An artists rendering of a million trees

Here’s a mostly good news story: it turns out that the Earth has trillions more trees than we thought. Research published in the journal “Nature” drew on global satellite imagery and more than 400,000 sample counts from forests around the world, and came to an estimate that there are currently 3.04 trillion trees on earth, which would be 750% from the previous best estimate, which was 400 billion.

So that is good news.

What troubles me a little is that the previous “best” estimate was off by that much.

That kind of undercuts the credibility of science a little bit. It shouldn’t be that hard to estimate the number of trees on the planet.

Still, I’ll take good news where I can get it.