McPherson’s career as a professor began at Texas A&M University, where he taught for one academic year. He taught for twenty years at the University of Arizona, and also taught at the University of California-Berkeley, Southern Utah University, and Grinnell College.

McPherson has served as an expert witness for legal cases involving land management and wildfires. He has published more than 55 peer-reviewed publications.

In May 2009, McPherson began living on an off-grid homestead in southern New Mexico. He then moved to Belize in July 2016. He moved to New York in October of 2018.

In November 2015, McPherson was interviewed on National Geographic Explorer with host Bill Nye. Andrew Revkin in The New York Times said McPherson was an “apocalyptic ecologist … who has built something of an ‘End of Days’ following.” Michael Tobis, a climate scientist from the University of Wisconsin, said McPherson “is not the opposite of a denialist. He is a denialist, albeit of a different stripe.”

David Wallace-Wells writing in The Uninhabitable Earth (2019) called McPherson a “climate Gnostic” and on the “fringe,” while climate scientist Michael E. Mann said he was a “doomist cult hero.”

Reading this makes me glad I’ve never donated to the Guardian. It used to be a good newspaper but has swung hard to the right. Gates as a climate hero, really? I consider him one of the most destructive and contemptible people on Earth — along with the other hyper billionaires, who are little different from their counterparts a century ago when oil was the monopoly commodity, or a century and a half ago when it was railroads. Gates and his “charitable” foundation are hard at work guiding public policy and public money into “solutions” that involve monopolies and fat profits for entrepreneurs and sharks like himself.

Gates is pushing hard for African farmers to adopt Green Revolution approaches like pesticides and artificial fertilizer and monocropping, along with GMO crops. You could say he’s “trying to fight hunger in Africa” but I don’t buy it. There are better, healthier, safer ways to expand production where needed, and to deal with the poverty and maldistribution that is the primary cause of hunger.

As for “sequestering carbon” via machines, that is nonsense. As was proven here in WV where we had a coal plant fitted with CCS equipment for awhile — when it looked like some kind of regulation would pass — but it was then abandoned because it failed to capture much of the CO2 and caused the plant to be less efficient so it needed to burn 30% more coal for the same power, and then you need to pipe the captured CO2 to places where you HOPE it will be sequestered forever–via pipelines not yet built, and we see how difficult and expensive it is to ram a gas pipeline from point A to Point B, why would this be different?

And now renewables have gotten cheap enough that coal can’t compete even without CCS. Soon this will be the case with gas as well. And they produce no wastes. CCS makes zero sense. It exists as an incantation, not a technology — a way to justify continued burning of fossil fuels.

As for nukes, they can’t compete with any other power source economically and there is no way to deal with the wastes which will be dangerous for the rest of the life of our biosphere — all so we can run our hair dryers? This is insane. And it is not mentioned that Gates is investing his own money in extremely dangerous “solutions”–geoengineering.

I have much more respect for Mann but I do disagree with two points. He rejects emphasis on personal lifestyle change, but in our capitalist system, as long as there is demand there will be supply, and scientists who jet about all the time are rightly considered hypocrites.

Yes, we have to have change at the governmental and corporate levels to pull away from catastrophic climate change — but we will not get it, ever, which means personal change is the best we can do. Not that we shouldn’t keep trying for policy change — even too little too late is better than nothing.

But some kind of collapse is pretty much baked into the system and some of the doomers are actually responsible people trying to get everyone to look at reality. Not McPherson — he skews the science to make it look like it’s already too late and we’ll all be dead in a decade. We actually could avert catastrophic change if we acted with tremendous immediacy, cooperatively, globally, accomplishing several simultaneous revolutions in power generation, agriculture, city layout /economic arrangements /transportation, and a few other lesser ones.

What are the odds of that actually happening? Zero, so our best chance is collapse coming sooner.