NASA: Earth greener now than 20 years ago thanks to 'human activity'

[Beetlegeuse]

One of the gifts of old age is perspective. I lived in times when we really were damaging the planet, which is why I've always known that the new Green Religion is just 21st-Century rebranding of 20th-Century communism. The watermelon movement. They're green on the outside but red as crimson on the inside.

Earth is greener today than it was 20 years ago thanks to 'human activity,' NASA study shows
By Paulina Dedaj | Fox News

A new findings from NASA revealed that the planet has seen an overall increase in greening over the last 20 years, due mainly in part to “ambitious tree planting programs.”

The research published on Feb. 11 found that the greening of earth over the course of the last two decades has shown an overall increase by 5 percent, equal to more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year compared to the early 2000s.

Initially, researchers attributed the change to warmer weather [but of course they did-Juice], wetter climate and the fertilization from added carbon dioxide, but Rama Nemani, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, said that the new data [that they were unable to conceal] showed that “humans are also contributing.”

Nemani pointed to China’s programs to conserve and expand forests and India’s cultivation of food crops.

“Now that we know direct human influence is a key driver of the greening Earth [and because we can't let on that carbon dioxide is good for trees], we need to factor this into our climate models,” she continued. “This will help scientists make better predictions [and more convincing propaganda] about the behavior of different Earth systems, which will help countries make better decisions about how and when to take action [to form a new world-wide government].”

[kelkel]

But the liberal media won't talk about it.

[MuscleScience]

Don’t doubt it with all the medical Mary Jane being grown

[Obs]

I live on the edge of the plains.
Trees everywhere and none were here 150 years ago. Thousands and thousands of acres of trees.
99% were mishaps.

"Volunteers" as the ignorant ass city people call them.

They are so concerned about the effect on the enviornment from me cutting down their little backyard pisselm... They make frowny faces on logging ads on facebook as they sit in their wood house at their desk and are so concerned at how mankind negatively affects trees.

It's cute, but what is to be expected of people who have never participated in any part of agricultural or forest harvest. If I lived in the burbs or a city and all I ever saw of what fed me was on tv I might believe the left agenda too.

[Beetlegeuse]

It's only been three and a half years since they discovered the plant has 7x as many trees as previously thought. SEVEN TIMES!!!!

Study counts 3 trillion trees on Earth, seven times more than thought

Makes you wonder what they were overlooking in the story in the OP that they could only find a 5% increase. Cuz math ain't my strong suit but I'm pretty sure 7x is bigger than 5%.

They can't even count the damn trees and get it right, they can't tell me tonight whether I'll need an umbrella when I go to work in the morning, but they expect us to believe them when they tell us we're all going to be underwater in 12 years if we don't mend our ways.

[Proximal]

Very cool. Seems to be a world wide effort to plant more trees, just saw something like this on FB.

Beetle, you down with solar power?

[Couchlockd]

What's "NASA greener earth?"

[Beetlegeuse]

...Beetle, you down with solar power?

Not in the least. What I'm opposed to is night. And cloud cover. And limited life expectancy of solar cells. And the high cost of storage batteries. Because those are the things that make glorious wonderful magical solar power an ineffective solution ...unless you're content to live a 19th-Century lifestyle. As is it's non-fungible unless you live in Tucson and never turn your stereo up to 11.

[EDCG19]

I don't really believe what NASA says or what their studies show in the first place but if this is legit than that's a good start
Regarding man made climate change I don't believe in it but I do believe we have bigger issues than climate change. We're mining and depleting resources from this planet at a large rate, we are polluting anything we can and destroying the planet by over consumption and contributing to the thrash piles that will just keep piling up for generations and generations to come.

We need stable and sustained energy without destroying the planet but I don't know what that would be. I don't believe in green energy either but there's gotta be a better way than producing tons of thrash and waste just to throw it all in a pile somewhere... We're polluting and depleting as many resources as we can on this planet

[Beetlegeuse]

Pollution in western countries now is insignificant compared to what it was when I was a kid. People used to commit suicide by routing their car's exhaust gas into the vehicle with a garden hose. Now nothing comes out of car exhausts except rosewater and baby foxes. Industrial air and water pollution is single digit percentage points of what it was in the 1950s and 60s.

And you're not going to get the worst offenders, China and India, to change their ways because they've got bigger, nearer term problems than whether there'll be anyone still alive in a hundred years.

The earth's atmosphere is an unimaginably powerful self-righting carbon cycling system. Events like the Toba Catastrophe prove that we're only kidding ourselves if we think we can do a better job of fixing the planet than the planet does of fixing itself. Man-made global warming is an idiotic hoax.

Cheap and plentiful energy fixes everything. There is no water shortage because when you flush the toilet, the water doesn't disappear, it just needs purifying. And it takes energy to do that. Or to perform desalination. It's not a water problem, it's an energy problem.

Coal mining accidents kill more people in an average month than have been killed in nuclear accidents in the US since the dawn of time. The Three Mile Island accident, which was a worst case scenario of multiple systems failures, killed this many people: 0. The most heavily dosed victims of the escaped radiation received the equivalent of four months worth of background radiation, not expected to cause even one additional case of cancer.

But Hanoi Jane made a film about it so everybody is terrified of the prospect of a nuclear power plant going up in their neighborhood.

Chernobyl was a reactor design that already was obsolete when it was built but in typical USSR fashion, they went ahead with it because it was cheap, and they fancied themselves flawless in its operation. Or as Admiral Gorshkov always preached, "Better is the enemy of good enough." It melted down because of failures that occurred while running a malfunction drill. How's that for irony?

Fukashima was the result of 20 years of criminal mismanagement and neglect of prescribed maintenance. They ran tests in 2008 that predicted something like this was coming but did nothing. Three executives went on criminal trial last year. AFAIK their fate is still TBD. The tsunami killed 18,500 people but the reactor meltdown is credited with killing zero.

The Anti-Nuke Kooks will always point to Chernobyl and Fukashima as cautionary tales but IMHO I see exactly zero relevance to the US's nuclear energy program.

In the meanwhile there are 99 power-producing nuclear reactors humming along quite nicely in the US, thank you very much. Not to mention the US Navy operates more than 80 nuclear reactors, all of which are on oceangoing platforms. They've been running nukular-powered boats for more than 60 years and in that time they've had this many sailors injured or killed in nuclear accidents: 0.

A friend of mine spent 24 years on nuclear submarines as a nukular engineer. He goes back to the original nuclear navy when even the lowliest of swabby had to get an interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover before he could get duty on one of his pigboats. A primitive age when every electronic system on the submarine combined had less computing power than my microwave oven. He encourages me to send nuclear doubters to come talk to him about it because he spent the best of a quarter of a century sleeping 10 feet from a nuclear pile. One that even traveled underwater, which is about as dangerous an environment as I can imagine for operating a nuclear tea kettle.

France has almost no natural fossil fuel resources so they had no choice but go nuclear or light their houses with candles. They started going nukular about 1975 as a result of the Arab oil embargo and energy crisis. Now they produce about 70% of their commercial electric power from nukes. In those same 45-ish years, they have had zero fatalities from nuclear accidents. In those same 45-ish years, about 2500 Americans have died in coal mining accidents.

Disposal of spent fuel is a problem, but just like garbage dumps, if the problem becomes big enough, capitalism will provide a solution. Someone will find a way to get rich resolving it. Because mankind has never deprived or conserved its way to prosperity. It's idiotic to expect people to be enthusiastic about working harder so they can lead a more austere life. Innovation and invention leads to prosperity. And risk. No balls, no blue chips.

[Proximal]

Not in the least. What I'm opposed to is night. And cloud cover. And limited life expectancy of solar cells. And the high cost of storage batteries. Because those are the things that make glorious wonderful magical solar power an ineffective solution ...unless you're content to live a 19th-Century lifestyle. As is it's non-fungible unless you live in Tucson and never turn your stereo up to 11.

All good points.

Think I might still give it a whirl though. Live out on the sunny left coast & am kind of worried about the big one that we are do for (major EQ). Going to go the battery route and put some essentials on a dedicated circuit. Won’t make a lot of sense though if the batteries are f’d up in the quake, lol.