Guy McPherson

Biography

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 other colleges in North America. 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 Westchester County, New York in October 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."

He has made a number of future predictions. In 2007, he predicted that due to peak oil there would be permanent blackouts in cities starting in 2012. In 2012, he predicted the "likely" extinction of humanity by 2030 due to climate change, and mass die-off by 2020 "for those living in the interior of a large continent." In 2018, he was quoted as predicting "that there will be no humans on Earth by 2026," which he based on "projections" of climate-change and species loss.