It’s important to remember on Earth Day that it’s unlikely trees are going extinct, despite recent concerns made by green researchers.
Environmentalists and conservationists helped spur a grassroots campaign in the 1970s helping to create Earth Day, in part over concerns trees would become extinct as a result of so-called man-made global warming.
Studies have issued dire warning about tree’s chances of survival in the age of man-made global warming.
One climate study conducted by the University of Delaware in 2015 and published in the journal of Nature Climate Change, for instance, issued a warning to public policy makers and environmentalists.
If global warming is not scaled back soon, the study’s authors argue, then the world should expect to see the death of 72 percent of needle leaf evergreens in the Southwest by 2050. That number would increase to 100 percent by 2100, the study states.
Analysts, however, argue the fear of these mass tree extinction is exaggerated.
“On the whole, I’d say the world’s forests and trees are in very good health,” Chip Knappenberger, a long-time climatologist and current assistant director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“There have been concerns that trees and other forestation would dwindle, but satellites show the Earth is actually greening at higher rates than in years past,” Knappenberger said, adding also that it’s important to note that trees actually thrive in conditions where there’s more carbon in the air.
Other climate researches share Knappenberger’s viewpoint.
Craig Idso, chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, for instance, noted in a 2016 study that If the Earth’s temperature were to rise dramatically in the future, then all would not be lost as “tree species have been shown to acclimate to changes in temperature.”
Idso’s research goes on to state that in fact “the optimum temperature for plant growth generally rises,” in a carbon enriched environment.
And in 2013, Randall Donohue, a research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia, published research showing very similar findings to those found by Idso and others.
Donohue used satellite images and found the Earth is greening, which seemingly runs counter to arguments made by environmentalist activist that global warming is causing mass droughts and tree and plant death.
“Lots of papers have shown an average increase in vegetation across the globe, and there is a lot of speculation about what’s causing that,” Donohue noted a press release.
He added: “Up until this point, they’ve linked the greening to fairly obvious climatic variables, such as a rise in temperature where it is normally cold or a rise in rainfall where it is normally dry.”
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