Article Tags: Doug L. Hoffman
[Thanks to Gabriel Rychert of ClimateRealists.com for pointing out the ES&T article to me. You were right, it is my sort of thing.]
Once again, scientists have proposed that planet Earth has been so altered by human activity that we are entering a new geological time period—the Anthropocene. A viewpoint article by some stratigraphic heavy hitters, just published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, has proclaimed a new age caused by anthropogenic global warming and man’s savaging of the environment. According to these experts, the effects of human activity have become so pervasive that Earth has been transformed and the 11,000 year old Holocene epoch is now a “lost world.” Is this really the start of a brave new epoch, one of our own making?
The name Anthropocene is not new. Nobel Prize-winner Paul Crutzen, a co-author of the ES&T paper “The New World of the Anthropocene,” first proposed it a decade ago it was not immediately accepted, but periodically the term seems to resurface. Crutzen’s intention was to call attention to the “unprecedented” changes humans have inflicted on the planet in the +200 years since the industrial revolution began. Indeed, the term has been picked up by some practicing scientists to denote the current interval of time dominated by human activity. Here is how the authors described the quest for mankind’s own epoch:
The notion that humankind has changed the world is not new. Over a century ago, terms such as the Anthropozoic, Psychozoic, and Noosphere were conceived to denote the idea of humans as a new global forcing agent. These ideas received short shrift in the geological community, seeming absurd when set aside the vastness (newly realized, also) of geological time. Moreover, the scarring of the landscape associated with industrialization may appear as transformation, but the vicissitudes of the geological past—meteorite strikes, extraordinary volcanic outbursts, colliding continents, and disappearing oceans—seemed of an epic scale beyond the largest factories and most populous cities.
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Source: theresilientearth.com