Global Greening Sounds Better Than It Is!

  I am Facebook friends with an old high school classmate who is politically a Trumpist right wing Christian.  He has been a missionary in Africa, and is proud of his work there and his friends. Half the time he writes posts that are mini-sermons, advising prayer and self-examination.   Half the time he reposts essays from people like Gary Bauer and Lew Rockwell.  Sometimes he reposts jokes praising how families knew how to handle kids in the old days, and occasionally really ugly memes about democrats.
He and I go back and forth from time to time pretty politely.  Most recently he quoted a post about "global greening," a rightist idea based on the fact that indeed the vastly increased carbon dioxide in our atmosphere does increase photosynthesis.  The problem is that this increased photosynthesis and increased oxygen no where near balance out the carbon dioxide.   
Barry challenged his Facebook friends to "research" the issue for themselves. I almost immediately found article a couple of years old in the New York Times and came up with  this: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/science/climate-change-plants-global-greening.html. 
The thrust of the article  is that Global Greening is real enough, but a minor factor in a complex situation. It says: "Despite global greening, carbon dioxide levels have climbed over the past two centuries to levels not seen on Earth for millions of years. And the carbon dioxide we’ve injected into the atmosphere is already having major impacts across the planet." Those major impacts almost certainly include more devastating fires in the West and more devastating floods like the ones in Eastern Kentucky.
The thing that scares me, along with global warming itself, is how my friend and so many others depend on these highly misleading and tendentious sources (I'm sure Barry would say, "So's the New York Times"). There is in many of the sources he uses a nugget of truth, some facts that they like to report with lots of statistics, but not the whole picture.

One of the best responses I ever saw to climate deniers who claim science on their side was John Oliver's Last Week Tonight piece from 2017 that made the point that a balanced presentation about climate change should have one scientist who questions climate change versus 97 who agree it is happening.
He makes his point hilariously by setting up a debate with two real scientists, a climate change denier and a climate change affirmer.  Then he brings in 96 more real live scientists to back up the affirmer. It's a wonderful visual explanation at https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10154625121922026