Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumA spectacular essay - and from the NYT!
Heart-felt and clear-eyed, erudite and eloquent. One of the best things I've read in a long time.
Theres a word for this new era we live in: the Anthropocene. This term, taken up by geologists, pondered by intellectuals and discussed in the pages of publications such as The Economist and the The New York Times, represents the idea that we have entered a new epoch in Earths geological history, one characterized by the arrival of the human species as a geological force. The Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term in 2002, and it has steadily gained acceptance as evidence has increasingly mounted that the changes wrought by global warming will affect not just the worlds climate and biological diversity, but its very geology and not just for a few centuries, but for millenniums. The geophysicist David Archers 2009 book, The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earths Climate, lays out a clear and concise argument for how huge concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and melting ice will radically transform the planet, beyond freak storms and warmer summers, beyond any foreseeable future.
The Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London the scientists responsible for pinning the golden spikes that demarcate geological epochs such as the Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene have adopted the Anthropocene as a term deserving further consideration, significant on the scale of Earth history. Working groups are discussing what level of geological time-scale it might be (an epoch like the Holocene, or merely an age like the Calabrian), and at what date we might say it began. The beginning of the Great Acceleration, in the middle of the 20th century? The beginning of the Industrial Revolution, around 1800? The advent of agriculture?
The greatest challenge the Anthropocene poses may be to our sense of what it means to be human. Within 100 years within three to five generations we will face average temperatures 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today, rising seas at least three to 10 feet higher, and worldwide shifts in crop belts, growing seasons and population centers. Within a thousand years, unless we stop emitting greenhouse gases wholesale right now, humans will be living in a climate the Earth hasnt seen since the Pliocene, three million years ago, when oceans were 75 feet higher than they are today. We face the imminent collapse of the agricultural, shipping and energy networks upon which the global economy depends, a large-scale die-off in the biosphere thats already well on its way, and our own possible extinction. If homo sapiens (or some genetically modified variant) survives the next millenniums, it will be survival in a world unrecognizably different from the one we have inhabited.
But the biggest problems the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the root of humanistic and philosophical questioning: What does it mean to be human? and What does it mean to live? In the epoch of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality What does my life mean in the face of death? is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination. What does human existence mean against 100,000 years of climate change? What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end?
NoOneMan
(4,795 posts)Its interesting that this is going mainstream. In 10 years, will the majority be pondering these questions that some of us struggle with now (doubt it). Maybe climate change really could induce a massive social change
chervilant
(8,267 posts)is the continued use of one hundred years as the time frame within which these devastating events will occur. In 2008, noted climate scientists described positive feedback loops that are already accelerating climate change. And, there's Fukushima. We're in for a bumpy ride!
hunter
(38,317 posts)There are people in my community who haven't heard from friends and family yet.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)I don't gig him too hard for that softening, though. A few more people will hear him if he speaks this way. Most people can't even go as far as saying there is an inevitable catastrophe in our future, let alone that it's here. We see this failure time and again, everywhere in all societies - including right here on DU.
chervilant
(8,267 posts)The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize theres nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.
hatrack
(59,587 posts)On edit: guy can fucking write.
LouisvilleDem
(303 posts)He's not a climate scientist, he's a guy getting his Phd in English.
hatrack
(59,587 posts)I've read plenty by PhDs in English that, well, sucked.
longship
(40,416 posts)As documented in 1957 by Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and Spike Milligan, in "The Plasticine Man."
http://www.myoldradio.com/old-radio-episodes/the-goon-show-the-plasticine-man/13
Listen and learn. And yes, Bluebottle gets deaded again, just like Kenny, the bastards.
bananas
(27,509 posts)Portland, OR
Many here seem to be looking forward with glee to a starving, corpse-filled dystopia; the data show the opposite trends: fertility is falling around the globe in response to prosperity and female emancipation, not food pressure. The blather of despair isn't coming from demographers, it's coming from elites who've been taken over by the brainleech of decades-old pop-Malthusian crypto-racism. The zombie apocalypse won't be caused by the hordes at the bottom but by the cored-out brainless corporatists at the top. Despite that, this garbage is disseminated through climate-change accepting elements of the right wing until it has become the received wisdom of that culture, especially military culture.
Climate change is going to be a challenge but it will mostly be a challenge of facilitating the migration of people and ecosystems. We will be up to that challenge so long as we see through the gauze of corporate mediocrity in the media. We must ignore the calls for fatalism and turn away nihilistic attempts to dismantle civilization. Instead we need to deal with the consequences of ocean acidification and warming.
Fortunately it is possible to simply turn away from the hand-wringers in the media and instead give column inches and page views to people working on the problems. With respect to Mr. Scranton, Baghdad and New Orleans were products of the wishful nihilism and the incompetence of power elites. Just because you were a witness there doesn't make those situations inevitable.
Nov. 11, 2013 at 12:14 a.m.
hatrack
(59,587 posts)And where would there be any evidence that we are doing anything on either front?
There is one metric that conveniently measures what matters, and only one, and that is atmospheric CO2. From it, the bulk of all else follows - climate breakdown and extreme weather events, and the steady drip-drip of acidification.
And what does that metric show? Do increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide show any sign of falling, or even of leveling off, or even of slowing down? No, they do not. Implacably and steadily, every year, we make our atmosphere and climate less stable, and our oceans more acidic, as we talk and talk and talk and talk about what we might have to do "someday".
Until such time as real-world measurements shows that atmospheric carbon (and by extension, carbonic acid) are decreasing in air and ocean, I suggest that there are better ways to employ our time on Earth than trying to save what cannot be saved.
I would also suggest that there are better ways to employ our time than upon the creation and erection of straw men, as Andrew has done in the excerpt above.
Bigmack
(8,020 posts)just watch the effects of the currently accelerating release of Methane in the warming northern lands and seas! Ms. Bigmack
LouisvilleDem
(303 posts)A sensible comment that makes many excellent points.
Delphinus
(11,831 posts)hard put into words my feelings.