Living in the Anthropocene

National Geographic, which is somewhat famous for covering ongoing discoveries of Australopithecines, has an article (which I missed when it came out, but found when I read a different article on the subject) about the new era we're living in, the human-dominated climate-influencing Antropocene. Now it's not all about global warming; we're changing landscapes, cutting down forests for agricultures, overfishing the oceans, cutting off the tops of mountains for coal, redirecting rivers, creating new lakes, depleting stratospheric ozone, and even talking about "hacking the climate" with dubious schemes to forestall the worst effects of climate change.

However the situation is sliced, diced, and defrosted, we collectively are causing rapid and massive changes. Even the climate-change denying cabal in love with the Urban Heat Island effect must consider that just the existence of the UHI is evidence of a great human influence on regional conditions on a rather large scale.

So anyway, a few scientists have proposed that the Holocene is over and the Anthropocene has commenced:

New Earth Epoch has begun, scientists say

Is it geologically viable as a boundary? They say it is:

"Recent human impacts—including habitat destruction, environmental pollution, and animal and plant extinctions—have been so great that they'll result in an obvious boundary in Earth's rock layers, the authors say."

It seems to me that the time has been a little short for that -- an obvious boundary in the rock layers -- but I have no doubt that numerous geochemical tracers will indicate the transition. Depends how conspicuous "obvious" has to be, I think.

The article goes into the importance of markers:

"The key thing is thinking about how—thousands or hundreds of thousands of years in the future—geologists might come back and actually recognize in the sediment record the beginning of the Anthropocene," explained paleoclimatologist Alan Haywood of the University of Leeds in the U.K.

"It's not as straightforward as you might think, because the marker has to be very precise, and it has to be recognized in many different parts of the world," said Haywood, who wasn't involved in the new study.

But I suspected just reading the headlines of the various articles that there might be a different reason for this move than just geological accuracy, and the NG article gets into this facetry:

"The move, the scientists write in the latest issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology, "might be used as encouragement to slow carbon emissions and biodiversity loss" or "as evidence in legislation on conservation measures."

The University of Leeds's Haywood said that, by underscoring how much we're changing the environment, the formalization would be "a very powerful statement."

But while "there are good scientific justifications for saying we have moved into the Anthropocene," he said, "we mustn't base that on a politically expedient decision."

Not that there's a need for breath retention; they'll work on the issue for 3-5 years, and any formal declaration won't be before a decade is out. So this announcement is unlikely to put a lot of pressure on those who need to be pressured (or perhaps pressurized; see the algae biofuel article below this one).