100,000 Amazon Trees Chopped Down to Build Road for COP30 Climate Conference

Spare a thought for the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt as he considers his upcoming trip to the Brazilian city of Belém to report on COP30. Saving the world and its environment is his gig so how will he face the prospect of travelling down a new four-lane highway cut through the dense Amazon rainforest to help speed him and his 70,000 other political activists to their luxury hotels? Based on trees per acre, an estimated 100,000 mature specimens have been chopped down and logged to build the eight-mile Avenida Liberdade causing untold disruption to local wildlife. Happily, all is not lost in despair. If he wishes, the BBC’s activist-in-chief can consider recent findings published in Nature Plants that increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have led to substantial growth in the remaining Amazon forest, with mature trees growing by over 6% a decade. Perhaps he could start promoting on the BBC the enormous benefits of CO₂, rightly known as the gas of life. He could front a campaign to assuage his dented COP conscience along the lines: ‘Forward with Carbon Dioxide, not Chainsaws.’

Needless to say the fatter trees of the Amazon have received little publicity in narrative-driven mainstream media. Extensive Green Blob-funded grooming is deployed to keep this type of inconvenient global ‘greening’ material out of the papers. Little mention is made of the astonishing CO₂-fuelled growth in global vegetation seen across the planet in the last 40 years. Increases of around 15% are common, some deserts have started to shrink and world famine has been alleviated by higher crop yields. SciLine is connected with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science, and it recently suggested that writers head off the ‘greening’ story by noting that “in many cases, CO₂ disproportionately favours weeds over crops, causing more problems for agriculture”.

In 2022 Rowlatt authored an alarmist series on BBC Radio 4 and World Service called The Climate Tipping Points in which he highlighted the potential “collapse of the Amazon rainforest” as one of the major irreversible changes tiggered by global warming. Not yet, it seems, for while Rowlatt was spouting this computer model agitprop, the scientists out in the field preparing their recently published paper found “aggressive changes” in mature tropical forest biomass. Yet again, it might be noted, climate model predictions fail the test when confronted with actual scientific data. As MIT Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen has said about the evidence-lite climate dogma: “The narrative is a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd scientific narrative.”

The team of researchers found that over 30 years of Amazonian plant data records across 188 mature forest plots, the trees had become considerably larger over time. The basal area, the size of the tree trunk near ground level, increased by 3.3% a decade. Trees fight for light and space in close proximity and height and size are an obvious advantage. While the larger trees were found to increase by over 6% a decade, the smaller plants also thrived, suggesting, the scientists note, that any recent negative climatic influences have been “more than alleviated” by the positive effects of increased resources such as CO₂ fertilisation. In effect the smaller trees operating in more difficult low light conditions can use the extra CO₂ to photosynthesise more easily and survive for longer.

In an article published in Watts Up With That?, Anthony Watts was clear on the important findings of the paper. It’s “plain old plant biology” he said, adding: “CO₂ fertilisation is no longer a theory tested only in labs. This study confirms it at continental scale: Amazon forest are thriving, not suffering, in a world with more CO₂.”

It’s likely that the Guardian will be assembling a team to travel the Avenida Liberdade Highway of Shame to attend the increasingly irrelevant COP Net Zero boondoggle. The newspaper recently reported that the big Amazon trees were more climate resistant “than previously believed”, proving that the ‘reverse ferret’ is alive and well in media land. “Previously believed”, of course, only applies to those who are unaware of the paleo record stretching back hundreds of millions of years. Perhaps it was a first for Popular Mechanics, which gave us its ‘Amazon’s Trees Are Weirdly Getting Bigger Every Decade, Which Defies Logic‘. Might be best not to give up the day writing job here. Finally, and perhaps scraping the barrel for any coverage of this important paper, NBC News noted the view of one scientist that fattening trees is “in some ways” a positive news story. “But it also means that the forest is now more vulnerable to losing those trees.” The obvious statement was then made that any benefit in larger trees sizes “can be quite easily negated by deforestation and logging”.

Something all those virtuous delegates to COP30 might just know something about.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.