In the latest issue of the journal Nature for August 2018, a new and highly unusual study was published by a group of American biologists and climatologists. This study is devoted to monitoring the planet's vegetation over the period, as stated by the authors, 1982-2016. In other words, scientists tried to figure out how the planet changed when viewed from the air over a period of 35 years.
The results were rather strange and very contradictory, which caused a storm of discussions of the article both in the social networks of climatologists and biologists, and in specific forums. However, first, let's retell the general essence of the study.
Using daily satellite observations obtained with the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), a team of scientists (Song, XP, Hansen, MC, Stehman, SV, Potapov, PV, Tyukavina, A., Vermote, EF, & Townshend, JR) has developed a special mathematical coefficient VCF (vegetation continuous fields) that reflects continuous vegetation fields on the planet's surface:
VCF, that is, the logarithmic coefficient of the amount of light reflected by the green cover of the planet and captured by the radiometer, has three spectral regions:
TC (tree canopy), showing places where there is tall vegetation with crowns (forests and jungle);
SV (short vegetation) showing places where low vegetation is present (shrubs, grass, agricultural fields);
BG (bare ground) showing places where nothing grows.
Promotional video:
For 35 years, the dynamics were as follows:
As the infographics proposed by the researchers clearly show, for the period 1982-2016. the forest area increased by 2.24 million square kilometers, which is an increase of + 7.1% compared to the 1982 level. At the same time, the official ecology has been confident for many years that the forests on the planet are on the verge of extinction.
In principle, the TC coefficient partially confirms that forests do die out in some places in the tropics, but in the middle and northern latitudes, forests grow (green pixels), and at a rate of much more than 7.1%, since this figure is obtained by subtracting forests that die in south (pink pixels) from forest growth in the north.
The second important observation that the network community made, but which escaped the attention of the adepts who created the scientific work, is … the Brazilian magnetic anomaly. The densest pink VCF pixels (places of forest disappearance) lie in the center of South America and southern Africa, that is, exactly where a new magnetic dipole is forming under the lithosphere:
This can be explained in two ways: either the magnetic anomaly is the cause of the death of trees, or the magnetic anomaly interferes with the work of the AVHRR (the radiometer on the satellite that collected the data).
However, there are also contradictions in this new study that are completely inexplicable. As stated by the authors (and highlighted in bold here), in their work they used daily satellite observations obtained with the help of an improved highly sensitive radiometer. Hence the question arises: is it that the satellite has been flying for them for 35 years? And when was its last “update”, after all, the “improved” type radiometer?
Since none of the other adepts succeeded in contacting the adepts who wrote the article, it was generally believed that the work used data from the force for 10 years, that is, during the operation of one satellite. The remaining 25 years were taken from old databases collected by other satellites, with different equipment and essentially reflecting nothing. Hence, 7.1% forest growth has occurred on the planet not in 35 years, but in the last 10 years. At the same time, as noted above, in Brazil and Africa, forests are dying at an alarming rate, so the growth of forests in the middle latitudes and in the north is not 7.1%, but all 15 - 25%.
At the same time, according to the same VCF infographics, not only forests are dying in the tropics, but everything in general: the global vegetation coverage of the planet has decreased by 1.16 million square kilometers (-3.1%), especially in the agricultural regions of Asia.
In the meantime, as you can see from the diagram, in the middle latitudes, everything only grows! And this, by the way, has long been noticed in the field by gardeners and gardeners, who for the last 10 years have been growing peaches and hazelnuts at such latitudes that the Michurins of the 20th century would simply have their eyes on their foreheads from the sight of these trees and bushes. Some even try to grow cypresses and palms brought from the Black Sea in the latitudes of Moscow.
Thus, at the philistine level, everyone has long noticed that something very, very strange is happening to the climate on the planet, but now there is a strictly scientific academic explanation for our philistine observations - with satellite data and hundreds of Excel tables. It seems that the planet in the equatorial region is burning out, while Siberia and Alaska are slowly turning into jungle. True, no one knows for sure when this will finally happen, but we are following the development of events.