Frosty Vs. Bjorn -- Frosty Wins!

Note: When Frosty Wooldridge sent us this article and his response, we did a fact check on Lomborg's statement that "organic farming leaves a larger footprint than its conventional cousin" -- which struck us as absurd.

Mr. Lomborg's personal assistant wrote us back and said the "source" for this statement was a wikipedia page devoted to ecological footprinting. The sentence Lomborg based his statement on is a hypothetical postulation meant to uliminate possible shortcomings of ecological accounting -- yet Lomborg, aided by whomever is asleep at the Denver Post's editorial desk, turned this into a pronouncement of fact on the ecological footprint of organic farming!

To wit:

The method seems to reward the replacement of original ecosystems with high-productivity agricultural monocultures by assigning a higher biocapacity to such regions. For example, replacing ancient woodlands or tropical forests with monoculture forests or plantations may improve the ecological footprint. Similarly, if organic farming yields were lower than those of conventional methods, this could result in the former being "penalized" with a larger ecological footprint.^[23] Of course, this insight, while valid, stems from the idea of using the footprint as one's only metric. If the use of ecological footprints are complemented with other indicators, such as one for biodiversity, the problem could maybe be solved.

As Frosty points out in his reponse, this ridiculous statement on organic farming pretty much sums up Lomborgs whole article.

LOMBORG’S UTTER BALDERDASH AND LACK OF RESPONSIBITY TOWARD HUMANITY

By Frosty Wooldridge

http://neighbors.denverpost.com/blog.php/2009/04/20/lomborgs-utter-balderdash-and-lack-of-responsibility-toward-humanity/

Re: “Despite predictions of doom, Earth is enough” Bjorn Lomborg, Denver Post, 4/19/09

The highly educated academic from Denmark, Bjorn Lomborg, in an op-ed piece in the Denver Post on Sunday told his audience that human overpopulation wasn’t a problem: “That our profligate consumption requires five planets is a catchy story, but it is wrong. The planet we have is more than enough.”

Professor Lomborg, please tell that to the tens of thousands of species already ensnared by human population hyper-growth that suffered extinction in the last century. Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of species facing extinction in this century. Tell that to the 100 million sharks that have been killed annually for the past 20 years that they have enough oceans to survive the onslaught of humanity.

“Upwards of two hundred species, mostly of the large, slow-breeding variety are becoming extinct here every day because more and more of the earth's carrying capacity is systematically being converted into human carrying capacity. These species are being burnt out, starved out, and squeezed out of existence thanks to technologies that most people, I'm afraid, think of as technologies of peace. I hope it will not be too long before the technologies that support our population explosion begin to be perceived as no less hazardous to the future of life on this planet than the endless production of radioactive wastes.” Daniel Quinn

Quinn refers to the Sixth Extinction Session rampaging across the planet whereby the largest die-off of species continues at the hand, not of nature or natural catastrophes, but by sheer human hyper-population growth.

I invite Lomborg to pull his head out of his academic ivory tower by addressing the harsh realities outside his college window. For him to make such absurd statements in the 21^st century, shows reprehensible misconduct unbecoming a scientist. His counterpart, the late economist Julian Simon, spouted the same crock of delusion that the planet could carry unlimited population.

The artist Shim Shimmel upon completing his work in Antarctica said, “Antarctica has come to symbolize the last of the wild places. But no place is sacred in Man’s eyes. In this pristine wilderness, greed would still find a haven for devastating industry. For God’s sake, with a planet full of beings such as ourselves, even the stars aren’t safe.”

With thinking and actions like Lomborg’s, humanity will not survive with any dignity or sustainable civilizations in the 21^st century. O.E. Wilson said that humanity has become the most dangerous animal on the planet while it threatens all other creatures on the globe.

H.R.H. Ghazi Bin Muhummad said, “Robert Kaplan's seminal article The Coming Anarchy … uses the image of a luxury car driving one way on a highway and a stream of destitute refugees walking the other way to suggest that whilst one part of the world is moving comfortably and prosperously forward, much of the rest of the world is suffering horribly, and disintegrating due to poverty, disease, crime, conflict, tribalism, overpopulation and pollution.”

With an annual worldwide human starvation death rate of 18 million human beings that die from exceeding their carrying capacity, how do people like Lomborg enjoy center stage in the Denver Post? How can such denial and delusion trump reality? Why didn’t the Denver Post allow a more reality based scientist such as Dr. Albert Bartlett, Dr. Diana Hull, Governor Richard D. Lamm, David Paxson, Charles C. Hartman and others a counter article?

If Lomborg’s specious conjecture that we enjoy ‘enough’ planet, how come our reefs worldwide die off at alarming rates? How come we suffer 27,000 square mile ‘dead zones’ at the mouths of our biggest rivers from so many chemicals spewed by humans into their waters? How come our oil reserves, that run our first world civilizations, descend into steeper curves as we pump the planet dry at 85 million barrels daily?

I could add a hundred more examples. It’s horrifically irresponsible to promote relentless human population growth via the Denver Post.

I invite the Denver Post to pull its ink pens out of the delusion of the benefits of population growth and publish top experts on how we might stabilize human population rather than encourage it like Lomborg.

This article illustrates how the patients are running the asylum!