Guest “Roaches check in — but they don’t check out!” by David Middleton
Who could ever forget this classic 1980 TV commercial, featuring “the Greatest” Muhammad Ali?
As Kip Hansen very eloquently pointed out here and here, the Anthropocene is every bit as dead as all of the cockroaches ever killed by Muhammad Ali. However, just like roaches, the Anthropocene “checked in” to the geologic time scale, but won’t “check out,” despite being very, very dead.
AT THE SMITHSONIAN | APRIL 18, 2024
What Myths About the Anthropocene Get Wrong
These ten misconceptions underplay how much we have altered the global environment and undermine the new perspective we need to deal with a drastically changed world
Jan A. Zalasiewicz, Scott L. Wing and the Anthropocene Working Group
The concept of the Anthropocene epoch was born in February 2000 out of a moment of spontaneity. Chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen had been listening to a narrative emerging at an international convening of scientists in Mexico.
[…]
It’s absurdly simple. The shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene epoch hits like a brick wall when looking at graphs that show changes in three major greenhouse gases and in global temperature during the last 30 millennia. All four of these critical planetary parameters shift from near-horizontal to near-vertical lines in the last 70 years or so.
[…]
By proposing a formal, geologically defined Anthropocene epoch, the working group intended to provide a precise definition for this recent, large, permanent and rapid transition in Earth’s physical, chemical and biological systems.
The proposal was rejected by the international hierarchy of stratigraphy—of which the International Commission on Stratigraphy is a part—without citing substantive reasons, but most public criticisms of the Anthropocene stem from a range of sources: from within the heart of geology, to well outside it, among the social sciences and humanities.
[…]
This bears repeating:
The proposal was rejected by the international hierarchy of stratigraphy… without citing substantive reasons…
The burden of proof was on the now defunct Anthropocene Working Group (AWG). They failed to make a coherent case for recognizing the Anthropocene as a formal geologic epoch. Zalasiewicz and Wing followed up their burden of proof fallacy with a string of strawmen and red herring fallacies, refuting alleged myths about the Anthropocene. Here’s an example:
4. Anthropocene strata are “minimal” or “negligible.”
That’s a very geological objection—but it’s wrong. Humans have, since the mid-20th century, been prodigious reshapers of the landscape and movers of rock and sediment (now, by more than an order of magnitude than natural sediment movers such as glaciers and rivers.) The amount of sediment settled behind the world’s thousands of big dams would cover all of California to a depth of five meters, and such sediments are full of distinctive markers, like pesticide residues, metals, microplastics and the fossils of invasive species. To define a time period formally, geologists must identify distinctive signals in sediments or rocks that can be correlated around the globe, and the presence of such markers is ubiquitous. The geology is real.
“The amount of sediment settled behind the world’s thousands of big dams would cover all of California to a depth of five meters”… Whether this is true or not, the fact is that such sediment is not concentrated in a five meter thick layer in California. It is scattered around the world behind “thousands of big dams.” What will happen to those dams and all those sediment accumulations over geologic time?
Without human intervention (maintenance), most earthen dams will have eroded away within 40 years. Large concrete dams, like Hoover dam, may last for 100’s or even 1,000’s of years, however…
Once those “thousands of big dams” have been removed by earth processes, all of that sediment would be transported downstream, eventually being deposited in natural sedimentary sequences. During the Late Pleistocene nature built lots of dams, impounding very large reservoirs, as the Late Pleistocene ice sheets retreated. Eventually these dams failed, leading to numerous megafloods. Glacial Lake Missoula is the most well-known example.
Normark and Reid (2003, p. 634) estimated a total volume of last-glacial flood deposits in the eastern Pacific Ocean as 1450 km3, including about 700 km3 from a single flood leaving the 57-m thick bed in the Escanaba Trough (but not including the deposits assessed by Gombiner et al., 2016). Assuming a 50% porosity for this sandy unit implies that the entrained sediment volume for this large early flood was about 15% of the maximum plausible total water volume of 2500 km3, the approximate maximum released volume of glacial Lake Missoula. Thus, this flood (and likely dozens of others) was exceptionally turbid.
The Missoula megaflood was an outburst flood. Manmade dams are just future outburst floods.
Abstract
Outbursts from impounded water bodies produce large, hazardous, and geomorphically significant floods affecting the Earth as well as other planetary surfaces. Two broad classes of impoundments are: (1) valleys blocked by ice, landslides, constructed dams, and volcanic materials; and (2) closed basins such as tectonic depressions, calderas, meteor craters, and those rimmed by glaciers and moraines. In some environments, floods emanate from subglacial and subterranean sources. Outburst floods are geomorphically important over geologic time because large flows achieve exceptional shear stress and stream power values, thus forming some of the most spectacular landscapes in the solar system.
The sediment deposits behind manmade dams will not remain intact after mankind is gone.
The only myth here is the notion of the Anthropocene as a formal epoch on the geologic time scale.
The Hockey Stick-O-Cene
The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was established in 2009. They appropriately chose a hockey stick for their logo.
They spent the next 14 years waging a public relations campaign before finally putting a formal proposal together.
The Smithsonian article featured this image in support of an Anthropocene epoch:
Can you say “Adjustocene”?
Their temperature graph not only erases the Medieval Warm Period… It also erases the Holocene Climatic Optimum, Neoglaciation and The Little Ice Age. It’s even worse than the Marcott-derived graph they employed back in 2016. Here is a far more realistic depiction of the average global temperature (PAGES 12K CPS) and CO2 (comparable resolution ice cores) over the past 12,000 years:
The CPS method best represents what we know about the evolution of the Holocene climate. The other four methods show very little temperature change from 9,500 years ago up until 1850 AD… A period when we know that there was massive ice retreat over the first 5,000 years and ice advance (Neoglaciation) over most of the next 4,500 years. CPS is the only one of the five methods consistent with the Holocene evolution of ice sheets and glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere.
While the CPS method still indicates significant warming over the past 150 years, it started at the coldest phase of the Holocene, a period when ice sheets were advancing… AKA The Little Ice Age:
Little Ice Age
JUNE 5, 2015 / K. JAN OOSTHOEK[…]
During the height of the Little Ice Age , it was in general about one degree Celsius colder than at present. The Baltic Sea froze over, as did most of the rivers in Europe. Winters were bitterly cold and prolonged, reducing the growing season by several weeks. These conditions led to widespread crop failure, famine, and in some regions population decline.
The prices of grain increased and wine became difficult to produce in many areas and commercial vineyards vanished in England. Fishing in northern Europe was also badly affected as cod migrated south to find warmer water. Storminess and flooding increased and in mountainous regions the treeline and snowline dropped. In addition glaciers advanced in the Alps and Northern Europe, overrunning towns and farms in the process.
Iceland was one of the hardest hit areas. Sea ice, which today is far to the north, came down around Iceland. In some years, it was difficult to bring a ship ashore anywhere along the coast. Grain became impossible to grow and even hay crops failed. Volcanic eruptions made life even harder. Iceland lost half of its population during the Little Ice Age.
Tax records in Scandinavia show many farms were destroyed by advancing ice of glaciers and by melt water streams. Travellers in Scotland reported permanent snow cover over the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland at an altitude of about 1200 metres. In the Alps, the glaciers advanced and threatened to bulldozed towns. Ice-dammed lakes burst periodically, destroying hundreds of buildings and killing many people. As late as 1930 the French Government commissioned a report to investigate the threat of the glaciers. They could not have foreseen that human induced global warming was to deal more effective with this problem than any committee ever could.
It’s bizarre that the AWG’s argument in favor of an Anthropocene epoch literally erased The Little Ice Age.
Geologic Time vs. The Keeling Curve
GEOLOGIC TIME
The Earth is very old — 4.5 billion years or more — according to recent estimates. This vast span of time, called geologic time by earth scientists, is difficult to comprehend in the familiar time units of months and years, or even centuries. How then do scientists reckon geologic time, and why do they believe the Earth is so old? A great part of the secret of the Earth’s age is locked up in its rocks, and our centuries-old search for the key led to the beginning and nourished the growth of geologic science.
[…]
The AWG claimed that the Anthropocene should be recognized as a distinct epoch, in part, due to the temperature and CO2 hockey sticks in Figure 2.
The AWG’s CO2 graph (red curve in Figure 2) is clearly the result of splicing instrumental data (Mauna Loa Observatory/Keeling Curve) onto ice core-derived estimates. This sort of exercise is guaranteed to gin up hockey sticks because the instrumental data are of much higher resolution than the ice cores. Over geologic time, neither the instrumental, nor ice core data will break out of the background noise.
Let’s look at temperature CO2 at an epoch-level resolution.
The “Anthropocene” hockey stick blades will not be resolved over geologic time.
Managing Geologic Time
Key Phrases & Abbreviations
- International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS)
- International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS)
- Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS)
- Anthropocene Working Group (AWG)
- Global Boundary Stratotype Sections and Points (GSSP’s, AKA “Golden Spikes”)
- INTERNATIONAL CHRONOSTRATIGRAPHIC CHART (Geological Time Scale)
The Phanerozoic (visible life) Eon comprises the most recent 541 million years of geologic time. It is subdivided into three eras, from oldest to most recent: Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic. The Cenozoic Era began approximately 66 million years, after the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction. It is currently divided into three periods, from oldest to youngest: Paleogene (AKA Lower Tertiary), Neogene (AKA Upper Tertiary) and Quaternary. The most recent period has two epochs: Pleistocene and Holocene. The syllable “-cene” denotes a Cenozoic Era epoch. The only major difference between the Holocene epoch and the previous five Pleistocene interglacial episodes is the current “dominance” of human civilization on the planet. From a geologic time perspective, the Holocene already is the Anthropocene and it doesn’t even truly merit its recognition as a distinct epoch.
The process of managing the geologic time scale is essential for scientific communication. Changing the time scale requires >60% majority votes of the relevant subcommission and the International Commission on Stratigraphy and then has to be approved by the International Union of Geological Sciences Executive Committee…
The Anthropocene proposal was overwhelmingly voted down by the Subcomission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS).
The Anthropocene is dead. Long live the Anthropocene
Panel rejects a proposed geologic time division reflecting human influence, but the concept is here to stay
For now, we’re still in the Holocene.
Science has confirmed that a panel of two dozen geologists has voted down a proposal to end the Holocene—our current span of geologic time, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age—and inaugurate a new epoch, the Anthropocene. Starting in the 1950s, it would have marked a time when humanity’s influence on the planet became overwhelming. The vote, first reported by The New York Times, is a stunning—though not unexpected—rebuke for the proposal, which has been working its way through a formal approval process for more than a decade.
“The decision is definitive,” says Philip Gibbard, a geologist at the University of Cambridge who is on the panel and serves as secretary-general of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the body that governs the geologic timescale. “There are no outstanding issues to be resolved. Case closed.”
[…]
Opponents also felt AWG made too many announcements to the press over the years while being slow to submit a proposal to the subcommission. “The Anthropocene epoch was pushed through the media from the beginning—a publicity drive,” says Stanley Finney, a stratigrapher at California State University Long Beach and head of the International Union of Geological Sciences, which would have had final approval of the proposal.
Finney also complains that from the start, AWG was determined to secure an “epoch” categorization, and ignored or countered proposals for a less formal Anthropocene designation. If they had only made their formal proposal sooner, they could have avoided much lost time, Finney adds. “It would have been rejected 10 years earlier if they had not avoided presenting it to the stratigraphic community for careful consideration.”
The Anthropocene backers will now have to wait for a decade before their proposal can be considered again. ICS has long instituted this mandatory cooling-off period, given how furious debates can turn, for example, over the boundary between the Pliocene and Pleistocene, and whether the Quaternary—our current geologic period, a category above epochs—should exist at all.
[…]
In order to approve an Anthropocene epoch at the subcomssion level, they needed at least 11 votes, they got 4. Despite losing by a 12-4 margin in the SQS, the AWG challenged the vote and the IUGS overwhelmingly upheld the rejection.
March 20, 2024
The Anthropocene
In 2001 the atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, proposed that human activity was impacting natural environmental conditions to the extent that we had effectively left the natural stable conditions of the Holocene and moved into a new interval that he named the Anthropocene. In response to this suggestion, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was established in 2009 on the initiative of Phil Gibbard (PLG: the then chair of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy; SQS). The remit of the Working Group was to examine the evidence for human induced climate change as reflected in the recent geological record, and to determine whether this was sufficiently compelling for a new stratigraphic unit to be included in the Geological Time Scale (GTS) and, if so, at what rank. The Working Group, initially led by Jan Zalasiewicz (JAZ) and latterly by Colin Waters (CW), deliberated for 15 years before finally submitting a report to the SQS in late October 2023.
[…]
Following standard ICS procedure, it was expected that there would be 30 days allotted for the discussion of the AWG proposal, to be followed by 30 days for voting. Because of a possible conflict of interest, JAZ and MAH recused themselves from the administration of the voting process (although both participated in the discussion), and the discussion and ballot were conducted
by the 1st vice-chair Professor Liping Zhou (Beijing University: LPZ) and Professor Adele Bertini (University of Firenze: AB), and who ensured that the process adhered strictly to the rules of ICS. However, when the discussion period ended and the Secretary moved to call a vote, both JAZ and MAH objected saying that the discussion period had been of insufficient length and that additional
information on the Anthropocene proposal had been excluded. This did not find favour with a substantial number of SQS members who were anxious to move forward to the ballot. In order to meet the request for more time, however, LPZ and AB agreed to extend the discussion period, which was initially expected to end in late December, until the end of January. Voting finally began on 4th February, in spite of further objections from JAZ and MAH based on their view that adequate time was not allowed for discussion. It ended on 4th March at which point the results were declared.The outcome was a decisive rejection of the Anthropocene proposal: 4 votes in favour; 12 votes against; and 3 abstentions. Three members did not vote, including JAZ and MAH, who then began a campaign questioning the legitimacy of the vote on procedural grounds and alleged contravention the ICS statutes. It is important to stress that there was no question of impropriety against either LPZ or AB, both of whom acted with complete integrity throughout a difficult process and who carried out their duties fully in accordance with the statutory requirements of ICS. Nor can the integrity of the SQS membership be called into question. All who participated in the process are geological scientists of the highest calibre, from a range of countries, and with wide expertise in
Quaternary stratigraphy and chronology. It is clear from the comments that were made during the course of the discussion period, that many were unconvinced by the arguments in the AWG proposal, and their misgivings are clearly reflected in the decisive nature of the voting outcome.The vote of the SQS has been recognized as valid by the ICS Executive, and that recognition has been near unanimously supported (15 yes, 1 abstention, 1 conflict of interest) by the chairs of the seventeen IUGS subcommissions, who are the ICS voting members. Although their proposal has been decisively rejected, the AWG has performed an important service to the scientific community by assembling a wide body of data on human impacts on global systems, and this database will be an essential source of reference well into the future. Moreover, the Anthropocene as a concept will continue to be widely used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. As such, it will remain an invaluable descriptor in human-environment interactions. But it will not be recognised as a formal geological term but will more usefully be employed informally in future discussions of the anthropogenic impacts on Earth’s climatic and environmental systems.
[…]
“Welcome to the Fabulous Anthropocene Era!”
For an Anthropocene to ever be recognized as a formal unit of geologic time, it would have to be distinctly recognizable in the rock record long after mankind is gone. Apart from a few odd isotope ratios, there will be very little trace of our existence a few million years after we have gone extinct or left the planet. As George Carlin so eloquently put it…
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet… nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine… the people are f***ed! Difference! The planet is fine! Compared to the people, THE PLANET IS DOING GREAT: Been here four and a half billion years! Do you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years, we’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion and we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat? That somehow, we’re going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us: been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
The planet isn’t going anywhere… we are!
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April 25, 2024 at 08:05AM
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