Jack: about the organic vs. conventional. The background of the whole argument was revealed at minute 5:32 of the video: “I’m Björn Lomborg…”. Google him, and all of this will make sense. It’s his entire MO to be contrarian on environmental issues. He gained fame and notoriety in environmental circles as the author of “The sceptical environmentalist”. He does make some valid points. Check out his TED talk on the topic, it’s quicker than reading the book, and you get the gist of his views. You may even agree with some of them.

What troubles me about him, is that he is an economist, with (apparently) relatively little understanding of natural sciences, yet he goes on pontificating about them. Unfortunately being contrarian out of principle only sometimes puts you on the better side of an argument, but not always. Contrarianism as a principle is also not scientific. I am an environmental scientist myself, with a bit of an idea about these issues and a PhD to my name, so I claim to know what I am talking about 😉

Björn Lomborg IMHO looks at things from a lay-person’s perspective as far as natural science goes, and adds his expert perspective as an economist. That sometimes works out, like when he advocates in the Sceptical Environmentalist focusing less on CO2 emissions and more on what other problems we could solve with those resources. I personally agree with that, but I happen to disagree with where he would re-direct the resources.
The noteworthy point, though, is that he reaches the right conclusion for the wrong reason, because he does not seem to grasp the actual science that would lead him to the right reason.

As far as the organic debate goes, his argument is almost entirely BS and FUD. The rebuttal you read out is dead on, in my opinion. The problem comes from interpreting specific findings of scientific papers out of their usually very narrowly defined context and making generalizations based on that. I also know from some of my former colleagues who do research into food and agricultural issues, that are legitimate experts on some specific aspect of science, but lack the holistic perspective on the environment or agriculture for instance. They can come to conclusions that are totally scientifically sound, but when put into a larger perspective, make little sense. Or they may just take the conventional status quo as given and make arguments for instance about meat production taking vast amounts of water per kg of meat produced, without realizing that CAFOs are not the only way of producing meat. I could go on, but I already went long here.

Anyway, I think this is mostly a publicity piece for Björn Lomborg. I didn’t google it, but it wouldn’t surprise me much to find out that he’s got a book out on the subject that needs selling.

Check out another aspect beyond just organic surface. The root structure, as depicted in the below article tells a whole additional perspective beyond just what’s on the surface of earth. The root system and therefore the soil health from the quick growing annuals will take years to recover.

That really gets you thinking.

http://proof.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/15/digging-deep-reveals-the-intricate-world-of-roots/

Just now catching up on shows…
Regarding that org vs. non-org video, I had to stop everything I was doing to get on here and mash out how utterly ludicrous it was. Pure mental gymnastics BS. Argh!