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As China’s coronavirus shutdowns end, air pollutants rise to traditional levels

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As economic activity resumes in China following the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, levels of the air pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO2) are rising to traditional standards for the first time this year.

According to NASA’s Earth Observatory reports, in February of 2020 scientists using NASA and European satellites identified there was a significant reduction in NO2 over the country after COVID-19 shutdown regulations took effect.

As CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWN REDUCES POLLUTION IN NEPAL, MOUNT EVEREST VISIBLE FROM OVER 120 MILES AWAY

With the conclusion of stringent health mandates, just three months later scientists saw their anticipated rebound.

NO2 is a noxious gas emitted primarily through the burning of gasoline, coal, and diesel fuel by motor vehicles, power plants, and industrial facilities.

The maps on this page show levels of nitrogen dioxide in the troposphere (the lowest layer of the atmosphere) over China. The maps above show NO2 levels in central and eastern portions of the country from February 10–25 (during the quarantine) and April 20 to May 12 (after restrictions were lifted). (NASA)

When nitrogen dioxide is closer to the Earth’s surface, it can turn into ozone that decreases air quality and makes breathing conditions unhealthy. When higher in our atmosphere, NO2 can form acid rain.

Researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Laboratory have monitored NO2 as well as general global air quality for several decades.

Data collected by the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) on the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite marked notable changes in levels of nitrogen dioxide in the troposphere over China during periods during and after shutdowns.

The Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite — which provides lower spatial resolution, but a longer data record — has made comparable measurements since the early 2000s.

Interestingly enough, past research has revealed that air pollution in China usually decreases during New Year’s celebrations and then increases slowly in the month after the celebrations are over.

Yet, during the pandemic, this increase was delayed by several weeks.

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In February and March 2020, NO2 levels over Wuhan and some other Chinese cities were well below long-term trends. By April levels bounced back, reaching the long-term norm for the season.

That said, NASA’s Earth Observatory noted that increasing sunlight shortens the lifetime of the gas near the ground, and shifting weather patterns can temper NO2 to disperse without resistance from the air.

Hurricanes are growing stronger as climate warms, new NOAA study shows

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Hurricanes are reportedly strengthening as the Earth’s climate grows warmer, according to a new study.

Although studying how hurricanes have changed over time is difficult and the tools scientists use to measure their impact are constantly in flux, a report released last week from the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found a clear upward trend in storm intensity and rate over the 39 years, between 1979 and 2017.

2020 ATLANTIC HURRICANE SEASON MAY BE ‘EXTREMELY ACTIVE,’ WITH 13 TO 19 NAME STORMS, NOAA SAYS

According to researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as temperatures rose so did the probability of storms reaching “major hurricane” status. The planet has significantly warmed in every year of those 39 studied, and the recorded years include eight of the 10 warmest ever recorded.

Using satellite imagery, scientists sanded the edges off newer, sharper tropical cyclone images to fit an older standard: images where each pixel represents an area five miles by five miles, taken every three hours. In addition, they discarded images from newer satellites that provide views of storms from angles not available in 1998. The result was an extensive dataset of approximately 225,000 similar-quality images of about 4,000 global tropical cyclones stretching back to the 1970s.

Julia Aylen wades through waist deep water carrying her pet dog as she is rescued from her flooded home during Hurricane Dorian in Freeport, Bahamas, Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2019. Practically parking over the Bahamas for a day and a half, Dorian pounded away at the islands Tuesday in a watery onslaught that devastated thousands of homes, trapped people in attics and crippled hospitals. Julia Aylen is the daughter of Photojournalist Tim Aylen, author of this photo. (AP Photo/Tim Aylen)

In examining these images — to estimate wind intensities, measured in kilotons — the group found that the chances of any given tropical cyclone hitting 65 knots to become classified as a hurricane have gone up and the odds of 100-knot storms have risen by a 15 percent increase.

“The main hurdle we have for finding trends is that the data are collected using the best technology at the time,” James Kossin, a NOAA scientist and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, said in a statement. “Every year the data are a bit different than last year, each new satellite has new tools and captures data in different ways, so in the end we have a patchwork quilt of all the satellite data that have been woven together.”

However, other conclusions have not yet been completely ruled out by the authors of the study. The paper does not strike down the possibility that the uptick in hurricanes isn’t the result of some perfect coincidence of other trends.

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That said, it points strongly — with purported 95 percent confidence — toward the idea that tropical cyclones “have become substantially stronger, and that there is a likely human fingerprint on this increase,” the researchers wrote.

Skeptics have largely dismissed fears over man’s impact on global warming, saying climate change has been going on since the beginning of time. They’ve also claimed the dangers of a warming planet are being wildly exaggerated and question the impact that fossil fuels have had on climate change.

Sen. Tim Scott blasts Joe Biden’s comment on black voters as ‘arrogant,’ ‘condescending’

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2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s statement that African-Americans “ain’t black” if they even consider voting for President Trump was condescending and arrogant, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., asserted Saturday.

Appearing on “Fox & Friends Weekend” with hosts Griff Jenkins, Pete Hegseth, and Jedidiah Bila, Scott pointed out that there is “no doubt” Biden is the liberal party’s nominee because of the support from House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn and the South Carolina African-American population.

BIDEN TAKES HEAT FROM LEFT-WING ACTIVISTS, BERNIE AIDES FOR ‘YOU AIN’T BLACK’ ‘REMARKS

“That is why he is in the position he is in, which only reinforces the negative narrative that Joe Biden ‘ain’t woke,'” he remarked.

Biden made the comments on Charlamagne tha God’s radio show Friday morning. Later that day, the former vice president publicly apologized, admitting he “shouldn’t have been so cavalier.”

Scott accused Biden of pandering to his audience, assuming that they were not intelligent enough to figure it out.

For Scott, it also calls into question Biden’s record with the African-American electorate.

“Think about the 1994 crime bill that disproportionately targeted African-American males,” he urged. “What did President Trump do? He came back with the First Step Act and said, ‘We’re going to have fairness in sentencing. We’re going to help people [who are] coming out not [to] return.’ That is a form of compassion that could be measured by the lives changed by the families impacted.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., shake hands before the second of two Democratic presidential primary debates hosted by CNN Wednesday, July 31, 2019, in the Fox Theatre in Detroit.
(AP)

Scott also noted Biden’s testy exchange regarding his opposition to integration on the debate stage with potential vice president pick California Democrat Sen. Kamala Harris and the president’s help creating “permanent funding” for HBCUs, focus on tackling sickle cell anemia, and legislation passed on opportunity scholarships.

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“And so, for Joe Biden to say to 1.3 million African-Americans who voted for President Trump that they ‘ain’t black’ is arrogant, condescending and it frankly speaks to the families of the 1.3 million African-Americans as well,” he told the “Friends Weekend” hosts.

“And frankly, I am just amazed that the last decade Democrats have had an entitlement mentality that they are entitled to the black vote,” Scott concluded.

Dr. Ben Carson pushes back on NY Gov. Cuomo’s ‘ridiculous’ defense of nursing home order

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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s directive to send recovering COVID-19 patients to already-vulnerable nursing homes was “clearly a mistake” to be learned from, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Dr. Ben Carson said Friday.

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In an interview on “America’s Newsroom” with host Sandra Smith, Carson said that whether or not there were appropriate guidelines in place by the state can be disputed “all day and all night,” but using logic could have saved lives.

“Obviously we don’t want to take people who have an infectious disease and concentrate them in a place that isn’t prepared to receive them,” he said.

FILE – In this Friday, April 17, 2020 file photo, a patient is wheeled out of the Cobble Hill Health Center by emergency medical workers in the Brooklyn borough of New York. The facility has listed dozens of deaths linked to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. In New York state, the nation’s leader in nursing home deaths, the Greater New York Hospital Association lobbying group wrote the first draft of an emergency declaration making it the only state with protection from both civil lawsuits and criminal prosecution arising from the pandemic, with the order signed by Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
(AP Photo/John Minchillo)

A new report released Friday by The Associated Press revealed that more than 4,300 recovering coronavirus patients had been sent to New York’s nursing homes under the March health order. While Cuomo has since amended this policy — and, more recently, ordered that all nursing home staff be testing for the virus biweekly — the death toll in homes and long-term care facilities has exceeded 5,000 people.

On Wednesday, Cuomo brushed off calls for the Justice Department (DOJ) to open an investigation into the massive number of deaths during the pandemic, shifting the blame toward guidelines from the Trump administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Cuomo, a Democrat, has also announced he is conducting his own inquiry under the leadership of State Attorney General Letitia James, also a Democrat.

“This is a political season, I get it,” he said. “I’m not going to get into the political back-and-forth, but anyone who wants to ask why did the state do that with COVID patients in nursing homes, it’s because the state followed President Trump’s CDC guidance.”

Cuomo added: “They should ask President Trump. I think that will stop the conversation.”

“Of course you’re not supposed to discriminate against anybody. All the federal guidelines say that about everything. That’s a ridiculous argument,” Carson responded.

“Obviously, you want to accept people if you have provisions and have taken the appropriate safeguards, but you just don’t say, ‘Okay, let’s bring somebody with tuberculosis in here because we are not supposed to discriminate against them’ without having prepared for that.”

“That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to a Republican, a Democrat or anybody with a brain,” he added.

Smith asked the secretary whether or not he thought there is a need for a federal probe into the nursing home deaths in the state.

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“Well, it would be good to make sure that we know what the weaknesses were so that we could correct them,” Carson told Smith. “I’m not sure that it would be useful to put people in jail and to compound a tragedy that has already occurred.”

Fox News’ Marisa Schultz, Andrew O’Reilly, and Gregg Re contributed to this report.

Dan Bongino: We’re learning now that Trump-Russia collusion was ‘always a hoax’

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In uncovering additional information regarding the case of former national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn, America is learning more and more that the narrative of collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia was “always a hoax,” Fox News contributor Dan Bongino stated Thursday.

In an interview on the “Brian Kilmeade Show,” Bongino said the answer to whether Flynn was actually guilty of any charges made against him in the Russia investigation was obvious.

FLYNN NOT MASKED IN REPORT ON KEY CALLS WITH RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR: SOURCE

“If you genuinely thought Mike Flynn was a spy to the point that an order from the presidential staff themselves to go target his phone calls originated from it, then how dare you not brief the incoming administration and allow a Russian spy to sit in the White House,” he exclaimed.

“The answer is obvious,” he told host Brian Kilmeade. “Of course, they didn’t think Flynn was a Russian spy. They knew it was a hoax — the whole thing.”

In this Jan. 3, 2017 file photo, national security adviser-designate Michael Flynn arrives at Trump Tower in New York. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
(The Associated Press)

Former President Barack Obama had warned then-President-elect Trump about Flynn during their Oval Office meeting two days after the election. Obama’s staff felt Flynn was problematic and had fired him from his job as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) initially probed Flynn on his connection with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. In 2017, Flynn pled “guilty” to a charge of making false statements in interviews with the FBI. However, he later recanted his plea, citing “bad faith” by the government.

The case returned to the national spotlight after the Department of Justice (DOJ) moved to dismiss charges against him earlier this month. In response, Flynn’s District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan called on Judge John Gleeson as a “friend-of-the-court” to review further, sparking backlash from Republicans.

A list of Obama-era officials who had sought to unmask Flynn was recently released, but Fox News confirmed Thursday that Flynn’s name was not actually masked in a key document detailing his calls with Kislyak and that his name from the unredacted transcript of the calls was then leaked to the press.

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“Nobody ever took this [Steele] dossier seriously. It’s always been a hoax,” Bongino asserted. “They’ve been targeting Mike Flynn since 2015 and his 2014 dinner with Svetlana Lokhova. He’s been a subject of the Obama administration’s spying because he opposed the Iran Deal and opposed the intelligence community’s handling of battlefield intelligence.”

“It’s as simple as that. Obama spied on his enemies,” he concluded. “It’s no more complicated than that, and Flynn was public enemy number one.”

Lokhova, a Russian-born academic who became a central point in 2017 for her past contact with Flynn, told Fox News in an exclusive interview last year that she is not a spy for Moscow — and, to the contrary, believes she was “used” to smear Flynn.

Calgary Zoo returning two giant pandas to China due to COVID-19-related bamboo shortage

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Canada’s Calgary Zoo will be returning two giant pandas on loan from China because a scarcity of flights due to COVID-19 has caused problems with getting enough fresh and tasty bamboo to feed their gargantuan appetites.

Pandas Er Shun and Da Mao first arrived at the zoo in 2018 after spending five years living at the Toronto Zoo and were supposed to remain in Alberta until 2023.

Er Shun and Da Mao were originally born at the Chongqing Zoo a year apart between 2007 and 2008. Er Shun — the oldest — was named for her smoothness, whereas the name Da Mao means “first of Mao,” as he was his mother’s firstborn.

TWO GIANT PANDAS MATE AT EMPTY HONG KONG ZOO FOR FIRST TIME AFTER LIVING TOGETHER FOR A DECADE

More than half a panda’s day is spent eating bamboo, which makes up 99 percent of its diet. An adult panda will consume up to 38 kilograms, or about 84 pounds, of bamboo a day.

The zoo’s president, Clement Lanthier, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the facility spent months trying to overcome transportation barriers in acquiring fresh bamboo during the global pandemic. Bamboo is rare in Canada and Er Shun and Da Mao prefer only certain kinds.

“They are picky,” Lanthier said. “There’s a reason why they are endangered. They need their bamboo. That’s all they do. They eat bamboo and they sleep.”

The nearly five-month-old female Panda bear named Chulina, left, eats bamboo at her enclosure at the Madrid Zoo in Madrid, Spain, Thursday, Jan. 12, 2017. Madrid’s zoo has named its latest baby panda bear Chulina (Cutey), in homage to Chulin, the first panda born at the zoo 34 years ago. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)
(The Associated Press)

Transporting bamboo from California added even more frustration to the process. Some of the bamboo shipments the panda duo received were promptly turned away upon receipt and other shipments that had arrived from Los Angeles were past their expiry point. The shelf life of bamboo is only four to five days long.

“Every 10 days there is more and more problem moving bamboo to Calgary. This risk is unacceptable,” Lanthier said.

“I cannot risk not being able to provide the best care to the panda every day. For other species there are options. For the panda, it has to be freshly delivered twice a week. It’s time for the panda to go back home,” he said.

Lanthier also reported that the news came as a bit of a shock to the Chinese government. In other locations where pandas are exhibited — such as France, Spain and different parts of Asia — bamboo can be grown locally.

The pandas had been one of the largest draws at the Calgary Zoo.

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While there is currently no date on the calendar for when the pandas will return home, Lanthier hopes it will happen in the next couple of weeks. He expects to get an export permit next week.

“I hope they move swiftly. We need to move them to a place where bamboo is abundant,” he added.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

California sheriff says $0 bail policy flies in the face of her four decade career in law enforcement, ignores victims

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The zero-cash bail emergency mandate in California, which has led to reduced prison populations to reduce the spread of COVID-19, ignores victims and favors criminals, Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims asserted Friday night

Appearing on “The Ingraham Angle”, Mims told host Laura Ingraham that the mandate was a de facto get-out-of-jail-free card.

As of Thursday, there were 711 suspected criminals released in the Golden State on $0 bail and 87 inmates had ended up back in police custody.

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Mims explained that there are two reasons California would set bail at $0.

“First of all, it was to reduce the population in jails and to reduce the incidence of COVID infecting inmates without taking into consideration what counties had already done to fix that problem. And, the second reason was to put out arraignment dates. When someone is in custody, they must be arraigned within a few hours. When they’re not in custody, they can set that date out. Now that courts are pretty much closed…they need that extra time for arraignments for people who are arrested,” she stated.

The Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution has 443 inmates infected with the coronavirus, the most of any federal lockup and more than all the California state prisons combined, in San Pedro on Wednesday, April 29, 2020.
(Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images)

As the pandemic quickly spread throughout the country, state and local officials’ concern shifted to crowded prisons, where inmates not only live in close proximity to one another, but share laundries, baths, and communal eating areas.

The United States has 2.3 million inmates in about 5,000 jails and prisons across the country. According to the Bureau of Justice, nearly 200,000 people 55 and older are behind bars.

As of mid-April, over 16,000 inmates had been released nationwide, due to the virus.

But, Mims argues that this policy does more harm to the justice system than it does good.

“This is $0 bail which means many people who are arrested for auto theft, assault with a deadly weapon with the intent to commit great bodily injury, elder abuse, child abuse: they automatically get released from California jails with a citation to appear,” she noted.

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It’s an oversight Mims believes “flies in the face of anything in [her] 41 years of law enforcement.”

“It has nothing to do with public safety,” she concluded. “It has everything to do with ignoring victims and giving inmates and people [who] commit [a] crime a free pass.”

Fox News’ Travis Fedschun contributed to this report.

Geraldo Rivera: How mainstream media ‘sycophants’ are revealing their motivations with Flynn coverage

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Mainstream media “sycophants” who are going along with “preposterous” answers from former Obama administration officials for the unmasking of ex-Trump national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn are revealing a lot about their motivations, Fox News correspondent-at-large Geraldo Rivera argued Friday.

In an interview on “Fox & Friends” with hosts Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade, Rivera said that it would be “impossible” for former Vice President Joe Biden and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to ask for the unmasking of a national security investigation of this magnitude and then forget doing so.

LIST OF OFFICIALS WHO SOUGHT TO ‘UNMASK’ FLYNN RELEASED: BIDEN, COMEY, OBAMA CHIEF OF STAFF AMONG THEM 

“It is preposterous. I was watching James Clapper … on another of the channels and he was asked directly: ‘Why did you ask for the unmasking?’ He said, ‘You know, I don’t know. I don’t remember,'” he recalled.

“How do you not remember that?” asked Rivera. “How do you not remember you trying to take down the national security adviser for the incoming president and you forgot what you were doing? I mean, it is so blatantly false to me.”

“And to see the sycophants in the media go along with that answer – the ‘I don’t know’ answer — I think really tells a lot about what the motivation of the reporter is, if not of Clapper or Brennan or Comey, et cetera,” he stated.

On Thursday, President Trump pressed Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham to call former President Barack Obama for testimony about the Flynn case.

However, Graham raised serious concerns about the implications of calling the former president to testify saying he is “greatly concerned about the precedent that would be set by calling a former president for oversight.”

Graham added that “both presidents are welcome to come before the committee and share their concerns about each other.”

“However, I have great doubts about whether it would be wise for the country,” he said.

“Well, I don’t think it’s particularly good for the country either, the question of what the former president knew and what did he know it,” Rivera agreed.

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“But, it is when you see the list of people involved. … It is almost impossible for the outgoing president, Barack Obama, not to be at least somewhat curious. …There were so many people of the outgoing Obama administration involved, there was like a graduating class party,” he told the “Friends” hosts.

“I mean, how could the former president not know?” Rivera concluded.

Releasing inmates will create ‘public safety crisis’ to go with public health crisis, union president warns

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New York State government — and local governments nationwide — cannot solve a public health crisis like coronavirus by creating a public safety crisis with the release of inmates, the president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association urged Tuesday.

Appearing on “Fox & Friends” with host Brian Kilmeade, Elias Husamudeen said that a recent report revealing inmates in Los Angeles, Calif., had been caught trying to infect themselves with COVID-19 to force their release from jail was not at all surprising.

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“We have inmates in our jail deliberately coughing on correction officers, trying to get them sick, which should be a felony,” he remarked. “But, in New York City, inmates don’t even have to do that, because they’ve released more than 1,700 inmates over the last couple of months and they’ve given them cell phones, gift cards, and hotel stays as well. So, I wish we had that sheriff here in New York City and we probably wouldn’t have that problem.”

Husamudeen believes that the best way to fight the virus’s spread in prisons is not by releasing criminals, but by utilizing distancing techniques. He pointed out that the inmate population in New York City is lower than it has been in the last 30 years.

“We have the ability to reduce or change the officer-to-inmate ratio but it doesn’t seem to be something that our public officials or our commissioner is interested in doing. And the reality is — there’s no other way to put it. You are not going to solve this COVID-19 problem by releasing people into the streets,” he stated.

“They’ve done it in New York City and most of the people that they’ve released have already come back and have already committed other crimes. Here in New York, I don’t know about anywhere else, but tens of thousands of inmates commit the same crime. They commit crimes two to seven times per year. They are in and out of our jails,” Husamudeen explained.

Husamudeen went on to tell Kilmeade that he believes the bottom line comes down to those making the decisions on behalf of the city’s safety.

“When it comes to safety, every city in New York should be safe and we need people who can really make real decisions that [are] good for America, good for New York, good for correction officers, [and] those of us who are forced to work in this, you know, in this environment,” he continued further.

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“Correction officers don’t have the luxury of working from home so we’ve had to come to work every day. When they reopened the government, we never closed.”

Iceland uses coronavirus stimulus money to fight climate change

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Last week, the Icelandic government rolled out several new environmental policies and proposals addressing climate change as part of the country’s second COVID-19 economic stimulus package.

The plans included new funding for projects tackling climate change and a bid to ban certain single-use products.

In addition to the award of approximately $3.7 million to these projects, Icelandic Minister for the Environment Guðmundur Ingi Guðbrandsson also introduced a bill to ban “unnecessary waste.”

The government’s investment will be used to increase carbon sequestration, accelerate switches to sustainable energy sources, and fund further climate research with the aim of meeting the terms of the United Nations’ Paris Climate Agreement.

ICELAND FOREST RANGERS ENCOURAGING CITIZENS TO HUG TREES DURING QUARANTINE

Around $1.3 million will be put to work aiming to naturally store carbon dioxide long-term in order to reduce levels of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, according to The Reykjavik Grapevine.

A recent report in the newsletter Melting Glaciers revealed that glaciers in Iceland have been rapidly retreating for 25 years due to increasingly warming temperatures.

That said, skeptics have largely dismissed fears over man’s impact on global warming, saying climate change has been going on since the beginning of time. They’ve also claimed the dangers of a warming planet are being wildly exaggerated and question the impact that fossil fuels have had on climate change.

The grants in Iceland’s coronavirus relief include money for land reclamation projects, land quality recovery and creating new birch forests.

Last year, the first-ever study to determine how many trees the Earth could support showed that an area the size of the U.S. could be restored as forests with the potential of erasing nearly 100 years of carbon emissions.

Published in Science, “The global tree restoration potential” report found that there is enough suitable land to increase the world’s forest cover by one-third without affecting existing cities or agriculture. However, the amount of suitable land area diminishes as global temperatures rise. Even if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the area available for forest restoration could be reduced by one-fifth by 2050 because it would be too warm for some tropical forests.

Reforestation has long been a part of the Nordic country’s interest.

A girl holds a sign that reads ‘pull the emergency brake’ as she attends a ceremony in the area which once was the Okjokull glacier, in Iceland, Sunday, Aug. 18, 2019. With poetry, moments of silence and political speeches about the urgent need to fight climate change, Icelandic officials, activists and others bade goodbye to the first Icelandic glacier to disappear. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

When the Vikings first arrived in Iceland in the ninth century, the land was covered in 25 to 40 percent forest. Within a few centuries, almost all of the island’s trees were slashed and burned to make room for farming. This rapid deforestation has resulted in massive soil erosion that puts the 364,000-person island at risk for desertification.

The Icelandic Forest Service has since taken up the helm of bringing back the woodlands to the molten surface, and Iceland’s trees are slowly sprouting once again.

Icelandic Forest Service Director Þröstur Eysteinsson told National Geographic in a short documentary that he is optimistic in their pursuit.

“To see the forests growing to see that we’re actually doing some good is a very rewarding thing. A very satisfying thing,” he said.

“Knowing which trees to plant is actually harder than you’d think. We plant about three million seedlings per year in Iceland. Most people have simply, until now, you use what you have. Here in Iceland, it’s the native birch. [You] plant them and you expect that they grow. And then, the climate changes,” Eysteinsson continued.

“The winters have become milder. Many of the trees that we planted in the 1950s — especially Siberian Larchs — are literally dying after several decades of being reasonably good. [They’re] sitting there dead in the landscape and it’s difficult to find the money to do something else with the land. [It] becomes a problem,” he said.

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“Our aim is to produce the seed that we need here in Iceland that it will eventually all be of genetically well-adapted material,” he added.

In 2019, forestation activity took a leap with close to four million new trees planted — a million more than the year before.

The country aims to reach carbon neutrality before the year 2040.