Interview with Guy McPherson

That's our first presentation done and the traveling part of the tour under way. We were ambushed when the stand in co-presenter attacked Guy and said some veryprovocative things like bringing up the subject of " Mass Suicide" !!! implying that somehow believing in NTHE somehow made that a possibility! WTF? I gave him a serve afterwards saying it was totally irresponsible for him to have said such a thing and he replied," It's what I think, I can say what I like". Considering we are bringing a very troubling message to people, sometimes for the very first time I believe throwing a comment like mass suicide into the debate was cavalier in the extreme.

Dr Daniel Hikuroa, research director of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, New Zealand's Māori Centre of Research Excellence was slated to speak and when he became unavailable Dr Sebastian Leuzinger, deputy director, Institute for Applied Ecology New Zealand stepped into take his place. Due to the email issues that I have had lately I missed that change and was caught unawares as I hadn't had a chance to research Sebastian Leuzinger. He accused Guy of cherry picking data and ignoring other negative feedback loops, when asked to list some of them he couldn't!

As with the Climate Change march a few weeks ago I was told moments before the presentation that I wasn't allowed to introduce Guy to the audience as it was Cristina Parra Jerez who was the host. No problems there except it was Guy who had specifically asked me to do so and his request was ignored.Power tripping much?

In her lengthy introduction Christina referred to 100's of extinctions / year when the real number is 200 /day???????

What prey tell is the purpose of stating numbers that are demonstrably incorrect?

Here is the write up of interview Guy did with Anna Maajvu

---Kevin Hester

NZ: 'Stop civilisation' only chance for survival, says climate change academic

Pacific Media, Centre,

21 October, 2014

AUCKLAND (Pacific Media Watch): Humans face extinction within 40 years as a result of abrupt climate change unless we put an immediate stop to the trappings of civilisation as we know it – cars, hot showers, shops and everything else, says an American ecology academic.

Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of Natural Resources, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, where he has taught for more than 20 years, has been researching "abrupt climate change" and is due to give a lecture on options for the future at AUT University tomorrow as part of his New Zealand speaking tour.

He told Pacific Media Watch that people tended to think of climate change as something that occurs in a linear fashion because evolution had encouraged a belief that the near future would be like the recent past.

However, abrupt climate change meant this was not the case. Earth had warmed only 0.85 C since the Industrial Revolution began, but recently has begun heading towards warming to a temperature beyond that which humans have ever survived.

Given that there was about a 40-year lag between carbon dioxide emissions and warming, the human species was ill-equipped to deal with the increase in temperature that would be faced, Professor McPherson said.

In the face of this, current strategies to combat climate change were unlikely to be enough.

Paraphrasing Tim Garrett of the University of Utah, Professor McPherson said: “Civilisation is a heat engine. The only way to stop runaway greenhouse is to terminate civilisation – no grocery stories, no fuel stations, no water coming out the of taps”.

Unworkable solutions

Solutions to climate change that were rooted in civilisation would not work because that was the problem, he said.

“We must stop all civilisation” he said.

McPherson said it was unlikely that this solution would be adopted politically, however, because it was not at all practical.

“I don’t know 40 people who would vote for that and I can’t imagine a political candidate running on that campaign. The only way to stop runaway climate change is something that nobody would ever vote for and ever pursue. The fact that industrial civilisation drives 150 to 200 species to extinction every day really does not enter the public discussion, or that at some point, this becomes us."

Professor McPherson strongly suspects that people will not know they are becoming extinct until it is too late.

“I get a lot of pushback even from mainstream climate scientists when I mention human extinction. Facing a choice between utter despair, hopelessness and total extinction, I suspect we are going to revert to total extinction” he said.

Geographically, people would probably want to move to coastal areas in the southern hemisphere as these areas would heat up less, and because Antarctica still had a tremendous amount of ice and would do for a long time, he said.

McPherson himself has moved to a straw-bale home on a shared homestead in New Mexico, US.

An abrupt climate change is defined as one which occurs when the climate system is forced to transition to a new climate state at a rate that is determined by the climate system energy-balance, and which is more rapid than the rate of change of the external force.

Dr Daniel Hikuroa, research director of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, New Zealand's Māori Centre of Research Excellence and Dr Sebastian Leuzinger, deputy director, Institute for Applied Ecology New Zealand are the discussants in tomorrow night’s lecture.