Global Rain Forests: Instead of Shrinking, Rain Forests are Thriving on Increased CO2

Despite the best efforts of Brazilian loggers and Indonesian oil-seed plantations, global rainforests are not shrinking. Perhaps rain forests like all the CO2 in the atmosphere.

“The picture is far more complicated than previously thought,” he said. “If there is no long-term net decline it suggests that deforestation is being accompanied by a lot of natural reforestation that we have not spotted.”

Dr Grainger first examined data published every 10 years by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) since 1980. These cover all forest in the humid and dry tropics and appear to indicate decline. FAO's Global Forest Resources Assessment 2000, for example, showed that all tropical forest area fell from 1,926 million hectares to 1,799 million hectares between 1990 and 2000. Ten years earlier, however, FAO’s previous report said that tropical forest area fell from 1,910 million ha to 1,756 million ha for the same 90 countries between 1980 and 1990.

Eurekalert

Can you imagine? The rain forests keep losing the same 150 million ha of rainforest every ten years! I suppose there is a "reset button" somewhere. Satellite images suggest an overall increase in earth's forest cover.

Since errors in national statistics are higher for forests in the dry tropics than for forests in the humid tropics, in places near the Equator such as Amazonia, Borneo and the Congo Basin, he repeated the process just for tropical moist forest, with a different set of data, in the hope it would give a clearer picture. This time he found no evidence for decline since the early 1970s. Indeed, while his own estimate in 1983 of tropical moist forest area in 1980 was 1,081 million hectares, the latest satellite data led to an estimate of 1,181 million hectares for the same 63 countries in 2000.

Eurekalert via Global Warming Politics

The clueless mainstream media continues to barrage a hapless public with disaster stories of rain forest devastation accompanied by catastrophic human-caused global warming.

There may be cause for hope that the public debate on climate and the environment may be opening up slightly--thanks to the internet. A new website, Climate Debate Daily, is now presenting up to date pro-IPCC releases and dissenting voice news releases side by side. While the climate orthodoxy will see this opening debate as a serious threat, open-minded and intelligent people will see it as an opportunity to weigh the facts openly and fairly.

H/T Tom Nelson