Why do some leading geologists reject the term "Anthropocene"?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
> But the Anthropocene’s future as an informal time period is assured. It’s too apt—and too important—a term to be abandoned. As Paul Crutzen pointed out in 2002, barring a “meteorite impact, a world war or a pandemic,” humans “will remain a major environmental force for many millennia.” Science recently summed up the situation this way: “the anthropocene is dead. long live the anthropocene.”
If this was all the justification I would be against the anthropocene being accepted. As the anti-anthro crowd says, geology is not the study of "maybes" or "if this trend continues".
Instead I am pro-anthropocene because even if humanity died today, there would still be an extremely weird layer of rock that would need to be explained and the existing human impacts on the enviroment would still take millions of years to dissipate. Further, '1952' is in the past. It's very recent, but it is in the past. Stratigraphy is the study of layers, and humanity has undeniably created a clear and very odd layer in the rock. Therefore, a new age is justified to me.
Myths about the Anthropocene ( 67 points, 2 days ago, 58 comments ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40079014
Would there be enough to make it an epoch rather than just an event though? Most opinions on the "silurian hypothesis" thought experiment seem to suggest not. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-an-industri...
Our current impacts are significantly different from what they were four hundred years ago. They will probably be even more different in another few centuries. Assuming we do not wipe ourselves out, our eventual impact will be very different from our current impact. Maybe we will even reverse many things, and a millennium is just a blip in geological time.
In any case, the Holocene is defined by human impacts on the environment, so really Anthropocene is more of an alternative name for the Holocene than a separate epoch: https://www.britannica.com/science/Holocene-Epoch
Why do you believe this?
That’s like complaining that lawyers argue, or engineers build things.
Will be kind of fun if the term becomes institutionalized, then some new groups propose the "Romanocene", the "Coloniocene", the "Industriocene", the "Americanocene" etc etc.
'Anthropocene' implies that it is humanity that is the driving force of the purported geological changes, but humanity's ability to cause such an impact is itself a blip in the biological history of our species. I do see that some proposals as to when the epoch started go as far back as the Neolithic revolution, but I very much doubt that a hypothetical world in which humanity had never progressed past subsistence farming and husbandry could have an effect on the geological scale. Plus, humanity still has more history before the Neolithic than after it.
So, taking the more mainstream arguments stating that a new geological epoch started in modern times, be it with the Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Era, or the 1960s, the fact that this epoch is Anthropic is not necessary and sufficient to describe it.
Instead, I would argue that the defining characteristic of this epoch would be Industrialisation, hence 'Industrocene' or, forgive my Greek, 'Viomechanocene' would be much more descriptive and more objective names.
Therein lies the rub.
I can imagine they say, we don't play clairvoyant. That's what I can agree with.
However I think that the concept of the Anthropocene is too important to throw it away. I propose a branch in geology which does research about current effects on stratigraphy. In that branch the Anthropocene would be indispensable.
Disclaimer: I am not a geologist.
It would have helped if the author had mentioned this at the beginning of the article. Or they had let someone neutral write the article entirely.
I’m not saying all arguments on every issue are made in good faith or are worth exploring, and of course some things are simply facts. I’m also not condemning editorials where a writer is expected to try and persuade. However, I do think there is merit in a form of journalism that summarizes the strongest arguments on both sides of an issue in dispute, rather than simply picking one side and running with it.
This analogy is deeply flawed. For spheres, we at least have some kind of mathematical model for what a sphere would be. For a “neutral point of view”, we don’t even have a good intuitive model for what that would look like, at least, not one that withstands a little bit of scrutiny.