Sneers and insults were the response de rigeur from the uninformed to Tony Abbott’s speech a couple of days ago to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, in which he made the point that modest warming such as the earth has experienced since 1850 (uncontested) as the planet came out of the Little Ice Age, has beneficial outcomes.   

Critics of this are obviously in denial of the science. Back in April 2016, Peking University released a study representing the most comprehensive modelling of remote sensing data so far shows the area on Earth covered by plants in the last 30 years has increased by 18 million square kilometres — about 2.5 times the size of the Australian continent — largely due to the fertilising effect of carbon dioxide. ‘[The greening] has the ability to fundamentally change the cycling of water and carbon in the climate system,’ said Dr Zaichun Zhu, from Peking University, lead author of the study. It’s not exactly a secret, either; indeed it was reported on the left’s bible, ABC News, on April 26 last year. 

The CO2 bogey, rather than a dangerous trace gas in the atmosphere, is in fact the benign gas actively greening the planet, not harming it. What is harming it blind ideology running hot. 

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