Guess what? The rain forests are regrowing in places where they were formerly cut down to provide agricultural land. This New York Times article spells out the controversy about this. I'm not surprised. We see the same phenomenon in the United States, with our temperate forests.
Prior to the arrival of Europeans, most land east of the Mississippi River was completely forested. The wisecrack was that a squirrel could leap from tree to tree all the way from tidewater Virginia to the banks of the Mississippi without ever touching the ground. As European settlers arrived, they cut down this forest to clear land for farming. In the last fifty years much of that cleared land is no longer cultivated and is quickly reverting to forest.
It turns out this old Earth, Mother Gaia, is more resilient and self-healing than alarmists would have you believe. We need to trust her more, and doubt her less. Sol, on the other hand, has been behaving irregularly of late and that can have major effects on climate. Unfortunately, we have exactly zero, zip, zilch ability to influence or mitigate solar behavior.
