Summary: The case against going extinct soon due to extreme climate change & human impacts. Science journalist Scott K. Johnson and counter-culture podcaster KMO. Radio Ecoshock 140917 Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB) OR you can listen to this program right now (or download or share it) on SoundCloud. Last week, Dr. Guy McPherson predicted humans will go extinct by 2030. Now science journalist Scott K Johnson and counter-culture podcaster KMO explain why they disagree. It's bad, but not that bad. SCOTT K JOHNSON "HOW GUY MCPHERSON GETS IT WRONG" In last week's Radio Ecoshock show, Dr. Guy McPherson explained his scientific reasons why he thinks humans will become extinct before the year 2040. He outlined a combined ecological collapse, already on-going in the extinction of other species, a dying ocean, the prospect of abandoned or failing nuclear plants, and the over-riding shift of Earth's climate. McPherson is a Professer Emeritus in natural science from the University of Arizona. He has collected masses of scientific papers, news articles, and statements to show the worst of all worlds developing. Our next guest says Guy McPherson is wrong. Scott K. Johnson describes himself as "a geoscience educator, hydrologist, and freelance science writer contributing at Ars Technica." His personal blog is at fractalplanet.wordpress.com. An article there has become a focal point for people questioning McPherson and the whole idea of near-term human extinction. It's title is "How Guy McPherson gets it wrong". Scott K. Johnson I begin by clearing on thing up. Some supporters of McPherson seem to think that anyone who disagrees with him is a climate denier. Scott Johnson is not. He thinks climate change is a clear and present danger to us all. Although not strictly speaking a scientist, Johnson has plenty of academic training, with a specialty in hydrology. He is a teacher, and as he says, a science journalist. But Johnson does see a strange parallel between Guy McPherson's approach to facts, and the way climate deniers tend to use them. Scott says it involves cherry-picking some parts of a paper or report, without consider the rest of it, or even the conclusions reached by the author(s). Johnson notes that McPherson is caught in a double-bind. On the one hand, he presents his array of reasons why we will go extinct as based on science. On the other, he dismisses scientists who don't agree with his bleak prognosis as being too afraid to talk about the awful truth they know. I point out to Scott that I have talked with scientists, often after an interview, who will say privately they are more worried than they admit publicly. That does happen. But that doesn't mean that all scientists are afraid. We have plenty of outspoken scientists, and I haven't found any that publish peer-reviewed papers who say we will become extinct in the next 25 years. We discuss the central role played in Guy's dating scheme, the time of our extinction, by a single "paper" (which turns out to be just a blog post) by Malcolm Light of the Arctic News. I've written extensively about the unreliable nature of Malcolm Light's pretty wild prediction, including the very month and year all humans will be gone from the Northern Hemisphere. In what looks like a scientific paper, complete with complex graphs and charts, we find this stunning announcement: "The absolute mean extinction time for the northern hemisphere is 2031.8 and for the southern hemisphere 2047.6 with a final mean extinction time for 3/4 of the earth's surface of 2039.6." Well that's pretty precise isn't it? In August 2031, say goodbye for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. There is a lot in this article. I won't call it a scientific "paper" until I can find evidence it was peer-reviewed or published in an official journal. This reminds me more of religion than science. If you haven't already read that piece, please check it out here. I won't go over all that
