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Because a miracle is (by this definition) impossible from where we stand today, we cannot force the universe to produce one. It is beyond our understanding of cause and effect. We can, however, give the experience of miracle to another person. To the extent we stand in a new story, we all have the power to be miracle-workers. Like Chris, we all have the power to perform acts that violate the old Story of the World.

A miracle is an invitation to a larger reality. Maybe I am more stubborn than most, but it typically takes repeated miracles for me to accept the invitation they hold. The perceptions of separation—for example, linear causality and rational self-interest—are embedded deep within my cells, for I am a product of that age.

At age twenty-one I arrived in Taiwan, uncomfortable in my own culture, in which I felt like an alien, but wedded still to many aspects of its defining stories. True, thanks to my somewhat leftist political upbringing I was cognizant of the bankruptcy of the mythology of progress and economic globalism, but I accepted without question the Scientific Method as the royal road to truth, and believed that science as an institution had arrived at a fairly complete general understanding of how the universe worked. I was, after all, a Yale graduate, trained in mathematics and analytic philosophy. It wasn’t long, though, before my story of the world came under assault. I had experiences with Chinese medicine and qigong that were impervious to my best efforts to explain away. I had a powerful LSD trip that melted what I’d called “reality” into an ocean of mind. I soaked up the Buddhist and Taoist thought that suffused the island, and heard countless stories of ghosts, Taoist shamans, and other weirdness from respectable people that I could dismiss only with a strenuous effort of interpretation. (Maybe they are trying to impress the foreigner. Maybe they are ignorant and superstitious, given to seeing what isn’t there.) I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with the cultural and personal arrogance I had to assume in order to preserve my worldview. To dismiss an entire culture’s perceptions of the world in favor of the dogma of objectivity and reductionism seemed akin to the very same economic and cultural imperialism that I was already aware of. Here was a kind of conceptual imperialism, to see an entire culture through a lens of anthropology or through a narrative of cognitive development that, in both cases, was heavily freighted with the power relations that rule our world.

At the same time, I encountered books that suggested that the Western worldview was crumbling from within. Of particular impact was the work of the Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine and the physicist David Bohm, two of the twentieth century’s greatest scientists, who upended my understanding of causality and my assumption, which I’d never thought to question on scientific grounds, that the universe is devoid of an inherent order or intelligence. This liberated me from the trap of dualism: to see the phenomena I’d become aware of in Taiwan as the exercise of some separate, nonmaterial realm of spirit; to conclude that science has its domain, and spirituality another. But now I could see that materiality was much more than we had made of it; that potentially, it could include all the phenomena we associate with spirit, and that this could happen, not by reducing, dismissing, or explaining away the “spiritual,” but, on the contrary, only by expanding the material far, far beyond what any scientist was comfortable with.

We are afraid of anything that disrupts our Story of the World, anything that challenges the rules and boundaries of the real. We are afraid of miracles, yet we crave them as well. It is our greatest desire and our greatest fear. When the story we live in is young, the fear is stronger than the desire. A young story has a strong immune system. It can dispose of conflicting data points with ease. I see a dangji (a Taiwanese shaman) in a shaking trance, carrying a burning hot brazier in his bare hands—well, it must not really be as hot as it looks. A taxi driver tells me of the time he picked up an odd woman in a wedding dress and drove her to a street number that didn’t exist, and when he turned to ask her she had disappeared from the cab—well, he was probably drunk that night, or maybe he was trying to impress the gullible foreigner. I sprain my ankle so severely I cannot walk, and am taken to a one-room cement clinic, where the doctor, smoking a cigarette, digs his thumbs into the swollen, inflamed flesh for five minutes of torture, puts some paste on it, wraps it up, and sends me home, and the ankle is completely better the next day—well, it must not have really been that bad, it must not have actually been swollen to double its size like I thought, and in any case it would have gotten better anyway. I visit a qigong master, who taps me on a few spots on my body to “clear my meridians,” and I start pouring sweat within seconds and walk out half an hour later feeling like a million bucks—well, I was probably hot going in there, and didn’t notice that the room was extra hot, and as for the intense tingling I felt when he showed us what projecting qi was, I must have been imagining it. The hundreds of people studying with that man—they must be dupes, bamboozled by his slick talk into believing an impossibility, probably psychologically dependent on the bogus spiritual teachings he peddles. I don’t even need to know what those are or examine whether they are bogus or not—they must be, because otherwise my world falls apart. The same goes for all the claims and lifelong careers of hundreds of thousands of homeopaths, naturopaths, acupuncturists, chiropractors, energy healers, and all the others who practice modalities for which there is “no scientific evidence”—controlled, double-blind studies in peer-reviewed journals. If there were any merit to their ideas, surely the unbiased institutions of science would recognize it by now. Those practitioners have been deceiving themselves, selectively remembering only those cases where the patient got better—and some inevitably will get better even with no treatment at all. They are misguided, self-deceiving, poor observers of reality. Unlike me, and the people I agree with. We are the ones who base our beliefs on evidence and logic.

You can see how robust a Story of the World can be, and how comprehensive. Ultimately, our beliefs about what is and is not scientifically acceptable implicate our trust in existing social structures and authorities. The accusations of naiveté, of mental derangement, of being out of touch with reality, and the emotional energy behind those accusations, stem from a feeling of threat. The threat is real. What is being threatened is the fabric of the world as we have known it. Ultimately, the same fear is behind the mental calisthenics of environmental skeptics or central bankers or anyone else who ignores the increasingly obvious signs that our system is doomed, and that the beliefs we took for granted, the institutions that seemed so permanent, the truisms that seemed so reliable, and the habits of life that seemed so practical are serving us no longer.

In direct contradiction to the scare stories about carbon dioxide being relentlessly pushed by the climate change alarmists, a scientific study published in Nature Climate Change and highlighted by NASA reveals that rising carbon dioxide levels are having a tremendously positive impact on the re-greening of planet Earth over the last three decades, with some regions experiencing over a 50% increase in plant life.

The study, entitled, “Greening of the Earth and its drivers,” used satellite data to track and map the expansion of green plant growth across the globe from 1982 – 2015. Published in 2016, this study found that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide causes “fertilization” of plant life, resulting in a remarkable acceleration of increased “greening” across every Earth continent. As the study abstract explains:

We show a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area… Factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend…

In other words, the planet is getting greener, and we have rising CO2 levels to thank for it, since rising CO2 accounts for about 70% of the increase in planet-wide greening, according to scientists. The more CO2 we release into the atmosphere, the more nutrients are available for plants, and the more rapidly the Earth is re-greened.

The following compilation map shows which land masses have experienced expanded greening since 1982. As the legend explains, the light green areas represent a 25% increase in green plants, and the dark green areas represent a 50% or greater increase:

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Image credit: Boston University / R. Myeneni

Natural News readers may note this is exactly what we’ve been reporting for over a decade. It’s basic science, of course, since plants use carbon dioxide to thrive. Higher CO2 means a greener Earth, since CO2 is the single most important molecule for sustaining plant life across the globe. It is beyond astonishing that the entire climate change cult denies the basic science of botany and photosynthesis.

Read my 2017 article which covers all this: All the biggest lies about climate change and global warming DEBUNKED in one astonishing interview.

To the shock of many climate change alarmists, even NASA scientists confirmed that carbon dioxide is “greening” the planet. As stated on the NASA.gov website in an article titled, “Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds“:

From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.

An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions. The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.

NASA explains almost exactly what I’ve been explaining for the last several years: That carbon dioxide is a necessary component of photosynthesis, the biochemical process by which plants produce metabolic energy. Via NASA:

Green leaves use energy from sunlight through photosynthesis to chemically combine carbon dioxide drawn in from the air with water and nutrients tapped from the ground to produce sugars, which are the main source of food, fiber and fuel for life on Earth. Studies have shown that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide increase photosynthesis, spurring plant growth.

Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect, said co-author Ranga Myneni, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University.

NASA even released a YouTube video that almost exactly mirrors the message Natural News has been advocating for years. The video is entitled, “Rising CO2 levels greening Earth”:

In direct contradiction to the real science on the greening benefits of carbon dioxide, Democrats routinely and mindlessly claim that carbon dioxide is a poisonous “pollutant” that will destroy the world. The anti-knowledge of lunatic Democrats demonstrates the extreme dangers of those who are scientifically illiterate yet spout “science” as their justification for demanding radical interventions in atmospheric chemistry.

In truth, rising levels of carbon dioxide will cause the following beneficial effects on Earth:

There are virtually no Democrats who recognize that carbon dioxide is the “miracle molecule” for plant life. “Green New Deal” proponents like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who is scientifically and economically illiterate — think that carbon dioxide must be eliminated in order to save the planet. In fact, she warns that Earth only has 12 years to go before all life ceases to exist unless humans stop burning fossil fuels.

Not surprisingly, she has it all wrong: It’s the burning of fossil fuels that’s releasing beneficial CO2 into the atmosphere, causing the global greening that NASA has already confirmed (see above). If humans stop burning fossil fuels, the result would decrease atmospheric CO2, resulting in plants starving to death from lack of CO2.

This would, of course, lead to the mass global die-off of trees, grasslands, food crops and rainforests. The “Green New Deal,” in other words, would actually result in the mass killing of plant life across the entire planet. If the world were to follow the demands of Ocasio-Cortez, the world’s ecosystems would collapse, resulting in mass death of plants, animals and humans.

It turns out that climate change alarmists, by vilifying CO2, are demanding actions that would make the planet less green by killing plants everywhere. Instead of a warm, wet planet with abundant rainfall and rainforests, Democrat seem to want a cold, dead world that’s devoid of plant life.

As any competent scientist would openly admit, the elimination of CO2 from the atmosphere would collapse the global ecosystem, leading to the complete wipe out of nearly all plants, animals and humans. Those who are calling for the elimination of CO2 are, as I have previously warned, actually advocating the terraforming of planet Earth into a post-human, post-life status that would collapse human civilization and annihilate nearly all food webs around the world.

As reported by Natural News, AOC’s “Green New Deal” seeks to eliminate the very molecule that turns planets green: Carbon dioxide, the molecule of life.

People like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are not the saviors of the planet, it turns out: They are the death merchants who threaten to destroy all life as we know it. Carbon dioxide isn’t a threat to planet Earth, but people like Ocasio-Cortez surely are. If anything should be eliminated from the atmosphere, it’s the hot air coming from the mouths of the climate alarmists who are spewing their death cult quackery that would devastate our planet if deployed.

If you really want to “green” the planet, stop the climate change lunatics like Ocasio-Cortez whose proposals would quite literally murder nearly all life on planet Earth.

Simply put:

More carbon dioxide = more green plants

That’s why CO2 is called a “greenhouse gas.” It turns the planet into a lush, plant-filled greenhouse that’s warmer, wetter and more abundant across all plant life. Why don’t Democrats and Leftists want Earth to be more green?