Throughout most of the succeeding years, this highly optimistic view of the biospheric consequences of the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content - and the great good it can do for humanity and nature alike - was largely ignored, as the world's climate alarmists took center stage with headline-grabbing predictions of catastrophic CO2-induced global warming and the host of disasters they contend it would cause. Now, however, enough has been learned to take Idso's upbeat view of the subject more seriously, in support of which statement we report the following information that has been developed from real-world observations and model projections of vegetative productivity made throughout the vast continent of Asia.

We begin with the modeling work of Liu et al. (2004), who derived detailed estimates of the economic impact of predicted climate change on agriculture in China, utilizing county-level agricultural, climate, social, economic and edaphic data for 1275 agriculture-dominated counties for the period 1985-1991, together with the outputs of three general circulation models of the atmosphere that were based on five different scenarios of anthropogenic CO2-induced climate change that yielded a mean countrywide temperature increase of 3.0°C and a mean precipitation increase of 3.9% for the 50-year period ending in AD 2050. In doing so, they determined that "all of China [our italics] would benefit [our italics] from climate change in most scenarios." In addition, they state that "the effects of CO2 fertilization should [also] be included, for some studies indicate that this may produce a significant increase in yield," an increase, we hasten to add, that is extremely well established (see our plant growth dry weight and photosynthesis data bases).

The great significance of these findings is readily grasped when it is realized, in Liu et al.'s words, that "China's agriculture has to feed more than one-fifth of the world's population, and, historically, China has been famine prone." As one example of this fact, they report that "as recently as the late 1950s and early 1960s a great famine claimed about thirty million lives (Ashton et al., 1984; Cambridge History of China, 1987)." Acting together, therefore, it is clear that the increases in China's agricultural production estimated to result from the direct effects of increased anthropogenic CO2 emissions plus the increases due to the changes in temperature and precipitation typically predicted to result from these emissions could well prove the deciding factor in determining whether China's population will or will not be able to adequately feed itself at the midpoint of the current century, which could well spell the difference between whether the world of that day will be peaceful or embroiled in conflict.

Moving from agro-ecosystems to natural ones, Su et al. (2004) used an ecosystem process model to explore the sensitivity of the net primary productivity (NPP) of an oak forest near Beijing (China) to the global climate changes projected to result from a doubling of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration from 355 to 710 ppm. The results of this work suggested that the aerial fertilization effect of the specified increase in the air's CO2 content would raise the forest's NPP by 14.0%, that a concomitant temperature increase of 2°C would boost the NPP increase to 15.7%, and that adding a 20% increase in precipitation would push the NPP increase all the way to 25.7%. Last of all, they calculated that a 20% increase in precipitation and a 4°C increase in temperature would also boost the forest's NPP by 25.7%.

In contrast to typical climate-alarmist contentions, therefore, it is clear that many projections of Asian ecosystem responses to potential increases in atmospheric CO2 and temperature are not catastrophically negative, even when the projected increases in air temperature are as large as the 4°C rise investigated by Su et al. In fact, as in the case of their analysis, many of the responses are positive, and strongly so. One of the reasons for this discrepancy between real-world fact and climate-alarmist fiction is that climate-alarmists typically disregard the many beneficial effects of concomitant atmospheric CO2 enrichment, including the ability of elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 to significantly increase plant growth and water use efficiency, as well as their tendency to alter the physiology of plants to where they actually prefer warmer temperatures, which phenomenon is expressed as a CO2-induced increase in the temperature at which plants photosynthesize most effectively.

Related evidence for the reality of these phenomena is discussed in our Editorial of 21 May 2003, where we describe the work of Grunzweig et al. (2003), who tell the tale of the Yatir forest (a 2800-hectare stand of Aleppo and other pine trees) that had been planted some 35 years earlier at the edge of the Negev Desert in Israel. An intriguing aspect of this particular forest, which they characterize as growing in poor soil of only 0.2 to 1.0 meter's depth above chalk and limestone, is that although it is located in an arid part of Asia that receives less annual precipitation than all of the other scores of FluxNet stations in the global network of micrometeorological tower sites that use eddy covariance methods to measure exchanges of CO2, water vapor and energy between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere (Baldocchi et al., 2001), the forest's annual net ecosystem CO2 exchange was just as high as that of many high-latitude boreal forests and actually higher than that of most temperate forests.

How could this possibly be?

Grunzweig et al. note that the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration that has occurred since pre-industrial times should have improved water use efficiency (WUE) in most plants by increasing the ratio of CO2 fixed to water lost via evapotranspiration. That this hypothesis is indeed correct has been demonstrated by Leavitt et al. (2003) within the context of the long-term atmospheric CO2 enrichment experiment of Idso and Kimball (2001) on sour orange trees. It has also been confirmed in nature by Feng (1999), who obtained identical (to the study of Leavitt et al.) CO2-induced WUE responses for 23 groups of naturally-occurring trees scattered across western North America over the period 1800-1985, which response, Feng concludes, "would have caused natural trees in arid environments to grow more rapidly, acting as a carbon sink for anthropogenic CO2," which is exactly what Grunzweig et al. found to be happening in the Yatir forest on the edge of the Negev Desert. In addition, the latter researchers report that "reducing water loss in arid regions improves soil moisture conditions, decreases water stress and extends water availability," which "can indirectly increase carbon sequestration by influencing plant distribution, survival and expansion into water-limited environments."

In light of these several observations, it is only natural to expect that as atmospheric CO2 concentrations and air temperatures rise hand-in-hand, both natural and agro-ecosystems would exhibit ever-increasing rates of net primary production ... and so they do, as has been demonstrated by a number of data-driven studies.

Based primarily on satellite-derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data, Zhou et al. (2001) found that from July 1981 to December 1999, between 40 and 70° N latitude, there was a persistent increase in growing season vegetative productivity in excess of 12% over a broad contiguous swath of Asia stretching from Europe through Siberia to the Aldan plateau, where almost 58% of the land is forested. And in a companion study, Bogaert et al. (2002) determined that this productivity increase occurred at a time when this vast Asian region showed an overall warming trend "with negligible occurrence of cooling."

In another study that also included a portion of Europe, Lapenis et al. (2005) analyzed trends in forest biomass in all 28 ecoregions of the Russian territory, based on data collected from 1953 to 2002 within 3196 sample plots comprised of about 50,000 entries, which database, in their words, "contains all available archived and published data." This work revealed that over the period 1961-1998, as they describe it, "aboveground wood, roots, and green parts increased by 4%, 21%, and 33%, respectively," such that "the total carbon density of the living biomass stock of the Russian forests increased by ~9%." They also report there was a concomitant increase of ~11% in the area of Russian forests. In addition, the team of US, Austrian and Russian scientists reported that "within the range of 50-65° of latitude [the range of 90% of Russian forests], the relationship between biomass density and the area-averaged NDVI is very close to a linear function, with a slope of ~1," citing the work of Myneni et al. (2001). Therefore, as they continue, "changes in the carbon density of live biomass in Russian forests occur at about the same rate as the increase in the satellite-based estimate in the seasonally accumulated NDVI," which observation strengthens the findings of all satellite-based NDVI studies.

Returning to China for several concluding reports, we begin with the work of Brogaard et al. (2005), who studied the dry northern and northwestern regions of the country - including the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR) - which had been thought to have experienced declining vegetative productivity over the past few decades due to "increasing livestock numbers, expansion of cultivated land on erosive soils and the gathering of fuel wood and herb digging," which practices were believed to have been driven by rising living standards, which in combination with a growing population were assumed to have increased the pressure on these marginal lands. In the case of increasing grazing, for example, Brogaard et al. note that the total number of livestock in the IMAR increased from approximately 46 million head in 1980 to about 71 million in 1997.

To better assess the seriousness of this supposedly "ongoing land degradation process," as they describe it, the researchers adapted a satellite-driven parametric model, originally developed for Sahelian conditions, to the central Asian steppe region of the IMAR by including "additional stress factors and growth efficiency computations." The applied model, in their words, "uses satellite sensor-acquired reflectance in combination with climate data to generate monthly estimates of gross primary production." To their great surprise, this work revealed that "despite a rapid increase in grazing animals on the steppes of the IMAR for the 1982-1999 period," their model estimates did "not [our italics] indicate declining biological production."

Clearly, some strong positive influence compensated for the increased human and animal pressures on the lands of the IMAR over the period of Brogaard et al.'s study. In this regard, they mention the possibility of increasing productivity on the agricultural lands of the IMAR, but they note that crops are grown on "only a small proportion of the total land area." Other potential contributing factors they mention are "an increase in precipitation, as well as afforestation projects." Two things that are not mentioned are the aerial fertilization effect and the transpiration-reducing effect of the increase in the air's CO2 concentration that was experienced over the study period. Applied together, the sum of these several positive influences (and possibly others that remain unknown) was demonstrably sufficient to keep plant productivity from declining in the face of greatly increasing animal and human pressures on the lands of the IMAR from 1982 to 1999.

Also working in an area not expected to show a positive response to the "twin evils" of rising air temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations, Piao et al. (2005a) used a time series of NDVI data from 1982 to 1999, together with precipitation and temperature data, to investigate variations of desert area in China by "identifying the climatic boundaries of arid area and semiarid area, and changes in NDVI in these areas." In doing so, they discovered that "average rainy season NDVI in arid and semiarid regions both increased significantly during the period 1982-1999." Specifically, they found that the NDVI increased for 72.3% of total arid regions and for 88.2% of total semiarid regions, such that the area of arid regions decreased by 6.9% and the area of semiarid regions decreased by 7.9%. They also report that by analyzing Thematic Mapper satellite images, "Zhang et al. (2003) documented that the process of desertification in the Yulin area, Shannxi Province showed a decreased trend between 1987 and 1999," and that "according to the national monitoring data on desertification in western China (Shi, 2003), the annual desertification rate decreased from 1.2% in the 1950s to -0.2% at present."

Further noting that "variations in the vegetation coverage of these regions partly affect the frequency of sand-dust storm occurrence (Zou and Zhai, 2004)," Piao et al. concluded that "increased vegetation coverage in these areas will likely fix soil, enhance its anti-wind-erosion ability, reduce the possibility of released dust, and consequently cause a mitigation of sand-dust storms." Interestingly, in this regard, they report that "recent studies have suggested that the frequencies of strong and extremely strong sand-dust storms in northern China have significantly declined from the early 1980s to the end of the 1990s (Qian et al., 2002; Zhao et al., 2004)." Hence, it would appear that the dreaded climatic change claimed to have been experienced by the globe over the latter part of the 20th century was either (1) not so dreaded after all or (2) totally dwarfed by opposing phenomena that significantly benefited China, as its lands grew ever greener during this period and its increased vegetative cover helped to stabilize its soils and throw feared desertification into reverse.

Continuing in much the same vein, Piao et al. (2006) investigated vegetation net primary production (NPP) derived from a carbon model (Carnegie-Ames-Stanford approach, CASA) and its interannual change in the Qinghai-Xizang (Tibetan) Plateau using 1982-1999 NDVI data and paired ground-based information on vegetation, climate, soil, and solar radiation. This work revealed that over the entire study period, NPP rose at a mean annual rate of 0.7%. However, Piao et al. report that "the NPP trends in the plateau over the two decades were divided into two distinguished periods: without any clear trend from 1982 to 1990 and significant increase from 1991 to 1999."

The three researchers say their findings suggest that "vegetation growth on the plateau in the 1990s has been much enhanced compared to that in [the] 1980s, consistent with the trend in the northern latitudes indicated by Schimel et al. (2001)." In addition, they say that "previous observational and NPP modeling studies have documented substantial evidence that terrestrial photosynthetic activity has increased over the past two to three decades in the middle and high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere," and that "satellite-based NDVI data sets for the period of 1982-1999 also indicate consistent trends of NDVI increase," citing multiple references in support of each of these statements. Piao et al.'s findings, therefore, add to the growing body of evidence that reveals a significant "greening of the earth" is occurring in response to (1) the ongoing recovery of the planet from the growth-inhibiting chill of the Little Ice Age, which was likely the coldest period of the current interglacial, plus (2) the aerial fertilization effect of the historical and still-ongoing rise in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration, as well as (3) the growth-promoting effect of anthropogenic nitrogen deposition.

Applying the same techniques, Fang et al. (2003) looked at the whole of China, finding that its terrestrial NPP increased by 18.7% between 1982 and 1999. Referring to this result as "an unexpected aspect of biosphere dynamics," they say that this increase "is much greater than would be expected to result from the fertilization effect of elevated CO2, and also greater than expected from climate, based on broad geographic patterns."

But is this really so?

From 1982 to 1999, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration rose by approximately 27.4 ppm. Based on the procedures and reasoning described in our Editorial of 18 Sep 2002, the aerial fertilization effect of this CO2 increase could be expected to have increased the NPP of the conglomerate of forest types found in China by about 7.3%. But this increase is only a part of the total NPP increase we could expect, for Fang et al. note that "much of the trend in NPP appeared to reflect a change towards an earlier growing season," which was driven by the 1.1°C increase in temperature they found to have occurred in their region of study between 1982 and 1999.

Following this lead, we learn from the study of White et al. (1999) - which utilized 88 years of data (1900-1987) that were obtained from 12 different locations within the eastern U.S. deciduous forest that stretches from Charleston, SC (32.8°N latitude) to Burlington, VT (44.5°N latitude) - that a 1°C increase in mean annual air temperature increases the length of the forest's growing season by approximately five days. In addition, White et al. determined that a one-day extension in growing season length increased the mean forest NPP of the 12 sites they studied by an average of 1.6%. Hence, we could expect an additional NPP increase due to the warming-induced growing season expansion experienced in China from 1982 to 1999 of 1.6%/day x 5 days = 8.0%, which brings the total CO2-induced plus warming-induced increase in NPP to 15.3%.

Last of all, we note there is a well-documented positive synergism between increasing air temperature and CO2 concentration (Idso and Idso, 1994), such that the 1°C increase in temperature experienced in China between 1982 and 1999 could easily boost the initial CO2-induced 7.3% NPP enhancement to the 10.7% enhancement that when combined with the 8.0% enhancement caused by the warming-induced increase in growing season length would produce the 18.7% increase in NPP detected in the satellite data.

In view of these observations, the findings of Fang et al. are seen to be right in line with what would be expected to result from the increases in air temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration that occurred between 1982 and 1999 in China: a dramatically stimulated terrestrial biosphere that is growing ever more productive with each passing year. This is the true observed consequence of the "twin evils" of the radical climate-alarmist movement (rising CO2 and temperature); and it is about as opposite and far removed as one can get from the horror stories this group promulgates, i.e., that the increases in these two factors are greater threats to the well-being of the biosphere, including humanity, than either nuclear warfare or world terrorism.

Analyzing the same set of data still further, Piao et al. (2005b) say their results suggest that "terrestrial NPP in China increased at a rate of 0.015 Pg C yr^-1 over the period 1982-1999, corresponding to a total increase of 18.5%, or 1.03% annually." They also found that "during the past 2 decades the amplitude of the seasonal curve of NPP has increased and the annual peak NPP has advanced," which they say "may indirectly explain the enhanced amplitude and advanced timing of the seasonal cycle of atmospheric CO2 concentration (Keeling et al., 1996)," the former of which phenomena they further suggest "was probably due to the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration, elevated temperature, and increased atmospheric N and P deposition," while the latter phenomenon they attribute to "advanced spring onset and extended autumn growth owing to climate warming." We are in basic agreement on most of these points, but note that the advanced onset of what may be called biological spring is also fostered by the ultra-enhancement of early spring growth that is provided by the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 concentration (see Trees (Early Spring Growth) in our Subject Index).

Citing a total of 20 scientific papers at various places in the following quote from their research report, Piao et al. conclude that "results from observed atmospheric CO2 and O2 concentrations, inventory data, remote sensing data, and carbon process models have all suggested that terrestrial vegetation NPP of the Northern Hemisphere has increased over the past 2 decades and, as a result, the northern terrestrial ecosystems have become important sinks for atmospheric CO2." Again, we agree, and again we wonder what there is about these very impressive positive observations that inspire radical environmentalists to classify the twin evils of rising atmospheric CO2 and temperature as worse than nuclear warfare and global terrorism.

In conclusion, it would appear that rather than devastating the landscape, the historical increases in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration and temperature have actually fostered a significant greening of the earth, including that observed throughout the length and breadth of Asia.

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