Mainstream Media Ignores Two Big Stories That Run Counter to the Net Zero Narrative

Food production in China is soaring, helped by slightly warmer temperatures and higher levels of carbon dioxide, while cows grazing on wetland pasture actually reduce emissions of the ‘greenhouse’ gas methane, partly by gobbling up decomposing, methane-emitting plants. Just a couple of stories, based on recent scientific research, that readers would have missed in the Net Zero-promoting mainstream media. Alas, environmental correspondents do not cover such uplifting scientific material.

In a recently published paper led by UCLA postdoctoral science researcher Di Chen, it was discovered that the “main factor” affecting China’s crop yields was local air temperature change. “When the air temperature in China is high, the yield will show an increasing trend, and vice versa,” it said. Elsewhere, two agroecology researchers in the United States found that on ground that is regularly water laden, the majority of methane was released from decomposing plants and animals. As a result, removing feeding cows resulted in higher methane emissions. Of course, such a finding has enormous implications for water-laden countries like Ireland, whose cow belching-obsessed policy berks are planning to spend £600 million removing 200,000 cows from some the world’s greenest and lushest pastures.

The above graph shows the enormous rises in Chinese yields for staples such as rice, maize and wheat measured by hectogram per hectare. The researchers note that improved agricultural management has had a part to play, although yields started to rise even during the instabilities of the immediate post-Mao period. The scientists also note that there is no obvious increasing trend in precipitation, while China’s air temperature and the global CO₂ rise “have the same trend as crop yield”. Recent lower levels of Arctic sea ice are considered an ”indirect process”, but the conclusions of the paper are clear. Warming extends the growing season and reduces damage from the cold. Increasing CO₂ improves the photosynthetic rate of crops, improves growth rates and dry matter content, and thus improves food production.

This ‘denial’ of counter-narrative climate science takes many forms in mainstream media, activism and politics. Mostly, it’s achieved by omission, a fate that can befall anything that isn’t useful for Net Zero promotion. Any suggestion that the climate is relatively benign compared to recent periods, with a little extra warming and a top up of CO₂ from levels so low they’re approaching danger point, is countered with hysterical claims of boiling and collapse. One bizarre omission, covered in detail in the Daily Sceptic, is the rapid, and accelerating, greening of the planet.

The evidence for the greening of the Earth from atmospheric CO₂ “is now too obvious to deny”, said a group of scientists from the CO₂ Coalition in a recently published paper. The graph above that accompanied their words, compiled from satellite data from 1982-2012, is a stunning demonstration of the wonders of CO₂ plant nourishment. In fact, another recent paper Chen et al (2024) found greening had actually accelerated over the last two decades.

All this greening might be a wonder of nature, but it is just how biology works, although it remains largely unpublicised because of Net Zero hysteria. In the detailed CO₂Coalition paper, the scientists sought to explain why the nutritional value of the world’s most abundant crops “can and will remain high as atmospheric CO₂ concentrations increase towards values more representative of those existing throughout most of Earth’s history”. The existing level of atmospheric CO₂ is noted to be “much less than optimum for most plants”.

Meanwhile, interest in the carbon cycle on cattle farms has been growing following scientific experiments on the Buck Island ranch, 150 miles northwest of Miami. Comparing gases emitted by pastures grazed to those un-grazed, suggests that livestock is a net carbon sink. The Heartland Daily News reported that when cattle graze on land, the plants prioritise root growth over the plant matter above the surface. “The deeper the roots, the more plants sequester carbon in the soil through the photosynthesis process,” it said.

Cattle are part of a carbon cycle. If you just model the emissions coming from the animal “you’re missing the rest of the ecosystem” commented Dr. Vaughn Holder, Global Beef Research Director at Alltech. Aside from reducing emissions from wetlands, livestock animals increase global food security by eating inedible plants and turning them into edible proteins for humans, i.e., their bodies. In addition, farmed animals eat a lot of food by-products that humans can’t or prefer not to eat, such as the pulp left after extracting the juice from oranges. Holder observes that composting such materials increases emissions five times more than feeding it to dairy cows, while disposal in landfill creates 50 times more emissions than giving it to the animals.

The increasingly picky diets that urban greens want to foist on the rest of us have little place for meat. Greenhouse gas emissions are a convenient scare to remove an ingredient that has been an essential and healthy part of the diet since homo sapiens emerged as a distinct omnivorous species. But if you can’t remove meat just yet, take it out on the cows and force them to wear special King Charles-endorsed masks to capture some of those evil extrusions.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.