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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Myths about the Anthropocene
hoc wrote 9 hours 15 min ago:
Making fire and the wheel considered dangerous, choosing farty animals
for our cultivation endeavors stinks while getting down from trees into
concrete caves was a bad move. Scaling that up to "everyone"...
priceless.
What we once considered pivotal points in our development seems now the
source for our declared demise. At least we discovered that via
satellites shot into orbit by rockets.
Now, if we accept that as the natural overshooting in a evolutionary
jump, we just need to adjust. The undershooting will be painful, the
discussion in the next few oscillations annyoing, still, it's the way
to go. After all, denial is just a common step in change.
noduerme wrote 9 hours 27 min ago:
Suppose you want to graph negative responses to a survey over time.
Let's say the business had been getting increasingly worse on all
metrics over time.
Grouped by day you might just see a couple huge spikes on days where
there were a few negative responses.
Grouped by year you'd notice that the volume of negative feedbacks was
increasing.
Grouped by milllenia it would be hard to notice that something had
changed radically in the last few years.
The question is what timeframe matters to your particular case. Unless
you can answer that, you can't form a specific idea of how bad
something actually is or whether it's begun improving or is still
deteriorating.
The worst atmospheric polluting parts of the industrial revolution will
have been over for most countries for a century before we really feel
the environmental consequences of rising sea levels and increased
greenhouse effects. No one alive today was burning coal in 1895. So
it's not crazy to think about how we adapt, while still considering how
to stop adding to the damage.
1oooqooq wrote 7 hours 37 min ago:
you will be detecting micro plastic with every single fossil for
millennia to come.
noduerme wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
Yeah, but a few thousand years is nothing.
Anotheroneagain wrote 10 hours 24 min ago:
It would have to be defined to begin much earlier, perhaps 26ky ago,
when the mass extinctions and geological changes began to happen.
kazinator wrote 12 hours 13 min ago:
Let's celebrate the new Anthropocene era by extracting some anthracene
from anthracite and lighting it on fire.
b33j0r wrote 12 hours 29 min ago:
Would anthropoch be better? Manflection point? Gympulse?
If the problem being identified is that science is bad at PR, I agree.
Science communication, I love you; please stop being a self-fulfilling
prophesy.
If the message is that human industrialization besides carbon emissions
directly have obscured the discussion. Yes.
But this article kinda⦠does not tell you the thesis, it gives you
the evidence for us to come to our own (proven and correct)
conclusions. At⦠length.
I like it, but we should probably try to get new people who donât
already agree⦠maybe
heresie-dabord wrote 11 hours 10 min ago:
> anthropoch be better? Manflection point? Gympulse?
How about the Idiocracene. ^_^
b33j0r wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
We donât _have_ to succumb to idiocracy. Just a reminder.
Our (royal we) actions to dumb down our UIs was probably immoral in
the middle-game; if we wanted anyone to not just smash money
buttons, based on feelings.
I was here. I get it
laszlojamf wrote 28 min ago:
I'm not sure I understand exactly what you mean, and I really
don't mean to be the language police, but I don't think "royal
we" means what you intend it to mean.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we
eimrine wrote 11 hours 32 min ago:
I would like to have a word like Antropocrisis or Anthropoverflow
which would be a collecting point for child-free arguments, because
nowadays a declining of population is still considered as a negative
event everywhere.
Vecr wrote 8 hours 10 min ago:
It is a negative event. I see the sign of the exponential, and it's
the wrong one.
rob74 wrote 7 hours 56 min ago:
Did you take a look at all those positive exponentials in the
article? They're all a byproduct of exponential population
growth, so any sign that that growth might be slowing down is a
positive one in my book...
Vecr wrote 7 hours 46 min ago:
I know what a sigmoid curve is, but I don't want to see where
it bottoms out.
eimrine wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
Graphics in the article are clearly exponents and currently
we can only hope they will turn into sigmoids before our
death.
mig39 wrote 14 hours 30 min ago:
The argument is a lot like calling that 1914-1918 global conflict "The
Great War."
Yeah, let's not be hasty here. Let's just call it a war, because
something worse can come along...
Let's not call this the Anthropocene yet, we don't know what's coming.
eimrine wrote 11 hours 26 min ago:
Your metaphor is great but lacks an answer how exactly should we call
this non-Anthropocene.
beloch wrote 15 hours 26 min ago:
Honestly, it is hubris to start the anthropocene in just the last human
lifetime. Our species has been making an impact that will be evident
in the geological record for longer than that.
e.g. Geologists of some far-off future are going to notice that species
that were isolated to one continent suddenly started popping up
everywhere in the fossil record a few hundred years ago. Sea travel
has united the continents in way they haven't been united since Pangea.
A few hundred years will be indistinguishable from a single human
lifetime to those future geologists. To us however, it's an important
distinction.
tim333 wrote 5 hours 44 min ago:
We seem to have wiped out most of the 'charismatic megafauna' from
about 10,000 years ago. Mammoths, dodos etc.
AdamN wrote 7 hours 39 min ago:
Agreed. Spain's old growth forests were denuded to build the Spanish
Armada (or thereabouts) and you can go further back to catastrophic,
anthropogenic, environmental shifts a few thousand years back in
India, China and elsewhere in the world. Geology isn't focused on
single year boundaries so maybe it's best to say that we entered the
Anthropocene 6k-2k years ago (a 4k year range).
userulluipeste wrote 13 hours 42 min ago:
"A few hundred years will be indistinguishable from a single human
lifetime to those future geologists."
On what do you base this claim? Before humans, not much happened
around and the sediment layers were thin. The amount of energy moving
things around was limited to weather (due to sun radiation, mostly),
volcanic/tectonic activity, and to (a lesser degree, due to direct
effect of) tidal forces. Humans activity however, both directly and
indirectly, caused effects that also involved energy stored in the
span of millions of years. That should be anything but
indistinguishable.
Also, from the article:
"The amount of sediment settled behind the worldâs 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."
parineum wrote 11 hours 43 min ago:
> like pesticide residues, metals, microplastics and the fossils of
invasive species.
How much of that stuff is going to survive on geological timescales
amd the concept of "invasive species" isn't really applicable to
anything but conservationists that want to maintain a static
environment.
Twisell wrote 11 hours 5 min ago:
Much will survive even if it will eventually transform. But
that's not unlike petroleum which is composed of fossilized
organic materials.
Wether the result will be useful or detrimental to future
generations is yet another question that we deferred to them.
willis936 wrote 13 hours 53 min ago:
Zooming in to the right of the graph: there's noise then there's
signal.
URI [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
FrustratedMonky wrote 17 hours 28 min ago:
This seems like a reverse logic article. Here are 'myths', but really
'Not'.
It isn't against naming this the Anthropocene, all of the myths are
followed by reasons why they aren't myths and this is probably the
Anthropocene. "From a certain point of view".
tgv wrote 6 hours 37 min ago:
The use of the word "myth" implies that people who don't accept it
are conspiracy nut jobs. But in reality it is only a semantic debate.
It doesn't change reality, nor does it allow better understanding. We
clearly have an impact on the planet, but it is up to whoever in the
very far future to decide if it really was the start of an epoch,
assuming they would still express themselves in such primitive
concepts.
BirAdam wrote 14 hours 32 min ago:
From an exceedingly anthropocentric point of view.
People assume that humans are the only or first animal of the
Holocene to have left lasting global impacts. The mastodons
essentially great swaths of steppe. Ants and worms have essentially
altered the grounds. Bacteria generate the bulk of the oxygen.
Beavers change the course of rivers and create lakes. The number of
critters that alter the Earth is quite numerous. Humans also alter
the Earth, and in increasingly large ways, but naming an epoch after
humanity seems⦠egotistical when other critters do stuff equally
impressive when scale is factored in.
Nevermark wrote 18 hours 20 min ago:
It does seem pointless to avoid naming a new era for dramatic
irreversible changes that would have defined a new era if they happened
millions of years ago.
How many common assumptions about the Holocene are already broken?
--
With much less at stake, I think it was out of touch and impractical to
choose scientific terminology at odds with existing common language,
when "dwarf planet" was defined as not a subcategory of "planet".
It defies common usage, and also common language forms. Prefixed nouns
usually refer to subcategories, not excluded categories.
What science fiction story is going to carefully distinguish "dwarf
planets" as being a completely separate category from "planets" because
one didn't completely clear its orbit of debris?
A better (equivalent, and just as useful) nomenclature would have left
the common definition of "planet" alone: i.e. a body circling a star,
too small to be a star or brown dwarf (no continuous or aborted
fusion), but large enough to form a near sphere based on its own
gravitational field.
THEN, subdivide "planets" into "major planets" and "minor planets". We
have 8 major planets, and it turns out, many many dwarf planets.
Pluto is a "planet", specifically a "dwarf planet". Earth and Jupiter
are "planets", specifically "major planets".
"Rogue planets" are "planets" that left their systems. Some were
originally major, some dwarf. "Protoplanets" are new "planets" actively
accumulating mass by clearing their orbital field. They may stabilize
as "major" or "dwarf" planets.
The new exlusionary definition of "planet" also opens the doors to
inevitable conundrums:
Some day a huge planetary type body will be discovered in the
outreaches of a solar system where it has not cleared its area of
debris. So not a "planet"?
Some day a small planetary body with a cleared orbital field will be
found between the orbits of larger planetary bodies that haven't
cleared their fields. So it is a planet, but the larger bodies
surrounding it are not?
kadoban wrote 11 hours 13 min ago:
That doesn't really fix anything, because no matter what you call
Pluto, it has to get demoted from the list of
planet-like-things-whatever-we-call-them that school children learn.
The issue is that there's hundreds of objects at least as planet-y as
Pluto is, and nobody is going to remember all of those. So either we
demote Pluto somehow, or we have to have some reason that it's more
important than the rest.
So, Pluto is just historically interesting but inherently just one of
many rocks. And science tries not to categorize things based on "oh
that one somebody noticed first".
derbOac wrote 5 hours 26 min ago:
I guess I never understood the problem with saying we have hundreds
of planets, and then to classify them.
Nevermark wrote 7 hours 45 min ago:
I agree, distinguishing between the importance of things is
helpful.
But changing âplanetâ to not include Pluto just created
unending inconsistency.
There is nothing that screamed ânot planetâ about Pluto until
some scientists preconceptions and emotional investment about the
numbers of planets got challenged.
People now have to learn by rote that Pluto is not a planet.
Because âscientists say soâ, not because they are actually
becoming sensitive to debris fields.
The link between orbital debris and planetary size isnât even
going to hold with future discoveries. So the new restrictive
regular language-unfriendly definition isnât even going to be
stable.
Ridiculous.
FrustratedMonky wrote 17 hours 35 min ago:
Yes. The entire Pluto thing seemed like a pedantic waste of time.
Or, at least grandfather it in. Now everyone still thinks of it as a
planet, but we have to qualify it when talking : "Oh hey I read an
interesting story about the 9th planet Pluto, ooops, sorry, I mean
'dwarf', don't crucify me".
masklinn wrote 10 hours 45 min ago:
The only waste of time is from emotionally charged reactions like
yours. The IAU vote happened 18 years ago, yet you canât let it
go.
The grandfathering idea makes a negative amount of sense. These are
technical classifications on objective criteria.
FrustratedMonky wrote 5 hours 2 min ago:
Sometimes when forming standards, it is worthwhile to grandfather
something in, just for the pure logistical effort needed to
change.
Consider that every single book, textbook, poster, pamphlet in
the entire world has to be edited and re-printed. Just so we
don't have the numbers go to 9.
Every kid for decades was taught about the 9th planet Pluto. 18
years later, and a lot of people still refer to it as a Planet.
And. Now we can't refer to the search for Planet 10 with the
much cooler name of Planet X. "Searching for Planet X" sounds
cooler. Now every conversation has to be "Searching for Planet
X, oh, I mean 9, because of those guys that renumbered them, why
did they do that again? Was there a point."
"emotionally charged reactions like yours"
Someone needs to look in the mirror.
Nevermark wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
> The IAU vote happened 18 years ago, yet you canât let it go.
The IAU happened 18 years ago but the vast public hasnât
cottened on to the whole new âcleared orbital debrisâ concept
tacked on to a word that already has widespread use and
understanding.
Mistakes donât become not mistakes because of 18 years. The
mistake was that itâs predictable that two definitions for
âplanetâ will still be jostling each other 50 years from now
- for no good reason when distinctions could be made without
attempts at universal redefinition by a minority of people who
use the word for highly specialized reasons.
Instead of just coining a new phrase such as âmajor planetsâ
for their brand new definition.
What are regular people supposed to say now when they want to say
what planet meant which includes Mercury and Pluto? âPlanetary
like things?â??? Itâs a completely avoidable mess.
arduanika wrote 17 hours 36 min ago:
"Planet" derives from the Greek word for "wanderer", so it's totally
on brand if the category keeps moving around.
runeofdoom wrote 18 hours 9 min ago:
We already had 'minor planets' (asteroids). Planets are a continuum,
from small rocky or icy ones the size of large moons, to
"terrestrial" ones, to ice giants and gas giants.
Nevermark wrote 17 hours 56 min ago:
Yes, that is how I think "planets" should be used. A root category
over any number of subcategories defined over continuums and
combinations of other features.
As it is used in common langauge.
neonate wrote 19 hours 32 min ago:
URI [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240418201615/https://www.smithso...
lainga wrote 20 hours 13 min ago:
Related:
Geologists reject declaration of Anthropocene epoch
URI [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/22/geologists-rej...
arduanika wrote 17 hours 41 min ago:
Huh. That looks like really important context. I wonder why the
Smithsonian article neglected to mention it. Do they just not want to
admit that there's any dissent?
defrost wrote 13 hours 26 min ago:
The Smithsonian article specifically mentioned it right after the
leading paragraphs that outlined what the distinguishing features
were and that it had been put forward:
The proposal was rejected by the international hierarchy of
stratigraphyâ of which the International Commission on
Stratigraphy is a partâ 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.
It then goes on to address 10 points of dissent made and why these
reasons are weak, misconstrued, not sufficient, etc.
arduanika wrote 11 hours 47 min ago:
Oh, my bad. I fail at reading. Thanks for the corrections.
astine wrote 13 hours 42 min ago:
They did mention it. The Smithsonian piece is a response to it.
They even link to the same IUGS press release that the Guardian
uses as a source.
lainga wrote 17 hours 34 min ago:
I think the proposing team ran out of options on the formal track
so now they're going the ad-hominem track against the IUGS (they're
uncomfortable with the Anthropocene, they're climate-change
deniers, etc.)
Clamchop wrote 18 hours 5 min ago:
This makes it sound like the designation is latent, even if rejected
by committee right now. They acknowledge an anthropogenic "event" is
under way but aren't admitting the anthropocene because of its
recency and unclear boundaries.
But the boundaries of other epochs are also only estimated and didn't
unfold completely overnight, not even for the K-Pg impactor, probably
the most sudden change in the geological record. It still took
thousands of years for the consequences to shake out into a steadier
state.
If we were studying the current transition hundreds of thousands or
millions of years from now starting with zero knowledge, the
disappearance of megafauna (ongoing and has been for tens of
thousands of years), the large scale transformation of forests to
grassland, the invasion of species to every corner of the earth, the
mass extinction most severely in the tropics and oceans, the
appearance of so much carbon, plastic, and other pollution in the
geologic record, and the disappearance of glaciers (tens of thousands
of years to go there, even in worst case scenarios) would appear
virtually instantaneous. There'd be error bounds on it but eventually
no disagreement that the Earth took a corner.
So the argument starts to sound a bit like denial. But that's OK.
We've been through lots of denial around whether extinction happens,
if mass extinction happens, if the K-Pg impact happened, if it caused
a mass extinction, or whether continents move around. All settled
now.
lainga wrote 17 hours 48 min ago:
> They acknowledge an anthropogenic "event" is under way but aren't
admitting the anthropocene because of its recency and unclear
boundaries.
You mean aren't admitting the anthropocene as an epoch? That's not
what the article says. The reason it's not admissible as an epoch
is because we might blow ourselves up tomorrow and wipe out
industrial civilisation. And the whole layer of steel and concrete
we laid down would be very thin in the record, like the K-Pg
impact. The banded iron formations are kind of on the boundary,
they're associated with the Great Oxygenation Event but you could
also maybe call it the Jatulian period. That was a couple hundred
million years.
> There'd be error bounds on it but eventually no disagreement that
the Earth took a corner.
Those are classified as events, not epochs. The K-Pg impact was an
event.
Ed. I guess you could also say why can't we have a new Anthropocene
period caused by an Anthropocene event, but I don't know what to
tell you, it's just confusing to do that. That's why the K-Pg
impact is followed by the Danian age, not the
The-Start-Of-This-Period-Has-A-Lot-Of-Iridium age. I don't get why
the proposal didn't want to call it the Crawfordian if that's where
the canonical marker is found
marcosdumay wrote 11 hours 50 min ago:
Besides, if we don't blow ourselves up, it's a virtual certainty
that there will be another completely different geologic event in
the next 100 years. And some completely different one on the
following 100 years.
Hell, many of the changes from the current event are not even
coherent with each other.
IMO, some people are just way too intent on pushing futurology
around. (On something similar, people started pushing some grand
event that would mark the end of the 20th century at the 80s. Of
course, they pushed lots of different ones.)
eimrine wrote 21 hours 34 min ago:
Can I have an answer to the quession in the heading according to the
article? This English is too complicated for me.
germinator wrote 19 hours 40 min ago:
You're basically walking into the middle of a niche debate about
semantics. There is a faction that dislikes the use of the word
"anthropocene" to refer to the current geological era - and
specifically, the past 100 years or so. Their main argument is that
it's an imperceptible blip on the radar compared to the scale of
other geological eras we study.
This article is a response that can be summed up as "no, we're
changing the environment faster than anything before, so it counts".
It's framed not as a genuine debate, but as an attempt to dispel
"myths".
"Why this matters" is left as an exercise for the reader...
mikestew wrote 19 hours 59 min ago:
Scroll halfway down to find a numbered list, with headings.
Personally, I couldn't simplify it anymore than that.
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