Environmental Indicators

UN Secretary-General António Guterres claims “Earth Day” is a “reminder” that “every indicator is flashing red,” including “climate chaos,” “collapsing biodiversity,” and a “1.5 degree limit slipping out of reach.”

IN FACT, comprehensive empirical datasets show that those indicators (and others) are solid green. Here are the specifics:

Global hurricane frequency and intensity have been roughly level since 1970, as far back as reliable data extend.
A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change analyzed three long-term satellite datasets and found “a persistent and widespread increase” in “greening” or plant growth “over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area” from 1982 to 2014, “whereas less than 4% of the globe” had less greening over this period.
A prominent scholarly journal published a study in 2025 which found that “extinctions related to climate change have not significantly increased over the last approximately 200 years,” and extinctions have not “been accelerating in recent decades, but instead have declined in the largest group of animals and in plants.”
A study published by the journal Nature analyzed satellite data to obtain a “comprehensive record of global land-change dynamics” from 1982 to 2016 and found that worldwide tree cover increased by 2.9% to 10.8% with 90% confidence over these decades.
A study of satellite data published by the journal Nature Climate Change found that from 1985 to 2015, the net amount of land area on Earth grew by about 22,400 square miles, and the net amount of coastal land area grew by about 5,200 square miles.
Per the college textbook Exploring Earth: An Introduction to Physical Geology, “Earth’s climate has fluctuated substantially” over geological history “from temperatures that were much warmer than those of the modern climate to much colder temperatures,” and core samples in Greenland and Norway show that the climate in these regions “shifted from ‘mild’ to ‘glacial’ much more rapidly than we had imagined,” with “some of these climatic shifts” occurring in “under 10 years, and most in far less than 100 years.”

Assertions that such indicators are deteriorating suffer from five fatal flaws:

They cherry pick short-term trends and local anecdotes while ignoring long-term comprehensive data.
They use deficient datasets that become increasingly incomplete as they extend back in time.
They fail to account for factors like population growth and economic development.
They are flat-out falsehoods.
They predict the future based on models, a class of studies that is notoriously unreliable and has been criticized in a scientific journal for creating a “perception of knowledge and precision that is illusory and can fool policymakers into thinking that the forecasts the models generate have some kind of scientific legitimacy.”

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