More Evidence Global Greening Driven By CO2 Fertilization
“Our results showed that the global greening was still present in 2001–2020, with 55.15 percent of areas greening at an accelerated rate…compared with 7.28 percent of browning.” – Chen et al., 2024
The CO2 fertilization effect has been dominant driver of the global-scale increase in “leaf area index” (LAI), or greening, since the 1980s.
Scientists have estimated that CO2’s photosynthesis-enhancing capacity is 70 percent responsible for the greening trend (Zhu et al., 2016).
Using Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data sources of questionable quality, some recent studies have suggested the greening trend has slowed or has even been reversed to browning since the 21st century began.
As suggested, these data sources “should be used in caution” (Chen et al., 2024) as it is “well known that AVHRR-based NDVI and LAI have multiple sources of uncertainty,” such as “obvious artificial signals from the orbital drift.”
Using much more reliable MODIS data, scientists (Chen et al., 2024) can now say the LAI trend in the 21st century is robustly positive, and that 2001-2020 “global greening is an indisputable fact.”
CO2 fertilization is still the dominant (75.63 percent) driver of Earth’s 21st century greening trend.
Any drought trends in recent decades cannot overtake the positive CO2 fertilization effect, as all drought can do is slightly slow down the acceleration of the CO2-induced greening trend.
Image Source: Chen et al., 2024
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