1margd
Hope next epoch is not "Catastrocene"... :(
Canadian lake chosen to represent start of Anthropocene
Nuclear bomb fallout marks dawn of new epoch in which humanity dominates planet
Damian Carrington | 11 Jul 2023
The site to represent the start of the Anthropocene epoch on Earth has been selected by scientists. It will mark the end of 11,700 years of a stable global environment {Holocene?} in which the whole of human civilisation developed and the start of a new age, dominated by human activities.
The site is a sinkhole lake in Canada. It hosts annual sediments showing clear spikes due to the colossal impact of humanity on the planet from 1950 onwards, from plutonium from hydrogen bomb tests to the particles from fossil fuel burning that have showered the globe...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/11/nuclear-bomb-fallout-site-ch...
Canadian lake chosen to represent start of Anthropocene
Nuclear bomb fallout marks dawn of new epoch in which humanity dominates planet
Damian Carrington | 11 Jul 2023
The site to represent the start of the Anthropocene epoch on Earth has been selected by scientists. It will mark the end of 11,700 years of a stable global environment {Holocene?} in which the whole of human civilisation developed and the start of a new age, dominated by human activities.
The site is a sinkhole lake in Canada. It hosts annual sediments showing clear spikes due to the colossal impact of humanity on the planet from 1950 onwards, from plutonium from hydrogen bomb tests to the particles from fossil fuel burning that have showered the globe...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/11/nuclear-bomb-fallout-site-ch...
2margd
Human Footprint
Day's Edge Prod'n
PBS, Wednesdays
5 July to 9 Aug 2023
(check local listings)
30 sec preview: https://www.pbs.org/video/preview-bi9erd/
________________________________________________
Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine | 3:30 AM · Jul 17, 2023
The new documentary series Human Footprint, currently airing on PBS, traces humanity’s profound effects on the world around us.
Read the review from SciMagBooks : https://scim.ag/3n7 *
Photo ( https://twitter.com/ScienceMagazine/status/1680842296663605251/photo/1 )
-------------------------------------------------------------
* Mary Ellen Hannibal 2023. Altering Earth in our image: A new documentary series traces humanity’s profound effects on the world around us (Review). Science, 6 Jul 2023. Vol 381, Issue 665. p. 36. DOI: 10.1126/science.adi8075 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi8075
Day's Edge Prod'n
PBS, Wednesdays
5 July to 9 Aug 2023
(check local listings)
30 sec preview: https://www.pbs.org/video/preview-bi9erd/
________________________________________________
Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine | 3:30 AM · Jul 17, 2023
The new documentary series Human Footprint, currently airing on PBS, traces humanity’s profound effects on the world around us.
Read the review from SciMagBooks : https://scim.ag/3n7 *
Photo ( https://twitter.com/ScienceMagazine/status/1680842296663605251/photo/1 )
-------------------------------------------------------------
* Mary Ellen Hannibal 2023. Altering Earth in our image: A new documentary series traces humanity’s profound effects on the world around us (Review). Science, 6 Jul 2023. Vol 381, Issue 665. p. 36. DOI: 10.1126/science.adi8075 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi8075
3margd
Bill McGuire @ProfBillMcGuire | 4:15 AM · Jul 17, 2023
Volcanologist, climate scientist, writer, broadcaster, activist, socialist, best-selling author of HOTHOUSE EARTH: AN INHABITANT'S GUIDE. Born @ 313
I really can't make this point strongly enough.
This is just the very beginning.
World experiences hottest week ever recorded and more is forecast to come
There is a good chance that the month of July will see the highest global temperatures for 120,000 years
Robin McKie | 16 Jul 2023
...hottest week ever recorded globally} between 3-10 July this year.
...The Earth has not experienced anything like it since instrumental measures of air temperatures began in the 1850s, the World Meteorological Organisation revealed last week. “We are in uncharted territory and that is worrying news for the planet,” said Prof Christopher Hewitt, the WMO’s director of climate services.
This point was backed by Karsten Haustein, a research fellow in atmospheric radiation at Leipzig University. “The chances are that the month of July will be the hottest month ever … ‘ever’ meaning since the Eemian (interglacial period), which is some 120,000 years ago.”
...The consequences of a new record heatwave occurring very soon will be profound and dangerous, add scientists. More than 61,000 people are now estimated to have died as a result of the soaring temperatures that gripped Europe last summer.
Given the likelihood of that record being broken this year – or next year at the latest – there is a strong chance that 2022’s grim death toll will be topped very soon with Mediterranean nations such as Greece, Spain and Italy likely to suffer the worst consequences.
...“We should not be at all surprised with the high global temperatures,” Prof Richard Betts, climate scientist at the Met Office and University of Exeter, told the BBC. “This is all a stark reminder of what we’ve known for a long time, and we will see ever-more extremes until we stop building up more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
https://theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/16/red-alert-the-worlds-hottest-week-ever...
--------------------------------------------------
Matthew Todd 🌏🔥 @MrMatthewTodd | 4:25 AM · Jul 17, 2023:
Award winning writer. Former Attitude mag editor. ‘Straight Jacket' ('An essential read for every gay person on the planet’ Elton John).
The media is covering climate more but they are still nervous of telling the full truth: we are gambling with our entire civilisation, as David Attenborough warns here. This is a full blown global emergency and we have to declare it and act like it
1:16 ( https://twitter.com/MrMatthewTodd/status/1680856209832722432 )
Volcanologist, climate scientist, writer, broadcaster, activist, socialist, best-selling author of HOTHOUSE EARTH: AN INHABITANT'S GUIDE. Born @ 313
I really can't make this point strongly enough.
This is just the very beginning.
World experiences hottest week ever recorded and more is forecast to come
There is a good chance that the month of July will see the highest global temperatures for 120,000 years
Robin McKie | 16 Jul 2023
...hottest week ever recorded globally} between 3-10 July this year.
...The Earth has not experienced anything like it since instrumental measures of air temperatures began in the 1850s, the World Meteorological Organisation revealed last week. “We are in uncharted territory and that is worrying news for the planet,” said Prof Christopher Hewitt, the WMO’s director of climate services.
This point was backed by Karsten Haustein, a research fellow in atmospheric radiation at Leipzig University. “The chances are that the month of July will be the hottest month ever … ‘ever’ meaning since the Eemian (interglacial period), which is some 120,000 years ago.”
...The consequences of a new record heatwave occurring very soon will be profound and dangerous, add scientists. More than 61,000 people are now estimated to have died as a result of the soaring temperatures that gripped Europe last summer.
Given the likelihood of that record being broken this year – or next year at the latest – there is a strong chance that 2022’s grim death toll will be topped very soon with Mediterranean nations such as Greece, Spain and Italy likely to suffer the worst consequences.
...“We should not be at all surprised with the high global temperatures,” Prof Richard Betts, climate scientist at the Met Office and University of Exeter, told the BBC. “This is all a stark reminder of what we’ve known for a long time, and we will see ever-more extremes until we stop building up more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
https://theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/16/red-alert-the-worlds-hottest-week-ever...
--------------------------------------------------
Matthew Todd 🌏🔥 @MrMatthewTodd | 4:25 AM · Jul 17, 2023:
Award winning writer. Former Attitude mag editor. ‘Straight Jacket' ('An essential read for every gay person on the planet’ Elton John).
The media is covering climate more but they are still nervous of telling the full truth: we are gambling with our entire civilisation, as David Attenborough warns here. This is a full blown global emergency and we have to declare it and act like it
1:16 ( https://twitter.com/MrMatthewTodd/status/1680856209832722432 )
4margd
Major 'Population Correction' Coming For Humanity, Scientist Predicts
David Nield | 18 August 2023
https://www.sciencealert.com/major-population-correction-coming-for-humanity-sci...
----------------------------------------------------
William E. Rees 2023. The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable. World 11 August 2023, 4(3), 509-527; https://doi.org/10.3390/world4030032 https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Population Change and Its Impact on the Environment, Society and Economy)
Abstract
Homo sapiens has evolved to reproduce exponentially, expand geographically, and consume all available resources. For most of humanity’s evolutionary history, such expansionist tendencies have been countered by negative feedback. However, the scientific revolution and the use of fossil fuels reduced many forms of negative feedback, enabling us to realize our full potential for exponential growth. This natural capacity is being reinforced by growth-oriented neoliberal economics—nurture complements nature. Problem: the human enterprise is a ‘dissipative structure’ and sub-system of the ecosphere—it can grow and maintain itself only by consuming and dissipating available energy and resources extracted from its host system, the ecosphere, and discharging waste back into its host. The population increase from one to eight billion, and more than 100-fold expansion of real GWP in just two centuries on a finite planet, has thus propelled modern techno-industrial society into a state of advanced overshoot. We are consuming and polluting the biophysical basis of our own existence. Climate change is the best-known symptom of overshoot, but mainstream ‘solutions’ will actually accelerate climate disruption and worsen overshoot. Humanity is exhibiting the characteristic dynamics of a one-off population boom–bust cycle. The global economy will inevitably contract and humanity will suffer a major population ‘correction’ in this century.
...Barring a nuclear holocaust, it is unlikely that H. sapiens will go extinct. Wealthy, technologically advanced nations potentially have more resilience and may be insulated, at least temporarily, from the worst consequences of global simplification... That said, rebounding negative feedbacks—climate chaos, food and other resource shortages, civil disorder, resource wars, etc.—may well eliminate prospects for an advanced world-wide civilization. In the event of a seemingly inevitable global population ‘correction’, human numbers will fall to the point where survivors can once again hope to thrive within the (much reduced) carrying capacity of the Earth. Informed estimates put the long-term carrying capacity at as few as 100 million...to as many as three billion people...
It is uncertain whether much or any of industrial high-tech can persist in the absence of abundant cheap energy and rich resource reserves, most of which will have been extracted, used, and dissipated. It may well be that the best-case future will, in fact, be powered by renewable energy, but in the form of human muscle, draft horses, mules, and oxen supplemented by mechanical water-wheels and wind-mills. In the worst case, the billion (?) or so survivors will face a return to stone-age life-styles. Should this be humanity’s future, it will not be urban sophisticates that survive but rather the pre-adapted rural poor and remaining pockets of indigenous peoples.
Bottom line: Any reasonable interpretation of previous histories, current trends, and complex systems dynamics would hold that global MTI {Modern techo-industrial} culture is beginning to unravel and that the one-off human population boom is destined to bust. H. sapiens’ innate expansionist tendencies have become maladaptive. However, far from acknowledging and overriding our disadvantageous natural predispositions, contemporary cultural norms reinforce them. Arguably, in these circumstances, wide-spread societal collapse cannot be averted—collapse is not a problem to be solved, but rather the final stage of a cycle to be endured. Global civilizational collapse will almost certainly be accompanied by a major human population ‘correction’. In the best of all possible worlds, the whole transition might actually be managed in ways that prevent unnecessary suffering of millions (billions?) of people, but this is not happening—and cannot happen—in a world blind to its own predicament.
David Nield | 18 August 2023
https://www.sciencealert.com/major-population-correction-coming-for-humanity-sci...
----------------------------------------------------
William E. Rees 2023. The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable. World 11 August 2023, 4(3), 509-527; https://doi.org/10.3390/world4030032 https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Population Change and Its Impact on the Environment, Society and Economy)
Abstract
Homo sapiens has evolved to reproduce exponentially, expand geographically, and consume all available resources. For most of humanity’s evolutionary history, such expansionist tendencies have been countered by negative feedback. However, the scientific revolution and the use of fossil fuels reduced many forms of negative feedback, enabling us to realize our full potential for exponential growth. This natural capacity is being reinforced by growth-oriented neoliberal economics—nurture complements nature. Problem: the human enterprise is a ‘dissipative structure’ and sub-system of the ecosphere—it can grow and maintain itself only by consuming and dissipating available energy and resources extracted from its host system, the ecosphere, and discharging waste back into its host. The population increase from one to eight billion, and more than 100-fold expansion of real GWP in just two centuries on a finite planet, has thus propelled modern techno-industrial society into a state of advanced overshoot. We are consuming and polluting the biophysical basis of our own existence. Climate change is the best-known symptom of overshoot, but mainstream ‘solutions’ will actually accelerate climate disruption and worsen overshoot. Humanity is exhibiting the characteristic dynamics of a one-off population boom–bust cycle. The global economy will inevitably contract and humanity will suffer a major population ‘correction’ in this century.
...Barring a nuclear holocaust, it is unlikely that H. sapiens will go extinct. Wealthy, technologically advanced nations potentially have more resilience and may be insulated, at least temporarily, from the worst consequences of global simplification... That said, rebounding negative feedbacks—climate chaos, food and other resource shortages, civil disorder, resource wars, etc.—may well eliminate prospects for an advanced world-wide civilization. In the event of a seemingly inevitable global population ‘correction’, human numbers will fall to the point where survivors can once again hope to thrive within the (much reduced) carrying capacity of the Earth. Informed estimates put the long-term carrying capacity at as few as 100 million...to as many as three billion people...
It is uncertain whether much or any of industrial high-tech can persist in the absence of abundant cheap energy and rich resource reserves, most of which will have been extracted, used, and dissipated. It may well be that the best-case future will, in fact, be powered by renewable energy, but in the form of human muscle, draft horses, mules, and oxen supplemented by mechanical water-wheels and wind-mills. In the worst case, the billion (?) or so survivors will face a return to stone-age life-styles. Should this be humanity’s future, it will not be urban sophisticates that survive but rather the pre-adapted rural poor and remaining pockets of indigenous peoples.
Bottom line: Any reasonable interpretation of previous histories, current trends, and complex systems dynamics would hold that global MTI {Modern techo-industrial} culture is beginning to unravel and that the one-off human population boom is destined to bust. H. sapiens’ innate expansionist tendencies have become maladaptive. However, far from acknowledging and overriding our disadvantageous natural predispositions, contemporary cultural norms reinforce them. Arguably, in these circumstances, wide-spread societal collapse cannot be averted—collapse is not a problem to be solved, but rather the final stage of a cycle to be endured. Global civilizational collapse will almost certainly be accompanied by a major human population ‘correction’. In the best of all possible worlds, the whole transition might actually be managed in ways that prevent unnecessary suffering of millions (billions?) of people, but this is not happening—and cannot happen—in a world blind to its own predicament.
5margd
‘Pale Blue Dot’ by Carl Sagan.
3:30 ( https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1557971217272930304 )
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives…”
“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love…”
“every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner…”
“how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”
“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”
“In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.”
“Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.”
“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”
“To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
By Carl Sagan, 🔵Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
----------------------------------------------
Iconic ‘pale blue dot’ photo – Carl Sagan’s idea – turns 30
Blaine Friedlander | February 13, 2020
...one pixel...The iconic photograph of planet Earth from distant space – the “pale blue dot” – was taken 30 years ago – Feb. 14, 1990, at a distance of 3.7 billion miles, by the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 as it zipped toward the far edge of the solar system. The late Cornell astronomy professor Carl Sagan came up with the idea for the snapshot, and coined the phrase.
...In their 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Ann Druyan {Sagan’s widow and a Peabody and Emmy award-winning writer and producer} and Carl Sagan took a poetic and holistic view of Earth – as a tiny speck, a pixel – in the famed photo...
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/02/iconic-pale-blue-dot-photo-carl-sagans-...
3:30 ( https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1557971217272930304 )
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives…”
“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love…”
“every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner…”
“how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”
“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”
“In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.”
“Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.”
“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”
“To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
By Carl Sagan, 🔵Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
----------------------------------------------
Iconic ‘pale blue dot’ photo – Carl Sagan’s idea – turns 30
Blaine Friedlander | February 13, 2020
...one pixel...The iconic photograph of planet Earth from distant space – the “pale blue dot” – was taken 30 years ago – Feb. 14, 1990, at a distance of 3.7 billion miles, by the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 as it zipped toward the far edge of the solar system. The late Cornell astronomy professor Carl Sagan came up with the idea for the snapshot, and coined the phrase.
...In their 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Ann Druyan {Sagan’s widow and a Peabody and Emmy award-winning writer and producer} and Carl Sagan took a poetic and holistic view of Earth – as a tiny speck, a pixel – in the famed photo...
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/02/iconic-pale-blue-dot-photo-carl-sagans-...
6margd
The Anthropocene is dead. Long live the Anthropocene
Paul Voosen | 5 Mar 2024
Panel (ICS, International Commission on Stratigraphy, two dozen geologists) rejects a (AWG, Anthropocene Working Group) proposed geologic time division reflecting human influence, but the concept is here to stay
...Few opponents of the Anthropocene proposal doubted the enormous impact that human influence, including climate change, is having on the planet. But some felt the proposed marker of the epoch—some 10 centimeters of mud from Canada’s Crawford Lake that captures the global surge in fossil fuel burning, fertilizer use, and atomic bomb fallout that began in the 1950s—isn’t definitive enough.
Others questioned whether it’s even possible to affix one date to the start of humanity’s broad planetary influence: Why not the rise of agriculture? Why not the vast changes that followed European encroachment on the New World? “The Anthropocene epoch was never deep enough to understand human transformation of this planet,” says Erle Ellis, a geographer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who resigned last year in protest from AWG.
Opponents also felt AWG made too many announcements to the press over the years while being slow to submit a proposal to the subcommission. “The Anthropocene epoch was pushed through the media from the beginning—a publicity drive,” says Stanley Finney, a stratigrapher at California State University Long Beach and head of the International Union of Geological Sciences, which would have had final approval of the proposal.
Finney also complains that from the start, AWG was determined to secure an “epoch” categorization, and ignored or countered proposals for a less formal Anthropocene designation. If they had only made their formal proposal sooner, they could have avoided much lost time, Finney adds. “It would have been rejected 10 years earlier if they had not avoided presenting it to the stratigraphic community for careful consideration.”
The Anthropocene backers will now have to wait for a decade before their proposal can be considered again. ICS has long instituted this mandatory cooling-off period, given how furious debates can turn, for example, over the boundary between the Pliocene and Pleistocene, and whether the Quaternary—our current geologic period, a category above epochs—should exist at all...
https://www.science.org/content/article/anthropocene-dead-long-live-anthropocene
Paul Voosen | 5 Mar 2024
Panel (ICS, International Commission on Stratigraphy, two dozen geologists) rejects a (AWG, Anthropocene Working Group) proposed geologic time division reflecting human influence, but the concept is here to stay
...Few opponents of the Anthropocene proposal doubted the enormous impact that human influence, including climate change, is having on the planet. But some felt the proposed marker of the epoch—some 10 centimeters of mud from Canada’s Crawford Lake that captures the global surge in fossil fuel burning, fertilizer use, and atomic bomb fallout that began in the 1950s—isn’t definitive enough.
Others questioned whether it’s even possible to affix one date to the start of humanity’s broad planetary influence: Why not the rise of agriculture? Why not the vast changes that followed European encroachment on the New World? “The Anthropocene epoch was never deep enough to understand human transformation of this planet,” says Erle Ellis, a geographer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who resigned last year in protest from AWG.
Opponents also felt AWG made too many announcements to the press over the years while being slow to submit a proposal to the subcommission. “The Anthropocene epoch was pushed through the media from the beginning—a publicity drive,” says Stanley Finney, a stratigrapher at California State University Long Beach and head of the International Union of Geological Sciences, which would have had final approval of the proposal.
Finney also complains that from the start, AWG was determined to secure an “epoch” categorization, and ignored or countered proposals for a less formal Anthropocene designation. If they had only made their formal proposal sooner, they could have avoided much lost time, Finney adds. “It would have been rejected 10 years earlier if they had not avoided presenting it to the stratigraphic community for careful consideration.”
The Anthropocene backers will now have to wait for a decade before their proposal can be considered again. ICS has long instituted this mandatory cooling-off period, given how furious debates can turn, for example, over the boundary between the Pliocene and Pleistocene, and whether the Quaternary—our current geologic period, a category above epochs—should exist at all...
https://www.science.org/content/article/anthropocene-dead-long-live-anthropocene
7margd
Opinion:Despite Official Vote, the Evidence of the Anthropocene Is Clear
Anthony Barnosky and Mary Ellen Hannibal • April 2, 2024
When a governing body of the International Union of Geological Sciences voted down a proposal to name a new epoch in Earth’s history, it ignored conclusive evidence that for the first time, a single species — humans — has fundamentally altered the planet.
...Considering a proposal to name the inception of a new epoch in Earth’s history the Anthropocene, 12 of 22 members of the Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), part of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), voted “no,” thus killing the proposal. But the proceedings were marked by irregularities. The SQS had voted before outstanding recommendations made by the IUGS Geoethics Commission were implemented, and 11 of those who voted, including 10 of the “no” votes, were ineligible to do so because they had exceeded their term limits. When the chair and a vice chair of the SQS objected, they were removed from executive duties.
An expert panel had determined the parameters defining the Holocene had not only been exceeded, but in some areas smashed.
If we don’t name the Anthropocene, we will hamstring efforts to support a safe operating space for humans and other species.
...Darwin might be intrigued that, ironically, the Anthropocene in one sense restores the biblical vision of humanity’s place astride the planet. He might marvel that a small, unimpressive mammal over eons of natural selection gained enough power to transform an entire planet. Darwin may even have analyzed lake sediments to make his own Anthropocene inquiries. Seeing the evidence of a new epoch, his main questions might have been “Can humans adapt to the changes we have wrought?” and “How much time have we got?”
https://e360.yale.edu/features/anthropocene-denied
Anthony Barnosky and Mary Ellen Hannibal • April 2, 2024
When a governing body of the International Union of Geological Sciences voted down a proposal to name a new epoch in Earth’s history, it ignored conclusive evidence that for the first time, a single species — humans — has fundamentally altered the planet.
...Considering a proposal to name the inception of a new epoch in Earth’s history the Anthropocene, 12 of 22 members of the Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), part of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), voted “no,” thus killing the proposal. But the proceedings were marked by irregularities. The SQS had voted before outstanding recommendations made by the IUGS Geoethics Commission were implemented, and 11 of those who voted, including 10 of the “no” votes, were ineligible to do so because they had exceeded their term limits. When the chair and a vice chair of the SQS objected, they were removed from executive duties.
An expert panel had determined the parameters defining the Holocene had not only been exceeded, but in some areas smashed.
If we don’t name the Anthropocene, we will hamstring efforts to support a safe operating space for humans and other species.
...Darwin might be intrigued that, ironically, the Anthropocene in one sense restores the biblical vision of humanity’s place astride the planet. He might marvel that a small, unimpressive mammal over eons of natural selection gained enough power to transform an entire planet. Darwin may even have analyzed lake sediments to make his own Anthropocene inquiries. Seeing the evidence of a new epoch, his main questions might have been “Can humans adapt to the changes we have wrought?” and “How much time have we got?”
https://e360.yale.edu/features/anthropocene-denied
