Thomas Friedman trots out the over-population argument as part of his New York Times column “The Earth is full.” There are too many people and the world is getting hotter and food prices are increasing and productivity is improving which aggravates climate change and the over-populated planet can’t deal with it and so on and so forth. It is a vicious cycle, if you believe these nattering nabobs of negativism. Friedman wonders: “How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?” Perhaps because these Chicken Littles have been preaching from this discredited hymnbook for a long time. And we haven’t crossed all these redlines. We could rebut their argument, but facts do not matter to the Crowded Planet zealots. Rather, we should mock them, as Kathy Shaidle does when she says, “I remember when ‘the Earth was full’ — thirty years ago.”