Warming and rising atmospheric CO2 is GREENING the Earth

CO2 Science reports -In a team led by Rogier de Jong as published in Global Change Biology - that "it can readily be appreciated that the twin evils of the world's climate alarmists - rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global warming - have actually been what has fueled the last quarter-century's greening of the earth."

What was done
In a study designed to determine the net long-term trend in vegetative vigor of the entire planet, De Jong et al. employed "detection of trend changes in normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) satellite data between 1982 and 2008," based on "time series of 648 fortnightly images [that] were analyzed using a trend breaks analysis procedure," which feat was accomplished for fourteen different classes of land cover (biomes).

What it means
In discussing the current state of knowledge in this area, De Jong et al. write that "over the last few decades of the 20th century, terrestrial ecosystems acted as net carbon sinks, as evidenced by ecosystem process models and satellite vegetation data (Myneni et al., 1997; Schimel et al., 2001; Zhou et al., 2001)." And they say that "the easing of climatic constraints on plant growth as a result of increased CO2 concentrations and higher temperatures is a likely explanation for this effect (Nemani et al., 2003)." Thus, it can readily be appreciated that the twin evils of the world's climate alarmists - rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global warming - have actually been what has fueled the last quarter-century's greening of the earth.
  
Reference
De Jong, R., Verbesselt, J., Schaepman, M.E. and De Bruin, S. 2012. Trend changes in global greening and browning: contribution of short-term trends to longer-term change. Global Change Biology 18: 642-655.