Greening Without CO2? More Selective Science
15 hours ago Charles Rotter
In their lengthy and data-rich paper, Mishra et al. (2025) examine the notable “greening” of India’s Thar Desert from 2001 to 2023. They credit this transformation to a combination of increased monsoon rainfall and human-driven groundwater irrigation. Precipitation is said to contribute 45% to this greening, and groundwater pumping 55%. While this allocation of credit is intriguing, what’s truly shocking is what’s not mentioned at all: CO2 fertilization.
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-sustainability/fulltext/S2949-7906(25)00060-6Not once in the entire 11,000+ word document does the term “carbon dioxide,” “CO₂,” or even “fertilization” appear. This is despite the well-documented global evidence that increased atmospheric CO₂ boosts plant growth by enhancing photosynthesis and improving water-use efficiency. As Piao et al. (2019) noted in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, “Vegetation models suggest that CO2 fertilization is the main driver of greening on the global scale”. That fact seems to have escaped the attention of this research team.
The Thar Desert, a dryland environment with historically marginal vegetation, is precisely the kind of region where CO2 fertilization effects would be most potent. Plants under water-limited conditions often respond more vigorously to elevated CO2 because they can photosynthesize more with less stomatal opening, reducing water loss. Yet somehow, in a paper that examines vegetation dynamics down to the pixel level, CO2’s role is invisible.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/04/12/greening-without-co2-more-selective-science/
