They aren't interested in good climate news, and they aren't interested in finding the actual facts. They are interested in pushing an agenda, an anti-capitalist, anti-liberty agenda. They are about controlling the rest of us, and they are more than happy to ignore the facts.
Speaking of facts, Chris Morrison concludes with a reference to some actual science:
The authors of a recent science paper, Charles Taylor and Wolfram Schlenker, recently found what they called a consistently large fertilisation effect of a 1 ppm increase in CO2, equating to a 0.4%, 0.6% and 1% higher yield for corn, soybean and wheat respectively. You don’t need Grok to tell you that the BBC and the Guardian are uninterested in reporting on the astonishing improvements in crop yields caused by extra enriching atmospheric CO2
It's an amazing little spinning blue/white ball we live on. Anyone who claims to understand it completely is dealing in the purest of bunkum. While Earth's climate is enormously huge, chaotic, unpredictable, and subject to billions, maybe trillions of inputs and results, there are some broad, overarching things we can point to as established facts: Plants require CO2 to grow, a slight increase in CO2 levels is good for plant growth, and the resulting increase in forest and grassland actually absorbs CO2 in a self-correcting effect. Imagine that: The Earth's systems are capable of self-correction.
And, as I'm continually pointing out, it is the height of human hubris to assume we know what the planet's "correct" temperature is, or to think that there is some mystical thermostat we can dial back and forth to keep the entire planet in that "correct" range. Through most of the planet's history, it's been warmer than it is now.
These are facts.
This, in the end, is how we put paid to climate scoldery: We science the crap out of it. Literally.
