Nutty Professor Warns Of Global Apocalypse
By Paul Homewood
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/25649/
This just about sums up everything that is wrong about our taxpayer funded, leftie, human hating, university mafia nowadays!
An assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst concluded his comparative politics course earlier this month by telling students the planet is dying because of human activity – and there is little hope of reversing course.
“We are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, one that we are responsible for as a species,” Professor Timothy Pachirat told students on the last day of class. “We humans are creating the conditions for our own extinction as a species.”
He also suggested that because of global warming, students’ grandchildren might only be able to see a coral reef in “history books.” He also said the global consumption of farm animals illustrates in part “that we are living in a period of more suffering than the world has ever known.”
The dire predictions were among a long list of apocalyptic warnings the Yale-educated scholar laid out for his students in a 20-minute tangent that mirrored a TED talk in scope. Audio of the professor’s comments were exclusively obtained by The College Fix.
“Here’s the claim: If we accept my wide definition of comparative politics, okay, as the interdisciplinary study of how power works across time and space, then I want to argue the end of the Anthropocene is the single most important political context for the study of comparative politics today,” Pachirat said. “Yeah, I know what is going on with ISIS and ISIL and all that. I am still making this argument.”
The “Anthropocene” is a term used since its coining by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 to denote the present time interval, in which many geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities.
A student in the class told The College Fix they felt the scholar’s warnings amounted to “an apocalyptic rant about how humankind is going to destroy everything, even ourselves.”
“He made a lot of bold claims, further than the vast majority of green movement members have made, on how the Earth is unrecoverable,” the student said, adding that in general the professor did not inject his extreme views into lectures during the fall semester like he did on the final day.
Pachirat preceded his comments by acknowledging he was only giving his opinion, and that students would not be tested on the information.
Some Prat
“I figure you have been with me all semester, you might as well hear at least one lecture where I out and out tell you what I think – and if that makes you nauseous, you should leave now,” he told students before delving into the basis for his global extinction claims.
He began by noting the human population has “exponentially spiked since the industrial revolution … from 350 million to 1 billion to 2 billion to 4 billion to 8 billion and counting.” He also noted fuel consumption since the Industrial Revolution has spiked, “putting carbon back into the air that has been trapped, sequestered underneath the ground for hundreds of millions of years in the form of carbon and oil.”
“Think about this again in terms of geological time,” he told students. “The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. Humans have been around for 200,000 of those 4.6 billion years. The Industrial Revolution, when we humans began excavating and using fossil fuels … that’s only about 200 years old.”
“In geological time the Industrial Revolution represents what percent of the Earth’s history? 0.000004 percent of the Earth’s history,” he continued. “We come back to our UMass example. If UMass is the history of the Earth, and this stage is the period humans have been around, half of the chair you are sitting in is the Industrial Revolution.”
“And yet this Industrial Revolution, this tiny half-chair compared to the enormity of the entire campus, has brought with it widespread and unprecedented extinction of animals and plants, of entire ecosystems and marine systems — caused by human pollution, over harvesting, climate change, habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, monoculture farming, nuclear fallout, river diversion and ocean acidification.”
He cited the Fukushima nuclear disaster as one example of what humans “have been doing on a global scale for the last 200 years.” He went on to suggest humans have encroached on every corner of the Earth and “there is nothing truly wild anymore.”
“And at the same time that all this is going on there is a mass extinction of animal species,” Pachirat said. “We are in an era marked by unprecedented intensification of our exploitation over other species of animals that are in no danger of going extinct because we are reproducing them in order to use them.”
“Farm animals are the most illustrated example, with an estimated 50 billion land animals killed each year worldwide after living lives of immense, unprecedented confinement and suffering,” he continued. “If we use a utilitarian calculus based on the capacity to feel pain, it would be possible to say, based on our treatment of farm animals alone, that we are living in a period of more suffering than the world has ever known.”
He went on to say the future is bleak.
“If we continue with our current levels of pollution and carbon emissions, it’s possible that by the year 2050 — just 35 years from now — the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will exceed 500 parts per million, which is twice the level that existed before the Industrial Revolution,” he said. “And the oceans will have become 150 percent more acidic. We are going to see temperature increases of 3 to 7 percent Fahrenheit, and massive die offs of marine ecosystems, including perhaps most critically coral reefs. Have any of you ever seen a coral reef? It’s possible your children’s children will only be able to look at them in history books – they may no longer exist by the time you have grandchildren.”
“Within 100 years we could see a 52 percent extinction rate since the industrial revolution alone,” Pachirat added. “In other words, we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, one that we are responsible for as a species.”
He concluded by saying he hopes students could appreciate his concerns.
“You do not have to be an animal or a plant lover to take this argument seriously,” he said. “You could be the most narcissistic, anthropocentric, selfish jerk on the planet and this issue should still be of interest to you. It’s not inconceivable. Think back again to the Fukushima nuclear power disaster just a few years ago. We humans are creating the conditions for our own extinction as a species.”
The outlook is grim, he added.
“In all honesty I am extremely melancholic about our prospects,” he said of the human race.
In the end, he said that “each of us must justify why we are on this earth, and we too must recognize that we will be judged, we will, by future generations for what we do with our lives in this moment.”
He added that he didn’t have all the answers to the big questions, but he hoped he provoked students to seek them out on their own and impact the world in positive ways.
Maybe he’d like us all to go back to living in the 18thC!
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Maybe he’s simply practicing for his forthcoming 1st April lecture?
Thanks for the scary news, Paul.
Not so nutty, I think, as he gets paid to preach and indoctrinate the young.
No. He wouldn’t want all of us to go back to the 18th century. He’d only want that for of selected few of us.
I now live in Hong Kong – 5 years. I’ve been a regular visitor here for almost 30 years. During this time the city has transformed itself from a polluted slum with shoddy infrastructure and air into a very successful and remarkably clean, vibrant place to live. 70% of the city is parkland packed with an astonishing variety of plant and wildlife.
This academic prat is talking through his hat.
One of the better Green Doom & Gloom Porn outbursts.
Somebody should take up on himself to tell the “professor” the donor meeting for Greenpeace / WWF aka IPCC is over, no ned to continue to lie ..
Not a Professor, I think, but an assistant , like a junior lecturer’s assistant. Maybe he could take a course in Animal Husbandry in New Zealand next year! It illustrates the dangers of reading outside the area of professional expertise and so thinking you know better than the professionals. Quite common among the pseudo intellectuals who inhabit the journalistic professions ,said she in sweeping condemnation 🙂
By 2059 the earth will be 3 to 7 percent Fahrenheit warmer? What the hell is he talking about? He doesn’t know the different between degrees and percent? Or is he talking about 3 to 7 percent on the absolute temperature scale? That would equate to 16 to 37 degrees Fahrenheit increase in temperature. Is he just dreaming this stuff up?
People often erroneously confuse percentage temperature with degrees without taking the absolute range into account.
I even noticed at COP21 people talking about a 2 percent increase in temperature when they meant 2 degrees.
Well 2% is 2degrees in centigrade! Far less in K though but they don’t understand that, too difficult.
Only if you specify a range limit of 0-100 degrees.
Actually the range is almost limitless.
Meant 2050 not 2059.
So – there is nothing “wild” left in the world. I would love to take him to Nunavat or the Yukon and see if he could survive for three days. Or Greenland, Antarctica, the Sahara ……
Or just half-a-mile from the McDonald’s in Ketichan, Alaska
There are a number of different ways with titles of hires at universities in the US.
Usually, there are any number of
a. part time, students, adjuncts;
b. instructors;
c. assistant professors;
d. associate professors;
e. Professors
Often, non-academic folks will call all or some of these “Professor.”
The academic folks consider only the last as a “Professor.”
Another way of looking at it is “common” usage versus a “rank” that is bestowed after the person meets defined qualifications.
~~~~~
Timothy Pachirat has read much (not enough) and has opinions. As many academics do, such conversations are usually held Fridays after the last bell – at a local pub after a beer and pizza, then more beer, and so on.
A professor is the head of a department, or certainly used to be. This bloke looks about 20 years old. My 18 year old granddaughter knows more than he does.
My late father was a Professor of Chemistry. It is an earned level which comes after the vote of a committee. These days I’m not so certain about the “earned” part. He had a PhD from MIT, so it was always proper in the academic setting to call him “Dr.” Gibson, but only after his promotion was he “Professor Gibson.” He would have had choice words for what passes for academia today.
I wonder what he imagines Fukushima is going to do to mankind?
He should also look at the thriving wildlife in the Chernobyl area
He’s only voicing what every good green guy knows, from deep down inside, to be true. Nature is good, man is bad, and will inevitably destroy nature, and himself in the process. This is so deeply ingrained a thought pattern that there is almost no discussion possible at a rational level. That exactly the opposite is true is not a possibility that could be seriously entertained.
He’s right about one thing, though. Man will one day have to address the deep moral question about his treatment of animals. At the millenium I was asked to make some predictions for the future. I said that, in the last millenium man had largely worked out how he could and should treat his own species, and most of the moral questions thereabout had been settled. The next millenium would have to address his moral relationship with the rest of creation, starting with the higher animals. Up to now, the use of animals for food has been necessary and normal. That no longer has to be true. With his increasing ability to control his environment he’ll have an increasing moral obligation to do it right. Of course, it’s going to be a helluva long time before he can do anything about nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ but he can at least begin with those parts of the animal world that he does control.
Forget the Anthropocene – welcome to the Idiocene.
http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/welcome-to-a-new-geologic-era-the-idiocene.html
These idiots are going to look even more foolish than they currently do (no mean feat) when the world of science turns on it head over the next decade or so. Even many who think this guy is wrong but just has the scale wrong are themselves going to have to readjust.
Those who follow the electric universe and all the related interdisciplinary subjects will know of what I write. Just about everything we think we know is wrong. The 20th Century has been all about Government directed science and any real research has been squashed. All the facts and figures and timelines this idiot quoted in his rant are not even likely to be close, so his conclusions however strongly held are false before he even starts.
The events that I think will be the turning points are the landing on the comet by the European space agency and the visit to Pluto by NASA. In both cases all that they thought they would find the did not find, and much of what the Electric Universe predicted was there for all to see. It has just become very difficult to deny that settled science is wrong and we need to turn the clock back, forget Einstein and all the relativity nonsense, forget black hole, dark energy and matter and get back to proper science using what we can see and not what we can’t.
Once we accept that Cosmology is wrong, and way wrong at that, we can then look into the many other subject where the data and research just don’t fit with the theory. Just a couple of things to watch out for.
Fossil fuels are not fossils at all, even coal
The earth did not form from coalescing gas and dust around the Sun
700 years of the dark ages did not exist and have been inserted into history by the survivors of recent cataclysm.
Gravity is electromagnetic and acts instantaneously, not some wave to be found in the LHC as Newton’s mechanical equations demonstrate. Note I did not say Laws which they are most definitely not.
Earth’s gravity has changed and become stronger, gravity is not directly related to mass but related to the difference in electric charge between bodies. Still much to understand about gravity.
Think I’m as nutty as the Yale guy? Just watch this space as they say. The physical evidence is compelling.
We also need a change in politics and a return to real capitalism to take advantage of our new knowledge. This will be the real challenge.
You know, this guy could take care of one member of the over-population problem. Why is it these jerks always want to come kill me, but never think of themselves in the same light?
“Students’ grandchildren might only be able to see a coral reef in “history books”
What – along with snow???
Paul, your first sentence sums up this load of rubbish perfectly.
We have a challenger for climate scare merchant (being polite) of the week.
‘Angus Walker set up a climate change project called #WaterLog UK to warn people of the dangers facing the environment and he has created maps to show how a sea level rise of 70 metres would change the country.’
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/extreme-mock-up-shows-dumfries-7092246
Just agree to more windmills and stop burning fuel. In chilly Scotland? Don’t think so.
Another nutty professor said in 2000 that snow was a thing of the past. How did that work out?
This is nothing but a dangerous death cult, not unlike that of Jim Jones.
Human innovation has already cleaned up the environment and will continue to provide us with a better standard of living, if the environmentalist nut cases cases just stay out of the way.
(1) For a more detailed background, here is the bio from Assistant Professor Pachirat’s faculty page at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst website:
http://polsci.umass.edu/people/timothy-pachirat
He has a 2008 PhD “with distinction,” from Yale. Go figure.
(2) Here are the courses he is/has taught in political science in the 2015/16 academic year, including a course entitled, “Distance, Deceit, Denial (graduate seminar)”:
http://polsci.umass.edu/people/faculty/timothy-pachirat/teaching
After reading the bio and his course descriptions, it boils down to some pretty nutty and idiosyncratic stuff posing as intellectual fare, not atypical of what many of the young minds are being almost exclusively exposed to today. No wonder so many of them are lost.