UPDATE: New video added. See below.
Dr. Bradley Schaefer really knows how to reach young college students: spouting hyperbolic proclamations of death and nuclear obliteration. The Louisiana State University astronomy professor is filmed saying some pretty ugly things, even for the typical unhinged liberal professor. But we should give him the benefit of the doubt since the YouTube clip is heavily edited. We must consider the context in which these statements were made lest it be mistaken for anything more than bravado or how high brow academics talk amongst themselves. Yet bringing up the death toll on 9/11 is usually a loser argument in any debate.
Video after the break:
From an LSU campus reform outfit:
Dr. Schaefer’s views on the subject were well-known. At one point in class, the professor compares deaths from European heat waves to American deaths in the September 11 terrorist attacks: “Now remember, how many people got killed on 9/11? What was it? One thousand? Two thousand? Something like that. Three thousand, whatever. It’s dwarfed by this. Why aren’t people reacting?”
Students who chose a limited government response to global warming were given this question to answer: “Your professed policies have a substantial likelihood of leading to the death of a billion or more people. (A) Estimate the probability that you personally will be killed in an ugly way because of your current decision? (B) What is the probability that any children of yours will die in ugly ways due to your current decision?”
UPDATE: The professor refutes critics in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education and says he harangued both sides of the political spectrum and that the video above was edited, and show him in an unflattering light.
Here’s the unedited video http://vimeo.com/16649140
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I think this is what they call preaching fire and brimstone… except this time it is from the Fundamentalist Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming.
savethesharks says:
November 17, 2010 at 9:06 pm
Yeah yeah yeah….understood.
What I don’t understand is exactly what in the hell does his lecture have anything to do with…astronomy?
I watched the whole video and that was my thought also. He talks about spending several previous classes discussing the ozone hole. Then launches into an ignorant rant on hurricanes and moves on to 250 feet of sea level rise. The edited version was mildly
distorted, but his whole presentation was filled with phenomenal BS. I guess he should get a few points for admitting that “Waterworld” was impossible, but generally comes across as someone who attended to many Algore seminars.
What struck me early on in Dr. Schaeffer’s rant was his intimation that India and Pakistan – which have demonstrated their respective abilities to assemble and detonate nuclear explosives – might some 50 years in the future come these United States and “nuke” Americans for having visited upon them the climate catastrophe caused by our Gadarene emissions of carbon dioxide.
I damn’ near succumbed to a hysterical fit of the giggles. This guy is supposed to be a professor of astronomy and astrophysics, and he credits a pair of military basket cases like Pakistan and India with a credible capability – even 50 years hence – to launch a nuclear attack upon these United States? Much less a national command authority disposed to undertake such a course of action in the face of long-established U.S. strategic policy which tripwires what’s been described as “retaliatory wargasm.”
Let us speculate how Dr. Schaeffer’s spew would have been received at a university like West Point or Annapolis or Norwich, where the students receive a solid grounding in military history, theory of armed conflict, and geopolitics.
Well, cadets and midshipmen tend to be well-disciplined, so the most I’d expect from such men and women would probably be that “silent insolence” that used to be punishable before the 1928 revision of The Manual For Courts-Martial.
Though I am disinclined to remotely diagnose people like Dr. Shaeffer, I’ve got to agree with those who have – laughingly? – suggested that he had in this astronomy class demonstrated evidence of what we used to call a psychotic break.
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I suspect the young professor was subject to environmental alarmism from at least High School onwards. Many of the most zealous alarmists seem to live in a permanent state of quite severe anxiety about the future, and this must surely be harmful and likely to lead to personality and intellectual distortions away from the norm. My own idea of what that ‘norm’ is, is much more cheerful. I note how laughter and cheerfulness, and optimism, are so congenial to almost everyone I have ever met. It is not consistent with deliberately setting out to scare and depress people in order to win them over to your cause. My ‘norm’ also has it that most people scare easily, perhaps a carryover from our evolution during which even hints of some threats had to be responded to quickly, without pausing for analysis, in order to survive. That is my pop-science level explanation for the remarkable success of the ScareEveryoneSillyAboutClimate phenomemon. The evidence for alarm about CO2 is the air is very thin indeed. In fact, as far as I can tell, there is no unambiguous observational evidence at all that calls for alarm, that alarm being based largely on the projections of computer models programmed to illustrate the hypothesis that the radiative role of CO2 can lead to big effects on climate. So the phenomenon relies on emotive performances in order to get it out of the groves of academe, where in my opinion it largely belongs. The young professor may be as a much a victim as a perpetrator. He puts on quite a show.
Professor of Astronomy or astrology? The latter I think. This man is deranged and should join Holdren, Pelosi and Browner and live on a desert island and let the world get on and live.
I didn’t see the entire class. So he could be showing both sides. However, if I understand this correctly, Professor Schaefer is an astronomy professor. I assume this is an astronomy class. Not a debate class. What the hell is this man doing demanding that people defend their lifestyles in astronomy?
Maybe Professor Schaefer should defend his luxuries. As a heated and air conditioned class room and office. Maybe we should go to a simpler life where people died in their 30’s. And south Louisiana still fought with malaria and yellow fever. (Damn that horrid DDT.)
I assume LSU still has free speech alley. It seems the professor should go preach from the soap box there. And stop wasting his classes valuable time.
Kind of makes me ashamed I have both an undergraduate and graduate degree from LSU.
I’m with Hotrod, in that the video makes me deeply uneasy. Having once been accused of outrageously poor and inappropriate teaching by a young woman who had an agenda which was revealed later, which was to get the rest of the class to disregard the information I was imparting so she could top the school – a few years later she was found to be suffering a bipolar mental disorder – I had to face an enquiry and all the nastiness with goes with such proceedings. I was eventually exonerated fully, but bad feelings and suspiciions about me in the school community remained in evidence until the young woman’s young brother tried an almost identical scam with one of my colleagues the following year. At this, I was immensely relieved and as word of the brother’s behaviour filtered out, my reputation was fully restored.
For this reason, I hesitate to voice an opinion about the lecturer’s style, content and methods as the clip does not give suficient information or context.
this video says to me, we need to rethink our whole system of “higher education.” Given my experiences as a student and a parent, I see, it’s all about shaking people down for money. They run you through this gauntlet, more money, more money, more money, and all the while, you must “repeat after me…”
But try getting a job in this world without that piece of “sheep skin” – hah! It’s like extortion!
I have just about convinced my son to go back to college after he dropped out a year ago – because of teachers like this. Oftentimes, the worst ones give the best grades, as if they know what they’ve put you through and they want to keep you quiet. Why should a person have to sit through the kind of behavior exhibited in this video? The fact that his outrageous behavior was “taken out of context” – hey, some things don’t need any “context.” The idea that I would be paying for my kid to sit through this kind of behavior is absolutely sickening. Why not just send him down to the mental ward at the hospital?
This isn’t just about climate “science”. Some college teachers make everything political. Try telling your English teacher you don’t like Shel Silverstein! No more soup for you!
John Marshall says:
November 18, 2010 at 2:18 am
Professor of Astronomy or astrology? The latter I think. This man is deranged and should join Holdren, Pelosi and Browner and live on a desert island and let the world get on and live.
Add in the new head of Medicare, Dr. Letemdy.
I just watched enough of the unedited video to see that this professor knows much less about climate change issues than most commenters on this blog. He takes an incredibly sophomoric approach to addressing the issue of CAGW. He certainly needs more preparation before his next climate change lecture in order to retain a shred of credibility (I certainly think it’s possible to present CAGW theories in a credible manner, but he failed miserably in this attempt).
He was clearly biased towards CAGW. The only “balance” he provided was claiming that the group which wanted to do away with the internal combustion engine was going to starve the cities by cutting off their food supply. Again, this is a completely sophomoric response (I’m pretty sure that inner city starvation could be averted without the internal combustion engine).
jcrabb says:
November 17, 2010 at 8:10 pm
“This video has been edited to show only part of the lecture.
http://chronicle.com/article/Professor-Rebuts-Charges-of/125426/”
I watched the entire video………and it’s worse than the edited version………and worse than I thought it could be. I would be very surprised if steps aren’t taken to remedy the unfortunate situation.
So is the science.
At 10:22 AM on 18 November, wobble had written:
…
Er, yeah, the inner cities most assuredly would starve were the internal combustion engine done away with. Even railroad engines are Diesel-electric nowadays, not to mention the fleets of trucks which distribute foodstuffs and other consumer goods to the stores and eateries at which the residents of the inner city purchase what they need to keep themselves from starvation.
Yet again we see that the average global warming whackjob – by which I mean wobble – is as the beasts that perish when it comes to any understanding of the basic economics of a division-of-labor industrial civilization.
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Having attended a similar ‘astronomy’ university lecture by the name of “Apocalypse Now”, afterwards I suggested to the visiting English barbarian that he should surely volunteer for the population reduction.
This has gone mainstream (Fox) and includes a link to the full video, which is supposed to be 40 minutes long. Have not had time to watch it yet but for those who would like to here is the full context.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/11/18/global-warming-blood-hands-prof-class-lsu/
Larry
Fixed, and you’re welcome.
What were the students supposed to be learning? I hope these students got a chance to experience this guys irrational behavior before the drop date for the class
I have just watched the entire video, so my earlier post expressing extreme caution about judging the professor is redundant. The guy spouts a lunatic mix of of Malthus and extremely bad science, proving that a little knowledge is indeed dangerous. I suspect he is capitalising on AGW to ‘big himself up’ to his peers, but his content and delivery are a disgrace. The college that employs him maintains that ‘no student has complained’ – if that’s true, why did a student make and post the video?
He is not a teacher, in my view, and should be retrained at the very least.
At 9:47 PM on 18 November, Steve R had written:
…
This was – if you can believe it – a class in astronomy. Might could be that it was an “idiot class” – one of those courses in the subject area open only to non-science majors. When I was in college many decades ago, such a course was offered for the first time by the Physics Department to non-Physics majors. It was immediately perceived by those of us in Biology and Chemistry as an “easy ace” elective. It could not count for the fulfillment of our respective Departments’ degree requirements in Physics, but a 3-credit guaranteed four-point-oh in our “squishy subjects” burden was nothing to be sneezed at.
Roughly half of the students in that first class were, therefore, people with acid stains on their shoes or the reek of formaldehyde on our clothes. The rest were English majors and similar incompetents.
And the class was graded “on the curve.”
We killed ’em. By the middle of the semester, the non-science majors in the course realized that none of them was going to come out of that Astronomy course with anything over a middlin’ “C.” The instructors had to make the tests (especially the mid-term exam) hard enough so that the Biology and Chemistry majors didn’t all of us turn in perfect hundred-percent performances, and that left the bewildered Sociology and Political Science majors slaughtered on the sidewalk.
So what did the Liberal Arts types do? Why, they did what “Liberals” always do. They whined to the government – in this case, to the college administration.
There came down unto the Physics Department an ukase from the admin building.
“Break up the grading so that the non-science people get evaluated on a separate curve.”
Next semester, the Physics Department closed that astronomy course to Biology and Chemistry majors as well as to their own students.
So let’s say that the lecture thus recorded – can we call that scientific-content-free insane rant a “lecture”? – was part of an “Astronomy for Dummies” course at LSU.
Just what the hell was Bradley Schaefer – a hot-shot astrophysicist doing what I’ve been told is cutting-edge work in gamma ray bursts – doing at the head of that classroom, anyway?
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Looking at the full video I see no evidence of “creative instruction” or drawing out the students to examine their beliefs. In fact you can hear the students laughing at him.
He is a disgrace as a teacher and should not be teaching remedial reading let alone astronomy.
The University needs to have a long talk with this prof as he has seriously degraded the reputation of the University, and has certainly done his students a disservice.
I’d drop that class in a heart beat.
Larry
1. Then he should have proudly admitted his bias in his response instead of pretending that he was neutral about it.
2. The science is biased towards AGW. The science isn’t biased towards CAGW. Do you at least admit that there will be no C without positive feedback?
Er, no, there are plenty of options to prevent starving in inner cities in the event of an internal combustion engine ban.
1. Many people could (and most definitely would) move out of the cities. They might do this before the ban took effect or they might walk out as has been done for hundreds of years. They might live in refugee villages located closer to the food.
2. Gas turbine engines could probably be retrofitted for railroads. To prevent starvation, such projects could (and most definitely would) occur quickly.
3. Inner cities would like begin to tear up concrete and grow food in anticipation of the ban.
I never said that there wouldn’t be inconveniences and a devastating effect to the economy. I merely said that starvation could probably be averted. Surely, you understand the massive effort which would take place to prevent starvation, and the students on the left side never claimed that the ban had to occur immediately. Maybe they would suggest that it be phased in.
My point was that this professor was making specious, unscientific claims.
Yet again we see that the average global warming whackjob – by which I mean wobble – is as the beasts that perish when it comes to any understanding of the basic economics of a division-of-labor industrial civilization.
I’m not a warmist. I would best be described as a denier. Maybe you should reread my original comment.
I thoroughly understand basic economics and division of labor. I also thoroughly understand how people adjust to their circumstances to avoid death.
Maybe you agree with idiotic claims that millions of people will drown because the oceans are rising? Or maybe you agree that people would probably, you know, move away from the rising oceans even if it were to happen. This isn’t much different.
Fixed it for you.
And to think that as recently as 5 years ago still I naively thought that at least the hard sciences were safe from academic corruption, and still “self -correcting” (bitter, cynical snort): The self-righteousness, the deep, deep ignorance posing as erudition, the over-all cluelessness.
And for the self-coup de’ grace, he almost shouts, in the voice of a 14-year-old, that the seas will rise 250 feet.
I must still be a little naive & un-jaded, because I heard that and momentarily lost my breath. Anthony, there’s your climate craziness quote for next week.
BTW, I watched most of the un-edited version, and if anything, he looked even worse. Does anyone know exactly what the class was? Was it truely an astronomy class, or some general core science class?
At 12:58 PM on 20 November, PaddikJ had asked:
…
Best information available thus far is that it was, indeed, a class in astronomy – not “some general core science class” for non-science majors. I wouldn’t think that a known astronomy and astrophysics hot-shot like Dr. Bradley Schaefer would be assigned to teach the sort of “dummies”course that enrolls the kinds of students who confuse astronomy with astrology.
I repeat my sincere desire for access to the PowerPoint presentation used by Dr. Schaefer in that class session. I’d also like to know the extent to which the materials he’d spoken upon will be on the course’s final exam next month.
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