It is a too large field for one to research alone, but I am familiar with the effort to track global leaf area and desertification. So here is my small contribu

It is a too large field for one to research alone, but I am familiar with the effort to track global leaf area and desertification. So here is my small contribution to the discussion: 2013: "Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert" begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it's happening to about two-thirds of the world's grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos." https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI 2014: Global Greening Is Firm, Drivers Are Mixed - Harvard "Evidence for global greening is converging, asserting an increase in CO2 uptake and biomass of the terrestrial biosphere. Evidence for these trends comes from firm empirical data." http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015AGUFM.B31A0515K http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015AGUFM.B31A0515K 2016: Greening of the globe and its drivers - Nature "Satellite records from 1982–2009 show a persistent and widespread increase of leaf area (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing leaf area (browning)." https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004 Elevated CO2 as a driver of global dryland greening - Nature "Recent regional scale analyses using satellite based vegetation indices such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), have found extensive areas of “greening”" https://www.nature.com/articles/srep20716 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep20716 Rise in CO2 has 'greened Planet Earth' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36130346 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36130346 "Prof Judith Curry, the former chair of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, added: "It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called contrarians, since their disagreement with the consensus reflects conflicts of values and a preference for the empirical (i.e. what has been observed) versus the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models)."