Academics Demand Sabbaticals to Save World from Climate Change

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Vidar Nordli-Mathisen via Unsplash

More than 1000 British professors have signed a letter requesting more time off from teaching so they can tackle climate change and “save all life on our planet.”

“Humanity stands at the brink of a precipice. If we do not urgently address climate breakdown and the ecological crisis, the very future of life on earth is in question,” begins the open letter published this week by the Times Higher Education magazine and addressed to vice-chancellors, Universities UK and UK Research and Innovation.

Some of the signers hail from the nation’s leading institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and Bristol universities, as well as the London School of Economics and Imperial College London.

The academics note that they are particularly well suited to the task of saving the world from global warming, given their expertise and prestige among the common people.

“Universities are the bastions of wisdom and knowledge that are urgently needed to combat the climate crisis,” they insist. “Now is the time to increase our efforts.”

Occasionally straying into hyperbole and remarkably unscientific language, the letter asserts that “the crisis is at our doorstep” and that humanity now faces “an even greater challenge” than going to the moon in the 1960s.

“We ask you to support scientists, academics and students to help address the climate emergency through a series of new programmes, fellowships, sabbaticals and voluntary placements to help the critical efforts needed to save all life on our planet,” the letter pleads.

To back up their request, the academics assert that the “impacts of climate change are being felt more rapidly than predicted, with Himalayan glaciers melting twice as fast as expected and the Arctic warming to a full 4°C above average.”

Moreover, thawing permafrost soil “is releasing unprecedented amounts of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,” they insist, and “2018 was the world’s fourth hottest year on record.”

Not only that, “climate crisis-related disasters are happening at a rate of one a week,” they assert, and “the risk we face is that impacts may soon run away from us with changes too swift and unpredictable to mitigate.”

Earlier this month, another group of academics published an essay urging institutions of higher learning to encourage climate scientists to cry in order to relieve some of the stress associated with climate trauma.

“Academic institutes must allow environmental scientists to grieve well and thus emerge stronger from traumatic experiences to discover new insights about our rapidly changing world,” wrote a team of British researchers in the journal Science.

“When you spend your life studying places like the Great Barrier Reef or the Arctic ice caps, and then watch them bleach into rubble fields or melt into the sea, it hits you really hard,” they stated.

In requesting space for climate scientists, the authors compare them to those who work in disaster relief and the military.

“In these fields, well defined organizational structures and active strategies exist for employees to anticipate and manage their emotional distress,” they declare.

As Breitbart News reported last month, a growing number of children in the UK are being treated for an overwhelming terror of “environmental doom” as climate alarmists spread fears of an impending climate disaster.

“Protests by groups such as Extinction Rebellion, the recent fires in the Amazon and apocalyptic warnings by the teenage activist Greta Thunberg have prompted a ‘tsunami’ of young people seeking help,” the Telegraph’s science correspondent reported.

“A lot of parents are coming into therapy asking for help with the children and it has escalated a lot this summer,” said psychotherapist Caroline Hickman of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA), referring to the newly coined psychological phenomenon of “eco-anxiety.”

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