It Is Easy Going Green transcript

Narrator:

We live in a beautiful green world. Plants help to feed us, and sustain all the animals that share our planet. From time immemorial, the sight of a fresh green landscape has filled human hearts with joy and wonder. And that’s before we even get to flowers and fruit.

We crave green space. And if we can’t be outdoors, we bring the plants inside to have them near us.

John Robson:

Now imagine a tale about a great wizard who invented a special powder that could make plants of all kinds grow better. A powder:

That could make them more resistant to drought and heat.

That could make food crops grow faster and bigger.

That could make trees grow taller and stronger.

That could even make deserts turn green.

And the story gets better. Imagine this special powder was so cheap to make that companies would give it away for free. Farmers could use it without having to pay for it. And imagine it was so abundant that people could spread it in forests and grasslands and watch them all become greener and healthier.

But now suppose the story takes a dark turn. Imagine that in the midst of all this bounty, some false wizards convinced the king that this powder was the result of sinister witchcraft and that it caused bad weather, disease and madness. So they joined forces to cover up the good news about its effect on plants, get rid of the powder, and punish anyone who tried to use it. And the few sane people who knew the truth and tried to fight back were mocked, silenced or banished from the land.

The End.

It’s not a bad set-up for a fantasy novel. Unless it seems too unrealistic because the villainous turn is too implausible. But the thing is, it’s not a fantasy, it’s reality. It’s a true story and we’re in the middle of it. Only the phase state has been changed to hide that it’s a true story, because it’s not about a powder, it’s about a gas called carbon dioxide or CO₂.

And CO2 really is a magic elixir that is leading to global greening, to healthier and more abundant food crops, to taller trees and lush gardens where there used to be deserts.

And yes, it’s free. It’s a by-product of using fossil fuels. And rising atmospheric CO2 has caused, or at least coincided with, a remarkable increase in plant fertility globally in the last half-century. And as we’ll show you in this video there is a massive amount of science confirming the good news. But instead of celebrating, governments who claim to be “following the science” have now decided that it’s not a good thing. Instead, CO2 is “carbon pollution” and they’re trying to get rid of it, get us to “Net Zero” CO2 production by 2050 or even start sucking it out of the atmosphere and killing the plants. They’ve become convinced that it’s the reason we sometimes get bad weather, or get sick, or suffer from any number of problems.

But that part is the fantasy. What’s true, and what we’re about to show you, is that carbon dioxide is a great benefit to the world’s plants and therefore to all the animals, including people, because we depend on those plants. And those whose job it is to tell you about it have kept it hidden because they hated it and didn’t want you to know.

But I do. For the Climate Discussion Nexus, I’m John Robson, and this is a CDN “Crystal Ball” video on carbon dioxide and the great global greening that they didn’t see coming even after it happened, or at least pretended they didn’t.

Narrator:

The story begins with the vital biological process called photosynthesis. This is the process by which plants build biomass by converting light and certain molecules in the air into the chemical compounds that make up plant matter. It’s absolutely vital to any kind of complex life.

Photosynthesis requires carbon dioxide or CO2, water vapour or H2O, and light. And these things interact with a molecule inside plant cells called “Rubisco” which is short for Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate-carboxylase/oxygenase.

John Robson:

Rubisco. It sounds kind of like a breakfast cereal, you know, Start your day with a bowl of crunchy Rubisco. But it’s actually an enzyme that acts catalytically to promote a chemical reaction crucial to plant life.

Narrator:

Photosynthesis happens when a carbon dioxide molecule comes into contact with RuBisCo. In most plants, the carbon is converted to a new molecule with 3 carbon atoms, which is what plant cells are made of. This is referred to as the C3 process because, one guide explains, of the intermediary “three-carbon organic acid 3-phosphoglyceric acid (3PGS), which is then reduced to carbohydrate in the Calvin cycle.”

Rubisco is believed to have evolved about 3 billion years ago. And for a very long time afterwards, plants relied on C3 photosynthesis to grow. But over the past 200 million years, something changed. The level of CO₂ in the air has been steadily declining, especially in the last 65 million years, and we’re now in a period of severely low CO₂ levels by historical, or prehistorical, standards.

In response, about 35 million years ago, some plants evolved another, more efficient photosynthesis process in which CO₂ is concentrated inside the leaf and then first converted to an intermediary 4-carbon oxaloacetic acid molecule before going through the C3 process, which is why this one is called the C4 process. And corn, or maize, is an example of a modern crop that grows using the C4 process. As does sugarcane, sorghum and pearl millet. But just about every other type of plant, from rice to wheat to trees, is C3. And whichever they are, they absolutely need CO2 to live, let alone thrive.

John Robson:

Carbon dioxide really is the magic gas that makes plants happen, the essential nutrient they need to grow. And here’s another cool detail. Plants get CO₂ from the air by opening pores on their leaf surfaces called stomata. But every time they open their stomata some water vapour escapes, which is bad. It’s a necessary tradeoff, but when CO₂ is more abundant in the air they don’t have to open their stomata as much which means they don’t lose as much water. So more CO₂ allows them to use water more efficiently and thus makes them more resilient to dryness including drought.

Narrator:

The current concentration of CO₂ in outdoor air, called the ambient level, is about 420 parts per million, up a little bit from 280 parts per million in the early 1800s, but still far lower than the levels over previous millions of years when plants evolved and flourished.

John Robson:

CO₂ is such a magic elixir for plants that commercial greenhouses call it a “growth turbo” and pump the stuff in. Typically, the government of the Canadian province of Ontario, when it’s not busy pumping out propaganda about the threat of “carbon pollution”, tells greenhouse operators that while the concentration of CO₂ in outdoor air is helpful for plants, “increasing the CO₂ level to 1,000 ppm will increase the photosynthesis by about 50% over ambient CO₂ levels.”

As for human beings, including those working in greenhouses, breathing air with 1,000 parts per million CO₂ isn’t remotely harmful. In fact, the air inside most buildings and cars gets that high after a few hours, because our own outgoing breath contains 40,000 parts per million of CO₂. Which viewers of the film Apollo 13 will recall is not safe to breathe in for any length of time, in fact safety standards generally advise against spending hours breathing in 10,000 parts per million, but again that a level enormously higher than ambient ones, or what you get inside a greenhouse.

Ah, and the other thing that commercial greenhouses do to help the plants, also relevant to this whole panic over the gentle warming associated with a rise in CO2, is heat the air and the water supply. Because cold, like drought, is deadly for plants. Life inside a greenhouse means warmer air, with more water and lots of CO₂. And that’s heaven if you’re a plant, or if you’re a person who likes to see plants thriving because you like looking at them, eating them, or both.

Narrator:

So why are so many politicians and activists telling us we have to go to Net Zero and beyond, and eliminate all our CO₂ emissions? The problem, they tell us, is that rising carbon dioxide levels can affect our planet’s climate system, mainly by causing it to warm slightly, and get a bit wetter in many places.

John Robson:

2. Suppose it’s true. What’s the problem? Isn’t warmer, wetter and more CO₂. good for plants? I understand why we’re supposed to reduce real air pollution like smog and sulphur dioxide: at high enough levels those things demonstrably do make us sick, foul the air and kill plants. But the stuff they’ve been calling “carbon pollution”, that is carbon dioxide, doesn’t affect air quality and it benefits plants.

So, do you get the feeling we’re not been told the whole story?

The fact is, the global warming alarm industry has spent decades hyping every possible harm that might arise from a little bit of warming, while covering up all the benefits for plants of extra CO₂. Anyone who survived high school biology could tell you that if atmospheric CO2 rises, whatever its other consequences, plants will do better.

But you won’t learn any of these things from the scientific bureaucrats at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Indeed, in a recent series on our own website, we went through all the IPCC Summaries for Policymakers and couldn’t find a single mention of the benefits for plants from rising CO₂.

Nor is it in the Technical Summaries or their Synthesis Reports. If you look at the full Assessment Reports, and you dig far enough past endless pages of doom and gloom and model-generated forecasts of misery and chaos, you can find one dense and confusing hint, deep in one of the technical chapters, that admits something positive might be happening, but not in such a way that they were hoping you’d notice it.

Narrator:

“In summary, there is high confidence that vegetation greenness (i.e., green leaf area and/or mass) has increased globally since the early 1980s.”

John Robson:

Why were they finally forced to admit the world is getting greener? Because truth is the tortoise that often starts slow but ultimately wins the race. Despite their best efforts to cover it up, it’s happening so much that it’s now even visible from space.

Narrator:

In 2016 an international group of scientists led by Zaichun Zhu of Peking University in China published a study using satellite data collected from 1982 to 2009 showing that between 25 and 50 percent of the Earth’s land surface had gotten greener, and that “CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend.”

The next year another team of scientists, also based at Peking University, confirmed that: “Satellite data show unequivocally that the land surface has been greening for the past 30 years, and that leaf area index (LAI) has increased by 8% globally.” They also reported that the extra plants were absorbing heat and counteracting some of the observed warming due to greenhouse gases.

In 2019 a third group of scientists from Peking University published another study showing that “Long-term satellite records reveal a significant global greening of vegetated areas since the 1980s, which recent data suggest has continued past 2010.” They said China and India showed especially strong greening, but it was happening all over the world, even in the Arctic. And they confirmed CO₂ was the main driver.

In fact, as yet another study published in 2019 by a team led by Australian scientist Vanessa Haverd showed, global plants were responding to the extra CO₂ much faster than scientists had expected. In fact the greening rate measured by satellites was “nearly twice as high as current estimates” derived from computer models. And in 2024 a team led by Xin Chen of Nanjing University in China published an updated analysis of satellite data that concluded, quite simply, “global greening is an indisputable fact.”

And despite expectations that it should be slowing down, “The rate of global greening increased slightly.”

John Robson:

So the CO₂-driven greening is so strong it’s been visible from space for at least a decade, it’s happening twice as fast as models predicted, it’s speeding up rather than slowing down and it’s happening even in the Arctic. Anything else the experts failed to mention? Oh yeah.

Narrator:

The extra CO₂ isn’t just making plants grow faster. It’s making them more efficient in their use of water. In 2017 a team of Australian scientists wrote: “Land plants are absorbing 17% more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere now than 30 years ago, our research published today shows. Equally extraordinary, our study also shows that the vegetation is hardly using any extra water to do it, suggesting that global change is causing the world’s plants to grow in a more water-efficient way.”

Because plants have rising water use efficiency, greening is especially strong in some of the driest areas of the planet, places where it’s hardest to scrape out a living farming. In fact, even though climate models predicted deserts would expand due to global warming, satellite data show the opposite is happening. A 2024 study concluded: “Future projections show continued increases in aridity due to climate change, suggesting that drylands will expand. In contrast, satellite observations indicate an increase in vegetation productivity.”

John Robson:

It’s all incredibly good news. At least nearly all. The bad news is that none of it’s mentioned in the IPCC summaries, nor in any other government reports on climate change that we’re aware of. The same governments and activists who constantly tell us to “follow the science” and fly around the world nonstop to never-ending conferences where they talk about climate change until they’re blue in the face from all the CO₂ they’re exhaling or blasting out of the aeroplane engines, haven’t seen fit to tell you that rising CO₂ is making our world greener and healthier.

And when I say healthier, I mean the people and the animals living on it. Because as noted, the benefits from global greening go beyond just having more pretty plants to look at: world food production is also rising because atmospheric CO₂ is rising.

Narrator:

Scientists have spent decades measuring the effect of CO₂ on plant growth. Thousands upon thousands of experiments in laboratories and outdoor field settings have reported remarkable benefits to food plants and crops of all kinds from higher CO₂ levels.

For instance, rice is the world’s most important food staple. About 11 percent of arable land around the world is used to grow it, and it makes up 20 percent of the daily calories for half the world’s population.

Scientists have used so-called Free Air CO₂ Enrichment, or FACE, experiments to measure how well rice responds in outdoor settings to local increases in the level of carbon dioxide. In a 2021 study that reviewed 160 FACE experiments conducted over 20 years, the authors concluded that elevated CO₂ levels had boosted rice growth on average by 16 percent. Furthermore, when researchers looked at hybrid varieties especially suited to the higher CO₂ levels, the growth increase was nearly 25 percent.

John Robson:

And it’s not just rice that benefits from extra CO₂. Take wheat for instance. The website CO2Science.org reports on 92 published experiments between 1983 and 2020 exposing wheat to enriched CO₂ levels. Converted to a +300ppm common scale the average growth boost was an incredible 67.6 percent. Which actually isn’t even surprising, let alone incredible, when you consider that the evolution of C4 photosynthesis around the beginning of the Oligocene some 34 million years ago, was an adaptive response to a long-term, sustained drop in atmospheric CO2 from the levels that most plants find comfortable. And back then it was still around 760 ppm. Plants need CO2. Lots of it. And when they get it, you see dramatic results.

Narrator:

And not just increased growth. They also exhibit increased resilience to heat. A 2016 study by a team of American and European scientists surveyed all available evidence regarding how wheat, maize, rice and soybean will grow under a combination of climate warming and rising CO₂ levels. They concluded that rapid warming would eventually have a negative effect on plant growth, but it would be fully compensated for by the extra CO₂ for wheat and soybean, and almost completely for rice and maize. What’s more, the plants become far more efficient in their water usage when there is more CO₂ in the air.

John Robson:

At this point we could spend hours telling you about study after study that shows extra CO₂ in the air benefits plants, trees, crops, greenery of all kinds. What fun we’d have. And I do want to give a shout-out to CO2Science.org here for its incredible work over the years, archiving vast amounts of experimental evidence about the benefits of CO₂ on plant growth. Which, frankly, is precisely the work the IPCC was meant to be doing.

But at a certain point, though, you might start thinking it’s redundant. Everybody knows CO2 is good for plants… don’t they? Well, just in case, we’ll tell you about one remarkable study that looks at agricultural productivity in the United States.

Narrator:

A 2021 report from the US National Bureau of Economic Research, by economists Charles Taylor and Wolfram Schlenker, used satellite-measured observations of outdoor CO₂ levels across the United States, matched to agricultural output data and other economic variables. After controlling for the effects of weather, local pollution and trends in technology the authors concluded that every 10 parts per million increase in CO₂ levels boosted corn yields by 5 percent, soybeans by 6 percent and wheat by 8 percent. These are much larger gains than had previously been estimated using FACE experiments. Altogether the authors concluded that since 1940 CO₂ emissions had boosted US crop production by an incredible 50 to 80 percent.

John Robson

So, can we please stop calling it “carbon pollution”? The fact is that carbon dioxide is a miracle gas that’s greening the planet, boosting food supplies and making plants more resilient to drought.

Now someone might object that it’s also causing warming, and they might say that if you look at both sides, and weigh the good and the bad, we might still decide it’s harmful. But the problem is that we haven’t been shown both sides. We’ve only been shown one side, and an exaggerated, cartoonish alarmist version of it at that.

There’s now plenty of evidence that CO2 isn’t having the warming effect alarmists warned about 20 years ago Not that a bit of warming would necessarily even be a bad thing. But climate models projected far too much, and they predicted scary trends in extreme weather that also failed to turn up. Meanwhile groups like the IPCC, and government environment ministries, completely covered up the great global greening miracle.

And if they change tactics and decide since they can’t hide it any more they’ll start talking about it, you can bet they’ll bend over backwards to find a downside and try to convince you it’s a bad thing.

You know, we keep hearing complaints in some quarters about how the general public has stopped trusting our established institutions, including the scientific ones. And if you’re wondering why, well, here’s a case where a lot of lavishly-funded science agencies spent years hiding the mounting evidence about global greening and the benefits of CO₂ emissions because it didn’t fit their political masters’ narrative about a climate crisis. So why should we trust them?

Instead, let’s trust the data, trust the evidence, and trust the plants themselves who are telling us loud and clear that they want more CO₂.

For the Climate Discussion Nexus, I’m John Robson and that’s our CDN “Crystal Ball” look into CO₂, the Great Global Greening and the dark wizards who tried to cover it up.