Pirate's Cove

Some Friday silliness

Humanity’s profound impact on this planet is hard to deny, but is it big enough to merit its own geological epoch? This is the question facing geoscientists gathered in London this week to debate the validity and definition of the ‘Anthropocene’, a proposed new epoch characterized by human effects on the geological record.

“We are in the process of formalizing it,” says Michael Ellis, head of the climate-change programme of the British Geological Survey in Nottingham, who coordinated the 11 May meeting. He and others hope that adopting the term will shift the thinking of policy-makers. “It should remind them of the global and significant impact that humans have,” says Ellis.

Or, they could actually reduce their own impact on Gaia. Maybe go find a cave and leave the rest of us alone….hey, doesn’t a big conference in a major world city have a “significant and profound” impact on Gaia?

The “evidence for the prosecution”, as Zalasiewicz puts it, is compelling. Through food production and urbanization, humans have altered more than half of the planet’s ice-free land mass¹ (see ‘Transformation of the biosphere’), and are moving as much as an order of magnitude more rock and soil around than are natural processes². Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are expected to make the ocean 0.3–0.4 pH points more acidic by the end of this century. That will dissolve light-coloured carbonate shells and sea-floor rocks for about 1,000 years, leaving a dark band in the sea-floor sediment that will be obvious to future geologists. A similar dark stripe identifies the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum about 55 million years ago, when global temperatures rose by some 6 °C in 20,000 years. A similar temperature jump could happen by 2100, according to some high-emissions scenarios³.

If they hate Mankind so much, why don’t they take themselves out of the equation? What’s that? They want Someone Else to reduce their own population? Hmph.

Via Tom Nelson