Matt Ridley on the greening planet

Many of us had serious doubts about the talk claiming that lots of cows will green the deserts. On the other hand, I have almost no doubts about the main points in this 19-minute talk:



Via Bernhard Jordan

The increased CO2 levels, higher efficiency of agriculture in general, and fertilizers in particular allowed the planet to become greener than before.




Matt Ridley offers lots of geographic examples. He also mentions that only nine species that weren't confined to islands (plus Australia) have gone extinct due to humans in the last 500 years. The deceleration of extinctions reflects the main reason why the species were going extinct in the first place: people were just killing them. Quite often, they were doing so for a reason. Environmentalists are not the only reason why we're not doing these things so often today. The existence of artificial replacements is arguably more important.




Other particular examples of the greening of the Earth and of the expanding life come from Sahel, Amazon forest, the U.K., the U.S. East Coast, Svalbard, and others including the island that hosts both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Haiti is the brown, ugly, and lifeless part of the island because it's been crippled by the "renewable" scumbags.

The technological and industrial development isn't the culprit here: it's part of the solution. Do you agree?