The good news about climate change is that the news about climate change isn’t necessarily bad. In fact, it’s kind of good.

Let’s not get into a big thing about whether or not the weather is changing. Storming and blowing about climate change, pro or con, solves nothing, convinces no one, and generally leaves all parties cold-shouldered and hot under the collar. Let’s talk instead about what a warmer world might actually look like.

Data compiled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which august body is held to be the final voice on all things atmospherical, strongly suggests that if temperatures continue rising at their present rate, global warming should yield net benefits for most of this century. Expanding on that theme, Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University recently peeled apart 14 scholarly climate change studies conducted by governments and universities on six continents to see if they contained any instructive points of agreement. They contained lots of them, including the general consensus that a rising thermometer will, for the next 60 years, at least, likely beget increasing abundance and greater prosperity all across this Big Blue Marble.

One thing all of those studies agree on is that global warming as we understand it will probably enhance agriculture and industry up to about 6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial averages, a point the IPCC figures we’ll reach one fine day around 2080. That’s based in part on the not-disputed fact that the 2-degree rise we’ve experienced during the last 150 years has, by even cautious estimates, been instrumental in increasing global economic output by about 1.4 percent, and there’s no scientific reason to believe that trend won’t continue as the mercury creeps upward in coming decades. Interestingly, the principal hero in the global-warming-as-economic-driver story is also the greenhouse villain in the popular mind – carbon dioxide. CO2 is both the essential ingredient behind photosynthesis, making it possible for plants to manufacture carbohydrates, proteins and fats, and a surprisingly rare commodity comprising something under 0.04 percent of the atmosphere. As global CO2 levels inch up, global scientists have noted a pronounced increase in the Earth’s botanical inventory. Sifting through 30 years of satellite imagery, researchers at Boston University have catalogued an unmistakable green boom across some 31 percent of the planet’s vegetated area, as opposed to a relative decrease in fecundity over about 3 percent of the Earth’s surface. Africa’s parched and famine-prone Sahel region and ever-thirsty Australia are particularly rich examples of increasing CO2 levels’ marvelous fertilizing effect.

Also supporting that vegetable abundance is CO2’s much-maligned role in melting things, particularly glaciers and ice caps, which results in the elevation of other things, notably tides and shorelines. According to Tol’s broad cross-section of climatic wisdom, the primary outcome of all that melting has been, and will continue to be, a lot more surface water falling, flowing and generally making itself available to industry and agriculture. Fears that rising sea levels will erase the better part of the planet’s most valuable real estate are, at best, exaggerated, and at worst purposefully misleading. All 14 of Tol’s universally respected sources agree that the rise of ocean levels has, indeed, accelerated during the last century from a relaxed 2 millimeters per year to a leisurely 3 millimeters per year. Even were that rate of increase to double during the next 50 years, which pretty much nobody expects it to, it would still yield an average total gain of something under one foot. Even the worst-case-loving IPCC can’t feature seas rising more than two feet between now and 2080, which, while significant, is easily within humanity’s ability to manage and nowhere near the deliberately alarming 20 feet predicted in “Earth in the Balance.”

Finally, all of the comprehensive analyses collated by Tol are in perfect agreement that claims of more erratic, extreme and destructive weather events in our climate-change future are purely anecdotal and completely unsupported by reliable scientific or statistical evidence. Indeed, the scientific record makes plain that incidents of hurricanes, tsunamis, droughts and floods remain essentially unchanged since 1900, while statistics conclusively show that human economic and technological advancement and our native adaptability have slashed the climate’s costs in lives and money by more than 90 percent during that same period. And it’s worth repeating that while those 14 published and peer-reviewed studies represent individual institutional findings, they together quite exactly reflect the best consensus of the global scientific community.

None of this is to say that climate change isn’t serious business, which is why Tol doesn’t say that. The climate is a tricky bird, and our very survival as a species could ultimately depend on our understanding the impossibly complex interplay of life and air and water within our comfortable terrestrial solarium. But there’s also no good reason to think we can’t readily adjust to whatever conditions evolve between now and 2080, or that currently rising temperatures and sea levels are Nature’s kiss of death. As it happens, Nature may even now be quietly working to solve our presumed CO2 problem in its own quietly practical way.

It’s long been known plants store carbon. The more plants there are, the more carbon can be stored, and as previously mentioned there are a lot more plants these days storing a lot more carbon. But that’s only the half of it.

Climate scientists have been puzzled of late to find atmospheric levels of carbon-12 (by far the most abundant form of atmospheric carbon) beginning to fall below carefully calibrated expectations. An international team led by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography recently looked deeper into the mystery and were nothing short of astonished by what they saw. Plants – all plants, everywhere – have begun gobbling up more carbon-12 than they used to, and not just because they can.

Sucking more carbon-12 out of the environment enables plants to photosynthesize more efficiently, making them larger, healthier, and faster at reproducing even more plants with an oversized appetite for carbon-12. It’s all very complicated and scientific, but the upshot seems to be that rising CO2 levels may have triggered a hitherto unsuspected balancing mechanism. Functioning as far-flung parts of a single planet-spanning carbon filtration and sequestration system, Amazonian jungles and Ukrainian wheat fields and arctic tundra could theoretically, voraciously and automatically scrub the atmosphere until it reaches whatever carbon level Nature considers acceptable. The phenomenon is still a long way from understood, but the basic facts are clear enough and it wouldn’t be the first time Nature made a monkey out of Man’s scientific pretensions.

Argue about climate change if you must, but don’t fret about it. The news isn’t all bad, and it’s just possible the climate knows something we don’t.