Earth is becoming GREENER,

not BROWNER due to climate change
oh...the HORROR
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It’s hard to say how many punny posts we came up with using those words when Carol Browner was Bill Clinton’s EPA Administrator, but here we use it in the context of a recent Science paper by J-F. Busteri and 30 named coauthors assisted by 239 volunteers. It found, looking at global drylands (about 40% of land areas fall into this category), that we had undercounted global forest cover by a whopping “at least 9%”.

239 people were required to examine over 210,000 0.5 hectare (1.2 acre) sample plots in GoogleEarth, and classify the cover as open or forested. Think of being condemned to looking at that many satellite views of real estate.

This has been the subject of a jillion recent stories, blog posts, tweets and whatever concerning Bastin et al. So let’s add a bit more value here.

Last year, Zaichin Zhu and 31 coauthors published a remarkable analysis of global vegetation change since satellite sensors became operational in the late 1970s. The vast majority of the globe’s vegetated area is greening, with 25-50% of that area showing a statistically significant change, while only 4% of the vegetated area is significantly browning. Here’s the mind-boggling map: