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The Greening of India: AD 1981-2000
Reference
Singh, R.P., Rovshan, S., Goroshi, S.K., Panigrahy, S. and Parihar, J.S. 2011. Spatial and temporal variability of net primary productivity (NPP) over terrestrial biosphere of India using NOAA-AVHRR based GloPEM model. Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing 39: 345-353.

Background
The authors write that net primary productivity (NPP) is "an important component of the global carbon cycle because it provides a measure of the amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere through photosynthesis," which makes it also, therefore, a useful measure of global vegetative productivity.

What was done
Singh et al. used U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite-derived Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data, together with the Global Production Efficiency Model (GloPEM) developed by Prince and Goward (1995), to calculate annual NPP over all of India for the period 1981-2000.

What was learned
The five researchers report that regression analysis of the 20-year NPP database showed a significant increase in the temporal trend of NPP over India (r=0.7, p<0.001), with the mean rate of increase being 10.43 gC/m2/year, which yields a mean rate-of-increase of 34.3 TgC/year for the entire country, including its arid and semi-arid regions, its forests, and its dry-land and irrigated agricultural regions.

What it means
In spite of climate-alarmist warnings of the destructive consequences of anthropogenic CO2 emissions and what they describe as the unprecedented degree of global warming that they contend is driven by the rising concentration of the demonic gas in earth's atmosphere, the planet's biosphere continues to respond in positive fashion by growing ever more productive, as the ubiquitous CO2- and warming-induced Greening of the Earth phenomenon continues to grow ever stronger ... in this case, in India.

Reference
Prince, S.D. and Goward, S.J. 1995. Global primary production: A remote sensing approach. Journal of Biogeography 22: 316-336.

Reviewed 15 February 2012