Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "Climate change: Carbon dioxide rises more than ever in 2024 | BBC News" video.

  1. 1:45 Deserts have shrunk considerably since the 1980's. The Sahara shrank by 12,000km² per year 1984-2015(Liu & Xue, 2020). A study by Venter et al (2018) found the Sahara desert had shrunk by 8% over the previous three decades. The Earth has greened by 15% or more in a human lifetime. "The greening of the planet over the last two decades represents an increase in leaf area on plants and trees equivalent to the area covered by all the Amazon rainforests. There are now more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year"(NASA, 2019). Observations of Earth’s vegetative cover since the year 2000 by NASA’s Terra satellite show a 10% increase in vegetation in the first 20 years of the century. Global tree canopy cover increased by 2.24 million square kilometers (865,000 square miles) between 1982 and 2016 (Nature, 2018). As well as human intervention, the reasons for this include forests expanding polewards aided by additional CO2 and a slight rise in temperature. Increased CO2 causes this in two ways: it has a direct fertilising effect (the CFE), and it increases drought tolerance by reducing stomata. This greening of the Earth due to CO2 is now "an indisputable fact" (Chen et al, 2024). In fact, 55.15% of those areas greening have been doing so at an accelerated rate since 2001. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution the Earth's primary productivity has increased by more than 30% (Campbell et al, 2017 and Haverd et al, 2020). Zhu, Piao, & Myneni, 2016 calculate that 70% of Earth’s global greening in the modern period is due to CO2 and only about 13% is due to fertilizer and land use changes by humans. The Earth’s natural vegetation productivity actually increased 6% in 18 years (Nemani et al, 2003) with 42% of this increase coming from the Amazon rainforests. Extinction rates (1500-2009) peaked around 1900 at 50 per decade. Extinction rates have declined dramatically to around 4 to per decade in the 2000s. So the extinction rate is very low: 908 known lost species for 2.1 million known species in 500 years (IUCN Red List), so from observations there are an average of slightly less than 2 species lost every year. Out of a known species total of over 2 million. That gives an annual percentage loss of less than 0.0001%. That's background extinction. At that frequency it will take over 930,000 years to reach 80% extinction of species experienced at the K-T boundary that saw the extinction of the dinosaurs. Of course, extinction is a natural part of the evolution of life on this planet with the average lifespan of a species thought to be about 1 million years (cf 930,000). It is estimated that 99.9% of all plant and animal species that have existed have gone extinct. It should also be noted that no taxonomic families have become extinct in the last 500 years. In fact marine diversity at the taxonomic level of families is the highest it has ever been in the Earth's long history (see Sepkoski Curve). In a review of 16,009 species, most populations (85%) did not show significant trends in abundance, and those that did were balanced between winners (8%) and losers (7%) (Dornelas et al, 2019). There have been only 9 species of continental birds and mammals confirmed extinct since 1500 (Loehle, 2011). No global marine animals have become extinct in the past 50 years (McCauley et, 2015 using IUCN data). Take bird species: 11,195 have been counted (not estimated). All of these have been assessed by the IUCN. They catalogued 4 bird species became extinct over the course of 28 years between 1988 and 2016. That's 1.4 per decade or an annual extinction rate of 0.001%. Also the proportion of species assessed as threatened by the IUCN has declined rapidly over time, from 65% in 2000 (11,000 out of 17,000) to 28% in 2024 (46,000 out of 166,000). This increasingly positive outcome of their species assessments is only accelerating as time passes. Using IUCN data on assessed species- Amphibian species extinct 0.009% per decade. Mammals 0.029% per decade. Reptiles 0.006% per decade. Fish 0.006% per decade. Insects 0.009% per decade.
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  2. There has been a 10% decline in natural disasters since 2000 (CRED). Normalised disaster losses have decreased since 1990 and human mortality due to extreme weather has decreased by more than 95% since 1920, so you're 50 times less likely to die from a climate-related disaster in a world that's 1°C warmer than 100 years ago (EM-DAT, CRED/UC). Deaths from drought have declined by 99%! As an example of good news, Climate Change saved 555,103 lives in England and Wales between 2001 and 2020 (ONS, 2022).
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  3. Since 1900 the global temperature has increased by 1.3°C. Despite that humanity has flourished. Life expectancy has more than doubled from 32 to 73 years. Literacy has quadrupled from 21% to 86%. Humans are seven times more productive ($2,241 to $15,212 GDP per capita, per annum). People are better fed, having ⅓ more calories every day (2,192kcal to 2,928kcal). Global extreme poverty rates have tumbled from 70% to less than 10% (<$1 a day). And death from weather events have collapsed by a factor 50 from 241 million down to 5 million even while the global population has increased by a factor of 5. In a world that's 3°C warmer by the end of the century, it has been estimated that incomes will be between 1.9% (Tol, 2024) and 3.1% lower (Nordhaus) than that would otherwise have been. However the UN estimates that total incomes will have increased by 450% by 2100. If the effects of climate are included we will only be 440% or 435% richer! Oh my God, it's the end of the world! There is no climate crisis. There is no evidence of a climate crisis. Even if there is radical climate change (and that is a very, very big 'if') with the manifestation of numerous tipping points (including permafrost thaw, ocean hydrates dissociation, Arctic sea ice loss, rainforest dieback, polar ice sheet loss, AMOC slowdown, and Indian monsoon variability) the disruption to economic growth and well-being will be minimal. The world's economy will continue to grow making everyone much richer. By 2050 world mean consumption per capita should be $29,100 with tipping points or $29,300 without tipping points. Barely noticeable. Apart from it being approximately double what it is now. By 2100 world mean consumption per capita should be $71,000 with or without tipping points (Dietz et al, 2021). This is the most fortunate time to be alive in the whole of history.
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  4. Deserts have shrunk considerably since the 1980's. The Sahara shrank by 12,000km² per year 1984-2015(Liu & Xue, 2020). A study by Venter et al (2018) found the Sahara desert had shrunk by 8% over the previous three decades. The Earth has greened by 15% or more in a human lifetime. "The greening of the planet over the last two decades represents an increase in leaf area on plants and trees equivalent to the area covered by all the Amazon rainforests. There are now more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year"(NASA, 2019). Observations of Earth’s vegetative cover since the year 2000 by NASA’s Terra satellite show a 10% increase in vegetation in the first 20 years of the century. Global tree canopy cover increased by 2.24 million square kilometers (865,000 square miles) between 1982 and 2016 (Nature, 2018). As well as human intervention, the reasons for this include forests expanding polewards aided by additional CO2 and a slight rise in temperature. Increased CO2 causes this in two ways: it has a direct fertilising effect (the CFE), and it increases drought tolerance by reducing stomata. This greening of the Earth due to CO2 is now "an indisputable fact" (Chen et al, 2024). In fact, 55.15% of those areas greening have been doing so at an accelerated rate since 2001. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution the Earth's primary productivity has increased by more than 30% (Campbell et al, 2017 and Haverd et al, 2020).
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  5. @jaspercaelan4998  You're responses are worded so that they sound plausible, and make you seem knowledgeable, but they are all completely unsupported, and largely just plain wrong. Take your point about "short term variations", the CERES data referred to by Goessling and in my original comment stretches back to 2000 (data: CERES Ebaf4). It shows an increase in net solar radiation over the period 2000-2023 of approximately 1.3 W/m². The long-term positive trend in shortwave radiation has been confirmed to exist since 1983 (Pinker et al, 2005). The period 1983-2001 shows an increase of 1.6W/m² per decade (1% increase per decade). That there is an established trend for 40 years makes it climatologically significant i.e. not "short term variation". NASA claims that a reduction in albedo of 1 percentage point produces a warming effect equal to a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere (Wielicki et al, 2005). Accordingly, the albedo decrease we have had in the last 24 years corresponds to +2.0 W/m². The increase in CO2 corresponds to a theoretical increase of only +0.7 W/m². So the ongoing, longterm reduction in albedo and consequential increase in ASR has produced nearly three times as much warming effect in recent decades as the potential radiative forcing from CO2. Your statement "man made emissions is causing most of the warming" is wrong.
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  6. So nothing Britain does has any effect. Addendum: There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis. Even the biased UN's IPCC AR6 WG1, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", page 1856,  section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed: Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions), Aridity, Avalanche (snow), Mean precipitation,  Average Wind Speed, Coastal Flood, Agricultural drought, Hydrological drought, Erosion of Coastlines, Fire Weather (hot and windy), Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods), Frost, Hail, Heavy Rain, Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms, Landslides, Marine Heatwaves, Ocean Acidity, Radiation at the Earth’s Surface, River/Lake Floods, Sand and Dust Storms, Sea Level, Severe Wind Storms, Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets, Antarctic Sea Ice, Tropical Cyclones.
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  7. @jaspercaelan4998  Carbon dioxide is not rubbish. It is the gas in the atmosphere most essential to Life.
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  8. The current warming trend, and the heat of 2023-2024 is not explained by the rise in gases like CO2. There has been an increase in Absorbed Solar Radiation of around +1W/m²/decade with a record anomaly in 2023 around +1.83W/m² (CERES) or +1.31W/m² (ERA5). This is correlated with Total Solar Irradiance (how shiny the Sun is), which reached an all time record-breaking high in 2023 and 2024 as confirmed by satellite measurement (SORCE and TSIS). 90% of this solar radiation is absorbed directly by the ocean. 1% is absorbed by the atmosphere. Changing Greenhouse gas concentration has no effect on this increase in ASR. There is more energy from the Sun reaching the ocean, and this is warming it, and then the ocean is warming the atmosphere, then the atmosphere is radiating this energy away into space at an increasing rate. “The EEI [Earth's Energy Imbalance] trend and 2023 peak are not associated with decreasing outgoing longwave radiation (OLR), as one would expect from increasing greenhouse-gas concentrations" "Instead, OLR has been increasing and largely offsetting even stronger absorbed solar radiation (ASR) anomalies" (Goessling et al., 2024).
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  9. @jaspercaelan4998  "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." And that's all you've presented here just assertions. No evidence. No data. My comment makes reference to the most up-to-date peer reviewed research published in the world renowned and well respected journal 'Science'.
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  10.  @jaspercaelan4998  The Goessling paper was peer reviewed and published in the world renowned and well respected journal 'Science'.
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  11. ​ @WhyWorldWet Look it up. I provided references from reputable sources.
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  12.  @Wormkiller-v8e  Even the biased UN's IPCC AR6 WG1, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", page 1856, section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed: Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions), Aridity, Avalanche (snow), Mean precipitation, Average Wind Speed, Coastal Flood, Agricultural drought, Hydrological drought, Erosion of Coastlines, Fire Weather (hot and windy), Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods), Frost, Hail, Heavy Rain, Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms, Landslides, Marine Heatwaves, Ocean Acidity, Radiation at the Earth’s Surface, River/Lake Floods, Sand and Dust Storms, Sea Level, Severe Wind Storms, Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets, Antarctic Sea Ice, Tropical Cyclones.
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  13.  @Wormkiller-v8e  Even the biased UN's IPCC AR6 WG1, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", page 1856,  section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed: Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions), Aridity, Avalanche (snow), Mean precipitation,  Average Wind Speed, Coastal Flood, Agricultural drought, Hydrological drought, Erosion of Coastlines, Fire Weather (hot and windy), Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods), Frost, Hail, Heavy Rain, Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms, Landslides, Marine Heatwaves, Ocean Acidity, Radiation at the Earth’s Surface, River/Lake Floods, Sand and Dust Storms, Sea Level, Severe Wind Storms, Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets, Antarctic Sea Ice, Tropical Cyclones.
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  14. ​@J.R.Y. Venus has a very dense, high-pressure atmosphere. Temperature is directly proportional to pressure.
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  15. @JeffreyGoddin  Gas Laws not your thing, or just beyond your ken?
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  16. @Skyhawk1480  Oh dear, I hope you're not doing the educating. What you wrote about Jupiter shows a lack of understanding. When you refer to 'surface' there isn't one. Jupiter is a gas giant and may not have a solid surface in the way in which you imagine (like Earth or Venus). The 'surface' you refer to is an astronomical convention. It is the atmospheric point at which in the section of the gas column of Jupiter's troposphere where the pressure is equal to 1bar (i.e. the approximate atmospheric pressure at sea-level on Earth). So not 1000bar. Silly mistake, "and speaks poorly to the state of education you've been exposed to". The Galileo entry probe was dropped into Jupiter's atmosphere in 1995. As it descended it measured the temperature and pressure. 21km above your imaginary surface the pressure was 0.45bar, and the temperature was -145°C. At 1bar it was indeed -110°C. But it continued its descent through the atmosphere for a further 146km to a point where the temperature was +153°C. The pressure had become so great (22 bar) that the probe stopped transmitting. The pressure would increase as you descend deeper through Jupiter's atmosphere. Approximately 3000km below your imaginary surface, the pressure is so great the atmosphere starts behaving as a supercritical fluid. At around 500,000bar of pressure, the temperature is around 5,000°C. At 4,000,000 bar, the temperature should exceed 8,000°C. The temperature and pressure inside Jupiter increase steadily inward. As far as Venus is concerned, the point in its atmosphere where the pressure is 1bar is 53km above the actual hard, rocky surface of the planet. The temperature at that altitude is 20 to 30°C as you might expect from a planet so close to the Sun. To summarise on both planets tropospheric temperature increases with increasing atmospheric pressure. The temperature in their atmospheres at 1bar is related to their distance from the Sun. This relationship also holds true for Earth, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus (Mercury and Mars do not retain enough of an atmosphere to reach 1bar of pressure). I know it's uncouth but I really do take some pleasure in rude, insulting, ignorant people getting things wrong and it being pointed out to them.
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  17. @Skyhawk1480  "Gravitational collapse" leads to an increase in pressure and, hence, of course, an increase in temperature.
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  18. @Skyhawk1480  Do you still think Jupiter has a "surface" at 1bar (or even 1000bar) of pressure?
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  19. @jaspercaelan4998  Indeed, but trebling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase wheat and rice yield by about 35%. So CO2 would not be poisonous at those high levels. Even if CO2 is elevated to 50 times its current concentration, it would not be poisonous and vegetative growth would continue to increase (although seed yield would return to current levels). So still not poisonous.
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  20.  @jaspercaelan4998  There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis. Even the biased UN's IPCC AR6 WG1, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", page 1856,  section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed: Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions), Aridity, Avalanche (snow), Mean precipitation,  Average Wind Speed, Coastal Flood, Agricultural drought, Hydrological drought, Erosion of Coastlines, Fire Weather (hot and windy), Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods), Frost, Hail, Heavy Rain, Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms, Landslides, Marine Heatwaves, Ocean Acidity, Radiation at the Earth’s Surface, River/Lake Floods, Sand and Dust Storms, Sea Level, Severe Wind Storms, Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets, Antarctic Sea Ice, Tropical Cyclones.
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  21. Since 1900 the global temperature has increased by 1.3°C. Despite that humanity has flourished. Life expectancy has more than doubled from 32 to 73 years. Literacy has quadrupled from 21% to 86%. Humans are seven times more productive ($2,241 to $15,212 GDP per capita, per annum). People are better fed, having ⅓ more calories every day (2,192kcal to 2,928kcal). Global extreme poverty rates have tumbled from 70% to less than 10% (<$1 a day). And death from weather events have collapsed by a factor 50 from 241 million down to 5 million even while the global population has increased by a factor of 5. In a world that's 3°C warmer by the end of the century, it has been estimated that incomes will be between 1.9% (Tol, 2024) and 3.1% lower (Nordhaus) than that would otherwise have been. However the UN estimates that total incomes will have increased by 450% by 2100. If the effects of climate are included we will only be 440% or 435% richer! Oh my God, it's the end of the world! There is no climate crisis. There is no evidence of a climate crisis. Even if there is radical climate change (and that is a very, very big 'if') with the manifestation of numerous tipping points (including permafrost thaw, ocean hydrates dissociation, Arctic sea ice loss, rainforest dieback, polar ice sheet loss, AMOC slowdown, and Indian monsoon variability) the disruption to economic growth and well-being will be minimal. The world's economy will continue to grow making everyone much richer. By 2050 world mean consumption per capita should be $29,100 with tipping points or $29,300 without tipping points. Barely noticeable. Apart from it being approximately double what it is now. By 2100 world mean consumption per capita should be $71,000 with or without tipping points (Dietz et al, 2021). This is the most fortunate time to be alive in the whole of history.
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  22. There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis. Even the biased UN's IPCC AR6 WG1, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", page 1856, section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed: Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions), Aridity, Avalanche (snow), Mean precipitation, Average Wind Speed, Coastal Flood, Agricultural drought, Hydrological drought, Erosion of Coastlines, Fire Weather (hot and windy), Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods), Frost, Hail, Heavy Rain, Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms, Landslides, Marine Heatwaves, Ocean Acidity, Radiation at the Earth’s Surface, River/Lake Floods, Sand and Dust Storms, Sea Level, Severe Wind Storms, Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets, Antarctic Sea Ice, Tropical Cyclones.
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  23. @jaspercaelan4998  "it's open to change with new evidence" And that new evidence is what I have forwarded in my comment.
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  24. @joanapersoa  The Earth has certainly not lost that percentage of wildlife to extinction. Extinction rates (1500-2009) peaked around 1900 at 50 per decade. Extinction rates have declined dramatically to around 4 to per decade in the 2000s. So the extinction rate is very low: 908 known lost species for 2.1 million known species in 500 years (IUCN Red List), so from observations there are an average of slightly less than 2 species lost every year. Out of a known species total of over 2 million. That gives an annual percentage loss of less than 0.0001%. That's background extinction. At that frequency it will take over 930,000 years to reach 80% extinction of species experienced at the K-T boundary that saw the extinction of the dinosaurs. Of course, extinction is a natural part of the evolution of life on this planet with the average lifespan of a species thought to be about 1 million years (cf 930,000). It is estimated that 99.9% of all plant and animal species that have existed have gone extinct. It should also be noted that no taxonomic families have become extinct in the last 500 years. In fact marine diversity at the taxonomic level of families is the highest it has ever been in the Earth's long history (see Sepkoski Curve). In a review of 16,009 species, most populations (85%) did not show significant trends in abundance, and those that did were balanced between winners (8%) and losers (7%) (Dornelas et al, 2019). There have been only 9 species of continental birds and mammals confirmed extinct since 1500 (Loehle, 2011). No global marine animals have become extinct in the past 50 years (McCauley et, 2015 using IUCN data). Take bird species: 11,195 have been counted (not estimated). All of these have been assessed by the IUCN. They catalogued 4 bird species became extinct over the course of 28 years between 1988 and 2016. That's 1.4 per decade or an annual extinction rate of 0.001%. Also the proportion of species assessed as threatened by the IUCN has declined rapidly over time, from 65% in 2000 (11,000 out of 17,000) to 28% in 2024 (46,000 out of 166,000). This increasingly positive outcome of their species assessments is only accelerating as time passes. Using IUCN data on assessed species- Amphibian species extinct 0.009% per decade. Mammals 0.029% per decade. Reptiles 0.006% per decade. Fish 0.006% per decade. Insects 0.009% per decade.
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  25. @joanapersoa  my response was deleted so I've added to my original comment
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  26. @Wormkiller-v8e  Even the biased UN's IPCC AR6 WG1, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", page 1856,  section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed: Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions), Aridity, Avalanche (snow), Mean precipitation,  Average Wind Speed, Coastal Flood, Agricultural drought, Hydrological drought, Erosion of Coastlines, Fire Weather (hot and windy), Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods), Frost, Hail, Heavy Rain, Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms, Landslides, Marine Heatwaves, Ocean Acidity, Radiation at the Earth’s Surface, River/Lake Floods, Sand and Dust Storms, Sea Level, Severe Wind Storms, Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets, Antarctic Sea Ice, Tropical Cyclones.
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  27. @jaspercaelan4998  There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis. Even the biased UN's IPCC AR6 WG1, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", page 1856, section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed: Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions), Aridity, Avalanche (snow), Mean precipitation, Average Wind Speed, Coastal Flood, Agricultural drought, Hydrological drought, Erosion of Coastlines, Fire Weather (hot and windy), Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods), Frost, Hail, Heavy Rain, Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms, Landslides, Marine Heatwaves, Ocean Acidity, Radiation at the Earth’s Surface, River/Lake Floods, Sand and Dust Storms, Sea Level, Severe Wind Storms, Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets, Antarctic Sea Ice, Tropical Cyclones.
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  28. @jaspercaelan4998  my response was deleted so I've added it to my original comment.
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  29. ​@J.R.Y. Deserts have shrunk considerably since the 1980's. The Sahara shrank by 12,000km² per year 1984-2015(Liu & Xue, 2020). A study by Venter et al (2018) found the Sahara desert had shrunk by 8% over the previous three decades. The Earth has greened by 15% or more in a human lifetime. "The greening of the planet over the last two decades represents an increase in leaf area on plants and trees equivalent to the area covered by all the Amazon rainforests. There are now more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year"(NASA, 2019). Observations of Earth’s vegetative cover since the year 2000 by NASA’s Terra satellite show a 10% increase in vegetation in the first 20 years of the century. Global tree canopy cover increased by 2.24 million square kilometers (865,000 square miles) between 1982 and 2016 (Nature, 2018). As well as human intervention, the reasons for this include forests expanding polewards aided by additional CO2 and a slight rise in temperature. Increased CO2 causes this in two ways: it has a direct fertilising effect (the CFE), and it increases drought tolerance by reducing stomata. This greening of the Earth due to CO2 is now "an indisputable fact" (Chen et al, 2024). In fact, 55.15% of those areas greening have been doing so at an accelerated rate since 2001. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution the Earth's primary productivity has increased by more than 30% (Campbell et al, 2017 and Haverd et al, 2020). Zhu, Piao, & Myneni, 2016 calculate that 70% of Earth’s global greening in the modern period is due to CO2 and only about 13% is due to fertilizer and land use changes by humans. The Earth’s natural vegetation productivity actually increased 6% in 18 years (Nemani et al, 2003) with 42% of this increase coming from the Amazon rainforests.
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