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Dr Jordan Peterson claims burning fossil fuels is GOOD for environment because it's making the planet 'greener'... what's the truth?
World-renowned psychologist and culture war crusader Dr Jordan Peterson is not afraid to voice his opinions — however unpopular they may be.
The Canadian academic has been both praised and criticized for his take on trans medical issues, COVID-19 travel restrictions and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
But his latest claim might be the most contrarian yet.
In a podcast with UK politician Nigel Farage this week, Dr Peterson said burning fossil fuels was good for the environment.
'The influx of carbon dioxide from the fossil fuel industry into the atmosphere,' he said, 'is actually a net ecological good.'
Dr Peterson pointed to NASA data that showed some parts of the planet are thriving: 'In the last 20 years alone, the planet has greened by an area factor of 20 percent,' he said during Wednesday's podcast.
On his DailyWire+ program Dr Jordan Peterson told Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage this week that 'in the last 20 years alone, the planet has greened by an area factor of 20 percent'
'This is straight-up NASA data,' Dr Peterson said. 'I'm not making any of this up.'
'Not only has it got greener, and a lot greener, the places that got greener were primarily semi-arid areas,' Dr Peterson said, 'in fact, exactly the areas that the climate doomsayers said would turn into outright desert.'
'My view as a scientist who is capable of assessing data,' the psychologist said, 'is that... the planet is actually in a pretty severe carbon dioxide drought.'
Despite pervasive global warming doctrine, a small but growing number of experts have spoken out against what they say is climate alarmism.
Some, like Cambridge professor Mike Hulme, believe climate change is real, but that an overemphasis on curbing greenhouse gases has warped political priorities.
But few have claimed that the fossil fuel industry has been a net positive for nature.
DailyMail.com reached out to the scientists behind the NASA data alluded to by Dr Peterson.
Their past and present responses offer a far different take on that data.
Researchers with NASA's Ames Research Center and other scientists who work with the agency's satellite sensors, for example, did not attribute this greening of the desert or other 'semi-arid areas' to those regions' plants starving for the carbon dioxide released by fossil fuels.
'The effect comes mostly from ambitious tree-planting programs in China,' according to Abby Tabor, a spokesperson for NASA Ames.
The discovery was first made public in 2019, when NASA Ames released images from the US space agency's Terra and Aqua satellites which showed that large swaths of the Asian country had become 16 percent greener between 2000 and 2017.
For over two decades, both satellites have been in orbit equipped with MODIS, a sensitive tool for measuring the wavelengths of reflected sunlight and solar energy.
NASA satellite data has shown that that China alone contributed an estimated 25 percent to the global net increase in green leafy area. 'The effect comes mostly from ambitious tree-planting programs in China,' according to Abby Tabor, a spokesperson for NASA Ames
China's concerted geoengineering project had been, in part, a response to the expanding Gobi desert to its northeast, a spread hastened by climate change.
'Once people realize there is a problem,' as NASA climate scientist Dr Rama Nemani put it, 'they tend to fix it.'
Dr Nemani specialized in remote sensing and ecological forecasting at NASA Ames for 18 years before his retirement in 2021, and coauthored a paper on both China and India's sprawling greening efforts for the journal Nature Sustainability in 2019.
He and his colleagues found that China alone contributed an estimated 25 percent to the global net increase in green leafy area.
But while China's reforestation efforts have greatly helped to combat air pollution, soil erosion and desertification within its own borders, their efforts alone have not been nearly enough to undo all the damage wrought by climate change.
Earth has witnessed to two simultaneous events in the era of fossil fuel consumption: 'greening' areas, some caused by nature overtaking retreating glaciers, and 'browning' areas, often the scorching death of plants near the equator.
But Dr. Nemani and his co-authors found that the majority these new green areas referred to by Dr Peterson's '20 percent' increase figure 'overlap with croplands.'
Their study put numbers to what NASA called 'intensive agriculture' projects in both China and India, which they found increased food production 35 percent since the year 2000, via improved groundwater irrigation infrastructure and fertilizer use.
'In the 1970s and '80s in India and China, the situation around vegetation loss was not good,' Dr Nemani said.
'In the 1990s, people realized it, and today things have improved,' he said. 'Humans are incredibly resilient. That's what we see in the satellite data.'
After a boom in natural greening due to greenhouse gasses in the 1980s and '90s, rising temperatures have now cancelled that out in the 21st Century, an international team of scientists found in 2019. Top, satellite data shows a flourishing in vegetation from 1982-1998
Above, satellite data shows the dramatic retreat or 'browning' of global vegetation from 1999-2015. Researchers said that rising temperature's effect on atmospheric water vapor has created an atmospheric vapor pressure deficit (VPD) that's killing plant's through dehydration
But a more recent study by an international team of scientists indicates that any of the benefits to global vegetation due to either China and India's agricultural revolution or to carbon dioxide emissions have now taken a sharp turn for the worse.
After a boom in natural greening due to greenhouse gasses in the 1980s and '90s, rising temperatures have now cancelled that out in the 21st Century, they wrote.
The 'browning' trend — according to these researchers from the US, UK, France, China, South Korea, Switzerland, Germany and Japan — was documented via global satellite data also derived from NASA's MODIS.
Their study, published in the journal Science Advances, showed a flourishing in vegetation from the years 1982-1998 that took a dramatic retreat from 1999-2015.
As one of the study's lead authors, ecologist Dr Wenping Yuan from Peking University, told Newsweek, the mystery of this global plant death was hard to explain based on just temperature increases alone.
Above, an aerial view of a forest fire in the Encontro das Aguas park in the Pantanal wetlands in Brazil on November 19, 2023. The severe drought in much of Brazil last year was caused by climate change and the expansion of agricultural crops, experts have said
'We noticed global vegetation growth decreases starting from the late 1990s. We tried to search for the causes [by looking at] temperature, precipitation and radiation,' Yuan said. 'However, we failed to find strong evidence.'
The solution turned out to be the rising temperature's effect on atmospheric water vapor, which has created an atmospheric 'vapor pressure deficit' (VPD) that is literally killing plants through dehydration.
'Basically, if the water potential is larger in the atmosphere — i.e. VPD is larger — water will dissipate faster from the soil and plants,' Yuan said.
'It's like there's a pump in the air, and the pump extracts the water from the soil and plants via the vascular tissue. When the VPD increases,' the ecologist said, 'then the pump extracts the water faster and stronger.'
NOAA estimated that the global average for carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere has cleared 419.3 ppm. 'The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts were this high was roughly 3 million years ago, during the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period,' NOAA's Global Monitoring Lab
Dr Peterson said that he based his assessment an epochal 'carbon dioxide drought' on 'historical standards over periods of millions of years, instead of thousands.'
But data collected from air bubbles trapped deep within mile-thick ice core samples and other paleoclimate evidence appear to dispute this view.
'During the ice age cycles of the past million years or so,' according to reports by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 'atmospheric carbon dioxide never exceeded 300 ppm [parts per million].'
'The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts were this high was roughly 3 million years ago,' NOAA's Global Monitoring Lab assessed, 'during the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period.'
NOAA estimated that the global average for carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere as of 2023 has cleared 419.3 ppm.
The agency noted that this was a 50 percent increase since the Industrial Revolution began in the mid-1700s, when carbon dioxide levels were at just 280 ppm or less.
China's re-greening dates back to 1978 with an ambitious military program set to plant 100 billion trees across the country by 2050. Above, condos in 'Forest City,' a development project launched under China's Belt and Road Initiative in Malaysia photographed in September 2023
Wednesday's commentary was not the first time Dr Peterson's analysis on climate change and carbon emissions have brought him into conflict with US government's climate scientists, however.
After his 2022 appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt blasted Dr Peterson for not knowing 'what the heck a climate model is.'
For his part, Dr Peterson has accused his critics of being 'informed by the Club of Rome 'overpopulation' doomsayers,' in reference to the European non-profit group which he believes has engaged in an agenda-driven disinformation campaign.
But it remains unclear how, if at all, a European nonprofit with annual revenue well under 2 million euros would manage to influence a US agency like NASA whose annual budget hovers in the billions, with $34.14 billion earmarked for 2024.
To judge from NASA's own scientists, much of the world's successful 're-greening' has been the consequence of two of the world's largest countries by land mass, China and India, undertaking expensive, state-sanctioned efforts to grow vegetation.
As DailyMail.com reported in 2014, China's re-greening dates back to 1978 with the ambitious military program to plant 100 billion trees across the country by 2050.
Dubbed the Three-North Shelter Forest Program, or more commonly 'the Great Green Wall,' part of the project was to construct large strips of woodland to halt the expansion of the Gobi Desert, whose expansion has caused damaging dust storms.
Some of China's cities, such as Beijing (shown in 2021), have spent years ravaged by dust storms that make their way South from the Gobi desert. China bet big on the idea that a 'Great Green Wall' tree-planting project will improve the quality of life for people in these cities
For decades the Gobi Desert has been advancing and causing serious dust storms to key cities
In 2018, in fact, a large detachment of China's People's Liberation Army, along with members of the armed police force, were withdrawn from their posts on the northern border to work on these non-military tasks inland.
Contrary to the notion that the burning fossil fuels aided this process, which might have been true in the 1980s and '90s, any more carbon [CO2] emissions can only undermine these Manhattan Project-like greening efforts.
'The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will increase if other conditions do not change,' as Dr Yuan put it, 'which will result in a stronger greenhouse gas effect.'
'Decreased rates of vegetation growth will reduce vegetation biomass inland—including crop yields, herbage yields, forest biomass stock, etc. — which will reduce the supply to human society.'