The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age

[AdamSmith]

Last-but-one step to officially declaring it All Our Fault.

The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age
Experts say human impact on Earth so profound that Holocene must give way to epoch defined by nuclear tests, plastic pollution and domesticated chicken

Nuclear test explosion in Mururoa atoll, French Polynesia, in 1971. The official expert group says the Anthropocene should begin about 1950 and is likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across Earth by nuclear bomb tests. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday.

The new epoch should begin about 1950, the experts said, and was likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken were now under consideration...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropocene-epoch-experts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth

[AdamSmith]

Cont.:

The current epoch, the Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during which all human civilisation developed. But the striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the global mass extinction of species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development mark the end of that slice of geological time, the experts argue. The Earth is so profoundly changed that the Holocene must give way to the Anthropocene.

“The significance of the Anthropocene is that it sets a different trajectory for the Earth system, of which we of course are part,” said Prof Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester and chair of the Working Group on the Anthropocene (WGA), which started work in 2009.

“If our recommendation is accepted, the Anthropocene will have started just a little before I was born,” he said. “We have lived most of our lives in something called the Anthropocene and are just realising the scale and permanence of the change.”

Prof Colin Waters, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey and WGA secretary, said: “Being able to pinpoint an interval of time is saying something about how we have had an incredible impact on the environment of our planet. The concept of the Anthropocene manages to pull all these ideas of environmental change together.”

Prof Chris Rapley, a climate scientist at University College London and former director of the Science Museum in London said: “The Anthropocene marks a new period in which our collective activities dominate the planetary machinery.

“Since the planet is our life support system – we are essentially the crew of a largish spaceship – interference with its functioning at this level and on this scale is highly significant. If you or I were crew on a smaller spacecraft, it would be unthinkable to interfere with the systems that provide us with air, water, fodder and climate control. But the shift into the Anthropocene tells us that we are playing with fire, a potentially reckless mode of behaviour which we are likely to come to regret unless we get a grip on the situation.” Rapley is not part of the WGA.

Martin Rees, the astronomer royal and former president of the Royal Society, said that the dawn of the Anthropocene was a significant moment. “The darkest prognosis for the next millennium is that bio, cyber or environmental catastrophes could foreclose humanity’s immense potential, leaving a depleted biosphere,” he said.

[AdamSmith]

Cont.:

But Lord Rees added that there is also cause for optimism. “Human societies could navigate these threats, achieve a sustainable future, and inaugurate eras of post-human evolution even more marvellous than what’s led to us. The dawn of the Anthropocene epoch would then mark a one-off transformation from a natural world to one where humans jumpstart the transition to electronic (and potentially immortal) entities, that transcend our limitations and eventually spread their influence far beyond the Earth.”

The evidence of humanity’s impact on the planet is overwhelming, but the changes are very recent in geological terms, where an epoch usually spans tens of millions of years. “One criticism of the Anthropocene as geology is that it is very short,” said Zalasiewicz. “Our response is that many of the changes are irreversible.”

To define a new geological epoch, a signal must be found that occurs globally and will be incorporated into deposits in the future geological record. For example, the extinction of the dinosaurs 66m years ago at the end of the Cretaceous epoch is defined by a “golden spike” in sediments around the world of the metal iridium, which was dispersed from the meteorite that collided with Earth to end the dinosaur age.

For the Anthropocene, the best candidate for such a golden spike are radioactive elements from nuclear bomb tests, which were blown into the stratosphere before settling down to Earth. “The radionuclides are probably the sharpest – they really come on with a bang,” said Zalasiewicz. “But we are spoiled for choice. There are so many signals.”

Other spikes being considered as evidence of the onset of the Anthropocene include the tough, unburned carbon spheres emitted by power stations. “The Earth has been smoked, with signals very clearly around the world in the mid-20th century,” said Zalasiewicz.

Other candidates include plastic pollution, aluminium and concrete particles, and high levels of nitrogen and phosphate in soils, derived from artificial fertilisers. Although the world is currently seeing only the sixth mass extinction of species in the 700m-year history of complex life on Earth, this is unlikely to provide a useful golden spike as the animals are by definition very rare and rarely dispersed worldwide.

In contrast, some species have with human help spread rapidly across the world. The domestic chicken is a serious contender to be a fossil that defines the Anthropocene for future geologists. “Since the mid-20th century, it has become the world’s most common bird. It has been fossilised in thousands of landfill sites and on street corners around the world,” said Zalasiewicz. “It is is also a much bigger bird with a different skeleton than its prewar ancestor.”

The 35 scientists on the WGA – who voted 30 to three in favour of formally designating the Anthropocene, with two abstentions – will now spend the next two to three years determining which signals are the strongest and sharpest. Crucially, they must also decide a location which will define the start of the Anthropocene. Geological divisions are not defined by dates but by a specific boundary between layers of rock or, in the case of the Holocene, a boundary between two ice layers in a core taken from Greenland and now stored in Denmark.

[AdamSmith]

Cont.:

The scientists are focusing on sites where annual layers are formed and are investigating mud sediments off the coast of Santa Barbara in California and the Ernesto cave in northern Italy, where stalactites and stalagmites accrete annual rings. Lake sediments, ice cores from Antarctica, corals, tree rings and even layers of rubbish in landfill sites are also being considered.

Once the data has been assembled, it will be formally submitted to the stratigraphic authorities and the Anthropocene could be officially adopted within a few years. “If we were very lucky and someone came forward with, say, a core from a classic example of laminated sediments in a deep marine environment, I think three years is possibly viable,” said Zalasiewicz.

This would be lightning speed for such a geological decision, which in the past would have taken decades and even centuries to make. The term Anthropocene was coined only in 2000, by the Nobel prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen, who believes the name change is overdue. He said in 2011: “This name change stresses the enormity of humanity’s responsibility as stewards of the Earth.” Crutzen also identified in 2007 what he called the “great acceleration” of human impacts on the planet from the mid-20th century.

Despite the WGA’s expert recommendation, the declaration of the Anthropocene is not yet a forgone conclusion. “Our stratigraphic colleagues are very protective of the geological time scale. They see it very rightly as the backbone of geology and they do not amend it lightly,” said Zalasiewicz. “But I think we can prepare a pretty good case.”

Rapley also said there was a strong case: “It is highly appropriate that geologists should pay formal attention to a change in the signal within sedimentary rock layers that will be clearly apparent to future generations of geologists for as long as they exist. The ‘great acceleration’ constitutes a strong, detectable and incontrovertible signal.”

Evidence of the Anthropocene

Human activity has:

• Pushed extinction rates of animals and plants far above the long-term average. The Earth is on course to see 75% of species become extinct in the next few centuries if current trends continue.

• Increased levels of climate-warming CO2 in the atmosphere at the fastest rate for 66m years, with fossil-fuel burning pushing levels from 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution to 400ppm and rising today.

• Put so much plastic in our waterways and oceans that microplastic particles are now virtually ubiquitous, and plastics will likely leave identifiable fossil records for future generations to discover.

• Doubled the nitrogen and phosphorous in our soils in the past century with fertiliser use. This is likely to be the largest impact on the nitrogen cycle in 2.5bn years.

• Left a permanent layer of airborne particulates in sediment and glacial ice such as black carbon from fossil fuel burning.

[AdamSmith]

...Stratigraphy is an awesomely stringent discipline. Stratigraphers are at once the archivists, monks and philosophers of the Earth sciences. Their specialism is the division of deep time into aeons, eras, periods, epochs and stages, and the establishment of temporal limits for those divisions and their subdivisions. Their bible is the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, the beautiful document that archives Earth history from the present back to the “informal” aeon of the Hadean, between 4bn and 4.6bn years ago (“informal” because vanishingly little is known about it). Being a geo-geek, I sometimes mutter the mnemonics of the ICS as I cycle to work, trying to get the sequences straight: Cows Often Sit Down Carefully. Perhaps Their Joints Creak? – Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous …

The Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy – a title straight out of Gormenghast – was created in 2009. It was charged with delivering two recommendations: whether the Anthropocene should be formalised as an epoch and, if so, when it began. Among the baselines considered by the group have been the first recorded use of fire by hominins around 1.8m years ago, the dawn of agriculture around 8,000 years ago and the Industrial Revolution.

The group’s report is due within months [report now delivered; OP article above]. Recent publications indicate that they will recommend the designation of the Anthropocene, and that the “stratigraphically optimal” temporal limit will be located somewhere in the mid-20th century. This places the start of the Anthropocene simultaneous with the start of the nuclear age. It also coincides with the so-called “Great Acceleration”, when massive increases occurred in population, carbon emissions, species invasions and extinctions, and when the production and discard of metals, concrete and plastics boomed...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever

[AdamSmith]

...Plastics in particular are being taken as a key marker for the Anthropocene, giving rise to the inevitable nickname of the “Plasticene”. We currently produce around 100m tonnes of plastic globally each year. Because plastics are inert and difficult to degrade, some of this plastic material will find its way into the strata record. Among the future fossils of the Anthropocene, therefore, might be the trace forms not only of megafauna and nano-planktons, but also shampoo bottles and deodorant caps – the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. “What will survive of us is love”, wrote Philip Larkin. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic – and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever

[paulsf]

You need to post an intermission with a cute picture so we can get thru this article .  

[AdamSmith]

24 minutes ago, paulsf said:

You need to post an intermission with a cute picture so we can get thru this article .  

I gave you a hydrogen bomb and the Chronostratigraphic Chart.

How much more could you take? 

[Guest Larstrup]

There's hopeful news from Japanese scientists on the horrible plastic pollution problem engulfing the planet. They are studying a bacteria which may someday lead to a solution.

plastic eating bacteria

Edited August 29, 2016 by Larstrup
changed link destinations.

[lookin]

8 hours ago, Larstrup said:

plastic eating bacteria

But what eats the bacteria, if you don't mind my asking?   

[AdamSmith]

And away we go...

Nasa: Earth is warming at a pace 'unprecedented in 1,000 years'

...Lingering carbon dioxide already emitted from power generation, transport and agriculture is already likely to raise sea levels by around three feet by the end of the century, and potentially by 70 feet in the centuries to come. Increasing temperatures will shrink the polar ice caps, make large areas of the Middle East and North Africa unbearable to live in and accelerate what’s known as Earth’s “six mass extinction” of animal species.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/30/nasa-climate-change-warning-earth-temperature-warming

[Guest Larstrup]

9 hours ago, lookin said:

But what eats the bacteria, if you don't mind my asking?   

Ha!

[AdamSmith]

I Did Not Know That...

How the domestic chicken rose to define the Anthropocene

Over the past 70 years, the bird has become a global staple, and could be the key fossil evidence for human-influenced epoch

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/31/domestic-chicken-anthropocene-humanity-influenced-epoch

[AdamSmith]

...in 2015 humans had consumed a full year’s worth of natural resources by August 13. Well, guess what? This year we beat that date by five days. Unfortunately this is not golf and the lowest score does not win.

Earth Overshoot Day (EOD) is the date in each year when the Earth’s population has consumed the total amount of resources that can be regenerated by the planet and produced more CO2 than can be sequestered by it in that year. Making the analogy to a bank account, if EOD occurs after 365 days, then the account is perfectly in balance, with debits and credits canceling each other out. If it occurs before 365 days, then humanity is consuming resources and producing CO2 faster than the earth can replenish or sequester them — essentially debits outweigh credits in the earth’s bank account, depleting the underlying capital balance.The concept of EOD was conceived by Andrew Simms of the UK think tank New Economics Foundation and the result of a subsequent partnership with the Global Footprint Network.

Put another way, we are consuming resources at a rate that would require 1.6 Earths to replenish. Alarmingly, the trend with EOD is that it generally occurs earlier with each passing year. This means we are consuming resources at an ever increasing rate. With business as usual, by June 28, 2030 we will  need 2.0 Earths to satisfy our demand on the ecosystem.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/two-earth-problem-breakthrough-energy-systems-rob-harwood?trk=hb_ntf_MEGAPHONE_ARTICLE_POST

[AdamSmith]

One cheery reader's comment on this Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/oct/24/the-atmosphere-is-being-radicalized-by-climate-change...

 

It is time for citizens around the world to wake up to the extreme danger that further global warming now presents to the future lives of all young people on this planet.

Some key issues not yet being addressed with any urgency, if at all, are:

1. The true cost of fossil fuels not accounted for at all on the balance sheets of the fossil fuel corporations is estimated by the IMF to be $5 trillion in 2015.

It is made up primarily of environmental damage to soils, rivers, lakes, forests, coastal waters, oceans, seriously damaged human health, human lives cut short, and a rapidly expanding bill for all the impacts on homes, agriculture and infrastructure, arising from global warming. These costs are paid by citizens and taxpayers around the world and fall disproportionately on those who have done the least to cause this harm.

http://www.imf.org/external/np/fad/subsidies/

2. The cumulative atmospheric carbon limit, incorporated into the 2014 IPCC assessment, a limit recognised as a good indicator of how close we are to making the task of limiting the rise in Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) to +2C MAX, impossible to achieve unless cutting carbon emissions becomes an immediate overriding global priority for restructuring economic and industrial activity across the planet.

The scale and urgency of the task is made clear on this Oxford University calculator.

http://www.trillionthtonne.org/

3. As of today, aviation and shipping greenhouse gas emissions have not been accounted for by any nation's carbon accounts.

4. +2C GMST is not a nice balmy temperature that the human race will enjoy. To put this warming in perspective, the difference in GMST between today and the last glacial maximum 22,000 years ago with ice sheets up to 2 km thick across North America and NW Europe, when sea level was 125 metres lower, was only +5C.

We have warmed the planet +1C since 1870, and will add at least another +1C within a lifetime. We have not yet begun to feel anything like the full climate effects of that +1C, due to 93% of the extra heat energy having passed into the oceans, and it will be many decades before the global climate system catches up with the severe consequences we have already baked in.

5. The last time the planet had a GMST equal to what we are calling +2C, sea level was at least 5 to 9 metres higher, with some evidence suggesting double that.

6. The rate of warming that humans are causing is unprecedented in the geologic record of natural climate change so the ice melt response of the polar glaciers can not be determined by past precedence. The maximum rise in sea level expected this century included in the 2014 assessment is already in need of revision upwards. The rise in sea level can be expected to accelerate as warming continues. It will not be a linear response.

IUCN Gobal Marine and Polar Programme. Explaining Ocean Warming:Causes, scale, effects and consequences

https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/2016-046_0.pdf

 

7. Polar experts have repeatedly been taken by surprise since the year 2000 by the melt in Greenland, West Antarctica and now in some vulnerable glaciers in East Antarctica. Nearly all the non polar glaciers are retreating fast, many are past the point of no return.

Thresholds and Closing Windows:
Risks of Irreversible Cryosphere climate Change

http://iccinet.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ICCI_thresholds_v6b_151203_high_res.pdf

8. +2C is not an assured safe zone for a climate system that is compatible with the habitable zones, food production on land and in the oceans, and the necessary stable climatic conditions that have made modern civilisation possible.

Assessing ‘‘Dangerous Climate Change’’: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People,Future Generations and Nature

http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0081648&representation=PDF

9. The further we transition global warming beyond where it is today, the more likely it is that wars and revolution will take hold on every continent.

10. New global leaders must emerge who prioritise managing this isolated rock in space for the good of humanity, rapidly cutting carbon emissions, to stop further damage to the biosphere and to return it to stability, before it is too late to prevent a global tragedy for the human race.

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

Our grandchildren's grandchildren are toast.

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

Some here have posted that our ravaging the planet is the unavoidable consequence of overpopulation. That is surely half the problem: ecological scientists estimate that a sustainable global population for H. sapiens is 2.5 billion, whereas today we number 7.4 billion.

However. The other half of the problem is the rapacious mandate for growth, at any cost, that is the engine of free-market capitalism.

Our worship of the artifact of free-market capitalism as an unassailable and immutable good is misguided, and has possibly already become fatal to our species. It is a comparatively late production that did not exist before the Renaissance; it was created and fueled in great part by Italian bankers and financiers, with obvious implications; Piketty's recent Capital in the 21st Century documents how it is not inherently just or fair, but instead contains internal structures that over time concentrate wealth in a way that, at the least, is contrary to the social-justice charges in the Christian Gospels and other spiritual traditions. As Pope Francis has made one of his central messages.

The climate evils we are, today, only on the front edge of suffering result from capitalism getting its hands on our scientific and engineering capabilities to overwhelm the natural world that were developed during and after the second World War. That was when our material understanding of the world grew larger than nature's capacity to contain us, and to absorb without consequence the war-making drive and combativeness toward all things -- both other and our own kind -- that we inherited from being, as the Silurians in Dr Who called us, the "ape-descended primitives."

If we can't, as a species, engineer and implement some successor to free-market capitalism as a way to manage our material affairs, the world of Blade Runner will look good compared with what we get.

[AdamSmith]

The ape-descended primitives march on...

World on track to lose two-thirds of wild animals by 2020, major report warns

The number of wild animals living on Earth is set to fall by two-thirds by 2020, according to a new report, part of a mass extinction that is destroying the natural world upon which humanity depends.

The analysis, the most comprehensive to date, indicates that animal populations plummeted by 58% between 1970 and 2012, with losses on track to reach 67% by 2020. Researchers from WWF and the Zoological Society of London compiled the report from scientific data and found that the destruction of wild habitats, hunting and pollution were to blame...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/27/world-on-track-to-lose-two-thirds-of-wild-animals-by-2020-major-report-warns

[AdamSmith]

Of course the Gaia hypothesis offers the cold-eyed view that we have become a phage on the planet, and its systems are collectively generating an immune response that will ultimately eliminate the source of infection.

[Suckrates]

 

 

I cant even pronounce it, let alone understand WTF it is !!!!!   but I bet the topic is a hoot at a Gay party ?  

[AdamSmith]

3 hours ago, Suckrates said:

I cant even pronounce it, let alone understand WTF it is !!!!!   but I bet the topic is a hoot at a Gay party ?  

Some comic one time cracked, "Pleistocene, Eocene, on and on ... of course today we live in the Obscene era."

[AdamSmith]

"...The story of the Mojave desert tortoise is a microcosm of a much larger natural crisis, according to a new report by the WWF and Zoological Society of London, which predicts that the number of animals living in the wild will decrease by two-thirds in the next four years due to the impact of humans."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/01/mojave-desert-tortoise-california-endangered-lasers-ravens