Thank you. You understood what @GeorgeMonbiot & many people missed when he put out a smoke screen to avoid debate. Desertification in seasonal rainfall environments (brown areas below in picture) is due to loss of biodiversity caused by slow chemical oxidation that replaces rapid biological decay of billions of tons of annually dying grass. It was clearly explained here ten years ago bit.ly/1gm0HIZ Started when humans killed off most large animals that maintained decay by trampling and with their moist gut containing micro-organisms digesting and excreting. Native Americans & Aborigines saw the damage when they killed off 80% of the genera of large animals & tried to prevent slow oxidation from killing life - by using fire (rapid oxidation) that began desertification on different continents about 60,000 years ago. As I showed, in what is now an American National Park, an irrigation-based Native American civilization was destroyed by desertification before Spaniards arrived with sheep & centuries before fossil fuels. Areas of the land 100 times larger than the UK, including national parks in US, Africa, Australia, etc are every year sending carbon & water from soil to atmosphere. The desertifying National Parks I showed tell us with scientific certainty that the cause of desertification is the way in which all governments and large environmental organizations @WWF @IUCN @TNC @AP and universities develop management policies. As long as most of the world’s land including vast National Parks larger than the UK is releasing water & carbon because of desertification, droughts, floods & climate change will continue no matter what we do. With an Oxford Think Tank having published a report saying climate change will globally wipe out all cities economies & businesses & billions of people will die in violence is why I said “To shorten this debate let us assume: The World’s soils can sequester no carbon. Cattle give off 20 times the methane they do. Every human becomes vegan”. I conceded Monbiot’s entire line of reasoning at the outset so that we could focus the debate on the way policies are developed that is causing climate change (there is no other cause known). And I then stated what I contend (the very basis of the debate) which was: --That we have to address the way in which policy is developed dictating management at scale. --And when we do that it will require millions more cattle, sheep, goats, camels, even if they are only eaten by vultures. I then asked Monbiot to now tell us how he (or any scientist) would reverse global desertification using technology? The entire future of humanity hangs on that question and I am willing to debate it with any scientist in the world to save billions of lives and offer young people hope. The rest is history as everyone saw – Monbiot spent the entire time discussing carbon, methane & irrelevant papers by authors who never mentioned oxidation or any aspect of my life's work calling them "peer reviewed" when none were by any of my peers. Here is oxidation (several years of slow chemical breakdown) killing grass and soil life in the Aldo Leopold Memorial Forest on the Rio Grande river in the US - and just the desertifying areas of Africa over a hundred times the size of the UK (which is same size as the desertifying little island off the African coast. We need to start taking climate change seriously.