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Three Decades of Global Vegetation Land Cover Change
Volume 17, Number 34: 20 August 2014

One of the very best indicators of the health of earth's biosphere is the amount of vegetation that covers the terrestrial surface of the globe; and, therefore, it is instructive to see how this property of the planet has varied over the period of time that it has been possible to measure it by means of earth-orbiting satellites.

Working with Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data obtained by the Global Inventory Monitoring and Modeling Systems (GIMMS) group at the Laboratory for Terrestrial Physics from July 1981 to December 2011 (Tucker et al., 2005), Wu et al. (2014) calculated the history of the globe's Fractional Vegetation Cover (FVC) change over this 30-year period, when the atmosphere's CO2 concentration rose at an historic pace and the world's climate alarmists continually claimed that the earth was experiencing unprecedented deleterious global warming and various undesirable changes in extreme weather phenomena that were supposedly harming almost everything imaginable.

When their analysis was completed, however, the seven Chinese scientists reported something quite different, namely, that all of the world's continents - excepting Oceania - had experienced positive change in FVC, which represents biomass production. More specifically, they found that the most significant changes were in pixels turning green for the last three decades, when 1.8% of the pixels had negative trends and 13.56% had positive trends in annual FVCmax, and when 2.28% had negative trends and 14.36% had positive trends in annual FVCmean.

As for what this all meant, Wu et al. simply stated the obvious, when they wrote that "the global vegetation had turned green in the last 30 years," much as had been predicted to occur several years earlier in two biologically-prophetic videos: The Greening of Planet Earth (1992) and The Greening of Planet Earth Continues (1998), both of which can be viewed at www.youtube.com.

Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso

References
Tucker, C.J., Pinzon, J.E., Brown, M.E., Slayback, D.A., Pak, E.W, Mahoney, R., Vermote, E.F. and Saleous, N. 2005. An extended AVHRR 8-km NDVI dataset compatible with MODIS and SPOT vegetation NDVI data. International Journal of Remote Sensing 26: 4485-4498.

Wu,D., Wu, H., Zhao, X., Zhou, T., Tang, B., Zhao, W. and Jia, K. 2014. Evaluation of spatiotemporal variations of global fractional vegetation cover based on GIMMS NDVI data from 1982-2011. Remote Sensing 6: 4217-4239.