Download The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn

ORWELL & CLIMATE CHANGE — READING #6
The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age
Damian Carrington
The Guardian | August 29, 2016
[1] Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared,
according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town.
The new epoch should begin about 1950, the experts said, and was likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across
the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete,
and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken were now under consideration.
[2] The current epoch, the Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during which all human civilisation
developed. But the striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the global mass
extinction of species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development mark the end of that slice of geological
time, the experts argue. The Earth is so profoundly changed that the Holocene must give way to the Anthropocene. According to
the Working Group on the Anthropocene (WGA), “The significance of the Anthropocene is that it sets a different trajectory for the
Earth system, of which we of course are part,” said Prof Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester. "If our
recommendation is accepted, the Anthropocene will have started just a little before I was born,” he said. “We have lived most of
our lives in something called the Anthropocene and are just realising the scale and permanence of the change.” Prof Colin Waters,
principal geologist at the British Geological Survey, said: “Being able to pinpoint an interval of time is saying something about
how we have had an incredible impact on the environment of our planet. The concept of the Anthropocene manages to pull all these
ideas of environmental change together.”
[3] Prof Chris Rapley, a climate scientist at University College London said: “The Anthropocene marks a new period in which our
collective activities dominate the planetary machinery. “Since the planet is our life support system – we are essentially the crew of
a largish spaceship – interference with its functioning at this level and on this scale is highly significant. If you or I were crew on a
smaller spacecraft, it would be unthinkable to interfere with the systems that provide us with air, water, fodder and climate control.
But the shift into the Anthropocene tells us that we are playing with fire, a potentially reckless mode of behaviour which we are
likely to come to regret unless we get a grip on the situation.”
[4] Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and former president of the Royal Society, said that the dawn of the Anthropocene was a
significant moment. “The darkest prognosis for the next millennium is that bio, cyber or environmental catastrophes could
foreclose humanity’s immense potential, leaving a depleted biosphere,” he said. But Lord Rees added that there is also cause for
optimism. “Human societies could navigate these threats, achieve a sustainable future, and inaugurate eras of post-human evolution
even more marvellous than what’s led to us. The dawn of the Anthropocene epoch would then mark a one-off transformation from
a natural world to one where humans jumpstart the transition to electronic (and potentially immortal) entities, that transcend our
limitations and eventually spread their influence far beyond the Earth.”
[5] The evidence of humanity’s impact on the planet is overwhelming, but the changes are very recent in geological terms, where
an epoch usually spans tens of millions of years. “One criticism of the Anthropocene as geology is that it is very short,” said
Zalasiewicz. “Our response is that many of the changes are irreversible.” To define a new geological epoch, a signal must be found
that occurs globally and will be incorporated into deposits in the future geological record. For example, the extinction of the
dinosaurs 66m years ago at the end of the Cretaceous epoch is defined by a “golden spike” in sediments around the world of the
metal iridium, which was dispersed from the meteorite that collided with Earth to end the dinosaur age.
[6] For the Anthropocene, the best candidate for such a golden spike are radioactive elements from nuclear bomb tests, which were
blown into the stratosphere before settling down to Earth. “The radionuclides are probably the sharpest – they really come on with
a bang,” said Zalasiewicz. “But we are spoiled for choice. There are so many signals.” Other spikes being considered as evidence
of the onset of the Anthropocene include the tough, unburned carbon spheres emitted by power stations. “The Earth has been
smoked, with signals very clearly around the world in the mid-20th century,” said Zalasiewicz. Other candidates include plastic
pollution, aluminium and concrete particles, and high levels of nitrogen and phosphate in soils, derived from artificial fertilisers.
Although the world is currently seeing only the sixth mass extinction of species in the 700m-year history of complex life on Earth,
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this is unlikely to provide a useful golden spike as the animals are by definition very rare and rarely dispersed worldwide. . .
[7] The 35 scientists on the WGA– who voted 30 to three in favour of formally designating the Anthropocene, with two
abstentions– will now spend the next two to three years determining which signals are the strongest and sharpest. Crucially, they
must also decide a location which will define the start of the Anthropocene. Geological divisions are not defined by dates but by a
specific boundary between layers of rock or, in the case of the Holocene, a boundary between ice layers in a core taken from
Greenland.
[8] The scientists are focusing on sites where annual layers are formed and are investigating mud sediments off the coast of Santa
Barbara in California and the Ernesto cave in northern Italy, where stalactites and stalagmites accrete annual rings. Lake sediments,
ice cores from Antarctica, corals, tree rings and even layers of rubbish in landfill sites are also being considered. Once the data has
been assembled, it will be formally submitted to the stratigraphic authorities and the Anthropocene could be officially adopted
within a few years. “If we were very lucky and someone came forward with, say, a core from a classic example of laminated
sediments in a deep marine environment, I think three years is possibly viable,” said Zalasiewicz. This would be lightning speed for
such a geological decision, which in the past would have taken decades and even centuries to make. The term Anthropocene was
coined only in 2000, by the Nobel prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen, who believes the name change is overdue. He said in 2011:
“This name change stresses the enormity of humanity’s responsibility as stewards of the Earth.” Crutzen also identified in 2007
what he called the “great acceleration” of human impacts on the planet from the mid-20th century.
[9] Despite the WGA’s expert recommendation, the declaration of the Anthropocene is not yet a foregone conclusion. “Our
stratigraphic colleagues are very protective of the geological time scale. They see it very rightly as the backbone of geology and
they do not amend it lightly,” said Zalasiewicz. “But I think we can prepare a pretty good case.” Rapley also said there was a strong
case: “It is highly appropriate that geologists should pay formal attention to a change in the signal within sedimentary rock layers
that will be clearly apparent to future generations of geologists for as long as they exist. The ‘great acceleration’ constitutes a
strong, detectable and incontrovertible signal.”
George Marshall
Don't Even Think about It (2014)
Chapter 38: Intimations of Mortality ― Why the Future Goes Dark
[1] The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City is heaving― 115,000 fans crammed in for the second day of ComicCon, the largest comics convention on the East Coast. I am here to ask a simple question: What do you think the future will be like?
My reasoning is this: These people are young, smart, and curious about technology and future worlds. Surely, as they stand around
in lines waiting for autographs, they will have spare time to answer a few questions from a stray British social researcher—not in
costume, although one woman eyes my scruffy trench coat and asks, "Out of curiosity, have you come as Inspector Gadget?" So, I
ask them, what do you think the future will be like? . . .
[2] And climate change? In over twenty interviews, not one person mentions climate change until I prompt them to do so. Then
they have lots of views. No one doubts that it is happening or is going to be a disaster. "It will escalate into catastrophe." "If we
can't cope with that, we'll all die like the dinosaurs." But asked to identify when these impacts might hit, they reckon it's still a long
way off. "Maybe my great-grandchildren will have to deal with it," Catwoman says. Whatever happened to the future? Even when I
was growing up, a final straggler in the baby boom party, there was no doubt about what the future would look like. Shiny glass
buildings, food pills, mining the oceans, monorails. Images of the future were everywhere. Now, research shows, people are
unwilling to even think about it.
[3] Bruce Tonn at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has spent the past decade asking people what they think will happen in
the future. According to his research, most people interpret "the future" as being no more than fifteen years away and, beyond
twenty years, people's ability to imagine the future "goes dark." It's an intriguing term, and I ask Tonn to explain it. He says that
people are "just not able to imagine any type of future. They cannot visualize their lives, cannot visualize society, cannot visualize
the impacts of various policies or lack of them." Tonris research revealed a deep, underlying pessimism. Almost half of his
respondents would not wish to have been born in the future and anticipate that humanity will go extinct, most likely from
environmental collapse.
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[4] A survey of five hundred American preteens found that more than half felt the world was in decline and a third believed it
would not exist when they grew up. In Australia a quarter of the children believe that the world will come to an end before they
reach adulthood. Extinction is an emerging narrative around climate change— not just extinction generally, but our own extinction
specifically. A World Without Us, Alan Weisman's book on the environmental recovery of a world emptied of humans, became a
bestseller. In books such as Fred Guterl's The Fate of the Species and Clive Hamilton's Requiem for a Species, climate change
writers argue that our extinction is the ultimate danger.
[5] Elizabeth Kolbert's book Field Notes from a Catastrophe ends with the line, "It may seem impossible to imagine that a
technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing."
Recent years have also seen the emergence of a new field of extinction studies. The Future of Humanity Institute, nested within the
Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University, specializes in the study of catastrophic risks that threaten the future of humanity. The
rival Cambridge University has founded the Center for the Study of Existential Risk with the support of Jaan Tallinn,
multimillionaire cofounder of Skype. This is, one realizes, cool stuff.
[6] The Future of Humanity Institute conducted a poll of academic experts on global risks. They gave an estimate of 19 percent
probability that the human species will go extinct before the end of this century. The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate
Change factored a 9.5 percent risk of extinction within the next century into its calculations.
Extinction fits neatly into an altogether more flippant and fatalistic narrative that it is too late to do anything. As the late comedian
George Carlin put it:
Save the planet! What!? Are these fucking people kidding me!? The planet isn't going anywhere. We are! We are going
away, so pack your shit, folks. We wouldn't leave much of a trace either. Just another failed mutation, just another closed
end biological mistake. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
[7] Or, in a calmer version of what is essentially the same narrative, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh tells us that "the collective anger
and violence" of global warming will lead to our destruction within a hundred years, but we can accept this because "Mother Earth
knows she has the power to heal herself." These narratives do not belong exclusively to any single identifiable worldview. They are
experimental, building momentum as people try them out and pass them around. They are already widespread. Carlin's nihilistic
monologue has been viewed more than five million times on YouTube. If this is a defense mechanism, it is one that bypasses the
entire issue of our moral responsibility. It is as though we have moved from a bedside vigil to bereavement counseling without
actually experiencing the death itself.
[8] And when it is said that we are the ones who will go extinct, this is the most slippery of all we's. People are consistently far
more optimistic about their own chances than they are about those of humanity as a whole. No one using this language seems to
seriously consider that they or their own associates are under direct threat— these frames prepare them to accept the suffering of
others as unavoidable and required. Climate change imagery draws heavily on the iconography of death. Starvation, cracked earth,
skulls, dead trees. Reports of extreme weather events give prominent mention to the numbers of deaths, highlighted in headlines
about "killer heat." Metaphors of terminal illness, cancer, and murder appear regularly in environmental articles. An article in the
Sydney Morning Herald framed climate change as a terminal illness under the headline "Prognosis for a Planet: Death."
[9] The veteran environmental scientist James Lovelock has explored these metaphors in depth. A climate scientist, he says, is like
"a young policewoman" who has "to tell a family whose child had strayed that he had been found dead, murdered in a nearby
wood." Science study centers are "the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital" and are reporting that Earth "is soon to pass
into a morbid fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma." Beyond such attention-grabbing associations
between climate change and death lies a more interesting question: Does climate change in its essence trigger our fears of our own
death and is our response shaped by those fears?
[10] The anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that a fear of death lies at the center of all human belief. The denial of death, he
argued, is a "vital lie" that leads us to invest our efforts into our cultures and social groups to obtain a sense of permanence and
survival beyond our death. Thus, he argued, when we receive reminders of our death—what he calls death salience—we respond
by defending those values and cultures. Becker's theory, called terror management theory, has been supported by more than three
hundred experiments and predicts that when people are made directly aware of their death, they immediately rationalize the threat,
often by denying the personal risk or the proximity, just as smokers will say, "It's still a long way off, so I may as well live a little."
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[11] Janis Dickinson, a professor of neuroscience at Cornell University, places climate change within the thinking of Becker. She
suggests that many of the standard responses to climate change, of extreme rationalization, denial, or placing climate change
impacts far in the future, are all consistent with our responses to our fear of death. We cannot stand to think of the death of our own
children, but we accept that they will die after we ourselves have died. Similarly, we can avoid the fear of climate change by
placing its impacts beyond our own life span. In focus groups, people often do this quite openly, justifying their indifference with
the observation that it is all in the future, when they will be long since dead and gone.
[12] However, there is another, subtler aspect to Becker's terror management theory. When the reminder of mortality is subtle or so
subliminal that people do not even notice it, they display a greatly enhanced sense of the superiority of their own social group, and
that can lead them to give increased attention to status, money, and improved self-image. Becker believed that our innate way of
coping with our death is to invest our energy in our social group and its achievement—what he called our "immortality project."
[13] Dickinson suggests that it is the subconscious associations of climate change with death that are having the greatest effect,
fueling the extreme polarization of deniers and believers, and driving the wider population toward status-driven high-carbon
lifestyles. She cites the strong evidence that people interpret images of environmental destruction in terms of their own death. As
Becker's theory predicts, exposure to images of death increases environmental concern among those who already have those values,
and reduces it among those who do not. . . Many people who work on climate change deal with a deep sense of grief. Journalist
Ross Gelbspan wonders why he has such problems crying when he feels such a terrible sadness to see the loss of the future for
young people who look forward to their lives. "Instead of just running away from it, I try to take a deep breath and let it in."
[14] The campaigner Bill McKibben agrees that climate change does feels uncannily like our own death. When I invite him to
explore the theme, he adds an important caveat: This is, he tells me, quite unlike a natural death. "We are grieving for what we are
doing and our own inability to deal with it. We all know we are going to die, and we used to be able to cope with the thought that
our life was contributing to something larger that would survive us. Now even that has been taken away from us." So even the
"immortality project" that compensates for our own deaths has been taken away from us. Increasingly we are told that whatever we
do, we are committed to some uncertain future catastrophe that threatens to render the past meaningless. All we can do is wait for it
to come. It feels both real and unreal, something we are told will happen, that we might rationalize but we can't quite believe. This
strange sense of impermanence was the central theme in McKibben's seminal book on climate change, The End of Nature: "Our
comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world, our confidence that it will change gradually and imperceptibly if at all, is,
then, the result of a subtly warped perspective . . . We are at the end of nature."
[15] Maybe it is appropriate to leave the last word to the founder of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud, whose work so often revolved
around the centrality of death in our psyche. In his short essay "On Transience," Freud explores the way that our anticipation of
future death diminishes our view of the present. In 1915 Freud was walking with a friend in the summer woods, a few months after
one hundred thousand men had been massacred in the Battle of Ypres:
The poet admired the beauty of the nature around us, but it did not delight him. He was disturbed by the idea that all this
beauty was bound to fade, that it would vanish through the winter, like all human beauty and everything beautiful and
noble. All the things he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be devalued by the fate of transience
for which they were destined.
Chapter 41: Why We Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change . . . And Why We Are Wired to Take Action
[1] Through our long evolution, we have inherited fundamental and universal cognitive wiring that shapes the way that we see the
world and interpret threats and that motivates us to act on them. Without doubt, climate change has qualities that play poorly to
these innate tendencies. It is complex, unfamiliar, slow moving, invisible, and intergenerational. Of all the possible combinations of
loss and gain, climate change contains the most challenging: requiring certain short-term loss in order to mitigate against an
uncertain longer-term loss.
[2] Climate change also challenges and reverses some deeply held assumptions. We are told that the way of life that we associate
with our comfort and the protection of our families is now a menace; that gases we have believed to be benign are now poisonous;
that our familiar environment is becoming dangerous and uncertain. Our social intelligence is well attuned to keeping track of debts
and favors, and ensuring equitable distribution of gains and losses. Climate change poses a major challenge here too, with all
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solutions requiring that rival social groups agree on a distribution of losses and thereafter the allocation of a greatly diminished
shared atmospheric commons.
[3] We are best prepared to anticipate threats from other humans. We are inordinately skilled at identifying social allies and
enemies, identifying the social cues that define loyalty to our group and that identify the members of rival out-groups. Climate
change is immensely challenging in terms of these categorizations. It is not caused by an external enemy with obvious intention to
cause harm. It therefore tends to be fitted around existing enemies and their perceived intentions: a rival superpower, big
government, intellectual elites, liberal environmentalists, fossil fuel corporations, lobbyists, right-wing think tanks, or social failings such as overconsumption, overpopulation, or selfishness. Worse still, and unique among major threats, we all contribute
directly through our own emissions and are therefore personally responsible for the ever-increasing costs for ourselves, our ingroup, and our children and descendants. This moral challenge, combined with a sense of the relative powerlessness of individual
action, helps mobilize a well-ingrained set of defense mechanisms that enables us to ignore the problem—both through personal
disavowal and through socially constructed silence.
[4] There is a fundamental division, embedded in the physical structure of our brain, into the analytic and the experiential
processing systems—what I have called the rational brain and the emotional brain. The two brains work together on complex tasks,
but the engagement of the emotional brain is critical for galvanizing action, especially at a social level. The differences between our
rational and our emotional processing systems express themselves in a constant tension between the overly rational presentation of
climate science and its translation by campaigners into emotionally appealing narratives.
[5] The cognitive systems require that complex issues be converted into narratives which become the primary medium by which the
issue and the social cues that guide attention are transmitted between people. Meaning is therefore created by the way we talk about
it (or, I have suggested, the ways that we choose not to talk about it). Stories and narratives have universal qualities, and we
squeeze new information into these standard story patterns. We then justify these stories with reference to available recent
experience—usually itself in the form of a socially generated story.
[6] Climate change is exceptionally multivalent. It lends itself to multiple interpretations of causality, timing, and impact. This
leaves it extremely vulnerable to our innate disposition to select or adapt information so that it confirms our preexisting
assumptions—confirmation bias. If climate change can be interpreted in any number of ways, it is therefore prone to being
interpreted in the way that we choose. These constructed narratives therefore contain the final reason why we can ignore climate
change: they become so culturally specific that people who do not identify with their values can reject the issue they explain.
[7] The narratives formed by the early adopters of the issue came to dominate and frame all subsequent discussion. The early focus
on tailpipe emissions rather than wellhead production became a meta-frame that influenced all subsequent narratives concerning
the definition of the problem, moral responsibility, and policy solutions. As the issue matured, deniers became louder and stronger
and created their own narratives that came to "pollute" the discourse. These built on and reacted to the existing narratives, often
adopting and reworking their frames, to create compelling stories in which familiar enemies were motivated by self-interest to
cause intentional harm. As these narratives became repeated and shared within peer groups, they came to constitute a social proof.
These reinforced the other social cues coming from the media and political elites. As the issue developed, these cues accumulated
and powerful social feedbacks tended to amplify them, leading people to overestimate the consensus within their own social group
and to alter or suppress their own opinion if it did not conform.
[8] What is more, we are all active participants in this process, developing personal narratives that help us to manage the anxiety,
moral challenge, and required sacrifices inherent in climate change by choosing to make it yet more distant, less certain, more
hopeless, or less relevant to our own values. We even interpret the wider social norms to select the social cues that best reinforce
our chosen position. That is to say that, even with the best intentions, we cannot help setting up narratives that are designed to fail
against the very biases they are supposed to overcome.
[9] There is, then, no single factor that leads people to ignore climate change. Anyone who suggests that there is will, inevitably, be
fulfilling the wicked prophecy and defining the problem to support that conclusion. Rather, there is a set of interrelated negotiations
between our personal self-interest and our social identity, in which we actively participate to shape climate change in ways that
enable us to avoid it. The bottom line is that we do not accept climate change because we wish to avoid the anxiety it generates and
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the deep changes it requires. In this regard, it is not unlike any other major threat. However, because it carries none of the clear
markers that would normally lead our brains to overrule our short-term interests, we actively conspire with each other, and mobilize
our own biases to keep it perpetually in the background.
. . . And Why We Are Wired To Take Action
[10] Even with our limitations, humans can accept, understand, and take action on anything. We have immense capacity for prosocial, supportive, and altruistic behavior. Climate change is entirely within our capacity for change. It is challenging, but far from
impossible. Beyond immediate personal threats, we have no instinct stronger than the drive to defend the interests of our own
descendants and social group. Climate change is not a minor inconvenience—even though some narratives shape it as such. It is an
existential threat on a scale equaled only by nuclear war. It contains threats at every level: to our sense of place, our identity, our
way of life, our expectations of the future, and our deepest instincts that lead us to protect our children and defend our tribe.
[11] Nothing is contained within climate change that we are incapable of dealing with. Even though it presents itself in the form of
a future threat, we have the capacity to anticipate threats, by giving them the narrative and cultural form that engages our emotional
brain and by creating social institutions that sustain our response. We have a strong drive toward such collective enterprises, for
they are one of the means by which we cope with the fear of our own mortality. We also have a virtually unlimited capacity to
accept things that might otherwise prove to be cognitively challenging once they are supported within a culture of shared
conviction, reinforced through social norms, and conveyed in narratives that speak to our "sacred values." These could just as
readily lead us to action as lead us to inaction.
[12] There is no single pathway from information to conviction. The cultural feedbacks that lead climate change to become more
distant, uncertain, or hopeless could equally well work the other way by creating a social proof and legitimacy around accepting
and taking action. The personal reward for action would then come from an intensified sense of belonging and the satisfaction that
comes from contributing to a shared project. Climate change is the one issue that could bring us together and enable us to overcome
our historic divisions. This, rather than the self-interest contained in the economic arguments, is the real reward of taking action.
[13] The final proof that we are not inherently "wired" to ignore climate change—which should be self-evident—is that the
majority of people, across the world, already accept that it is a major threat and might be prepared to support the necessary changes.
They currently feel isolated and powerless, but could readily be mobilized if their concerns and hopes became validated within a
community of shared conviction and purpose. Human history provides so many examples of social movements that have overcome
apparently impossible obstacles that we know that we should be capable of meeting this challenge, providing that we move
decisively.
[14] But this is just one of the many pathways that are opening up in front of us. Climate change is not a static issue, and extreme
weather events of entirely unprecedented scale and duration will continue to build. These events now occur within a cultural and
political environment that has been thoroughly primed with socially charged beliefs. The critical questions for the future are how
the increasing personal experience of extreme weather will interact with these existing narratives, and whether the result will be an
increase or a decrease in our acceptance that our own behavior is their underlying cause.