6 ms·

Why do some leading geologists reject the term "Anthropocene"?

51 points by Hooke 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
MrVandemar 2y ago
As much as precision is important, I think bickering about what we're scientifically calling the current man-made catastrophe is like arguing whether an aeroplane that's had its wings sheared off is still technically an aeroplane while it's plummeting to the ground.
- GrumpySloth 2y ago
  Except the plane is going to survive. Only the passengers aren’t going to. On the other hand, there are going to be new passengers. Assuming we don’t blow up the plane with nukes.
  - basil-rash 2y ago
    And if we do blow up the plane with nukes, there will still be new passengers. They’ll just be red-hardened. Maybe even rad-metabolizing. Evolution loves well-adapted organisms!
  - concordDance 2y ago
    The idea that we're headed towards extinction due to our impacts on the environment is not supported by any scientific institution I am aware of. Why do you believe this?
- lazide 2y ago
  Have you met taxonomists? That’s like complaining that lawyers argue, or engineers build things.
j9461701 2y ago
I find myself in an odd position - I am pro-Anthropocene but I find this reasoning suspect: > 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.
- bjornsing 2y ago
  Makes sense to me. What’s the counter argument?
  - defrost 2y ago
    There's some long hashing out of pro's and cons in the Smithsonian link and thread comments here Myths about the Anthropocene ( 67 points, 2 days ago, 58 comments ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40079014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40079014
- mordymoop 2y ago
  Also, geology isn’t just sedimentation. Erosion, from various causes, removes layers of rock, sometimes sweeping away thousands of feet of sediment. Our mining industry has removed rock on the scale of a significant meteor bombardment. Future geologists might ask “why is there a massive stratigraphic absence here?” as often as they ask “why is there a weird sedimentary layer here?”
  - 2y ago
gabaix 2y ago
> In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I am an Anthropocene partisan. 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.
- klodolph 2y ago
  I don’t think journalistic neutrality is either possible or desirable, the more I think about it.
  - mongol 2y ago
    I definitely think an article like this can be written from a neutral mindset. The ideal neutral journalist is one who is not emotionally invested in an outcome. In domestic politics almost everyone has an opinion but a piece about a scientific dispute is not something most have an opinion about.
    - reedf1 2y ago
      They might be dispassionate but they are not "neutral", neutrality is a position defined relative to two other positions and will always be a disputable ephemeral target. Even topic choice is an implied opinion.
      - unholythree 2y ago
        That’s like saying spheres aren't real because no perfect sphere exists. I think objectively exploring the merits of both sides of an argument is possible, and in many cases laudable. 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.
seydor 2y ago
This obviously has considerable political implications since it will inevitably be intertwined with climate change. So it's not merely a scientific discussion. 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.
- bradley13 2y ago
  The political implications may be the strongest argument against it. Science should strive for neutrality, to present facts without getting tangled up in politics.
  - Mordisquitos 2y ago
    On the other hand, now that the previous commenter mentioned that, I can see an objective reason to be against the term 'Anthropocene' regardless of whether the epoch itself is accepted. '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.
  - optimalsolver 2y ago
    Science has always been political, even back in the time of Galileo.
  - kevin_b_er 2y ago
    And when the politics of greed and the science of truth come to odds? Therein lies the rub.
ozymandias1337 2y ago
& according to Urban Dictionary we are living in the "Assholocene" https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Assholocene https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Assholocene
_nalply 2y ago
It seems some geologists don't want stratigraphy speculating about the future. 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.
richrichie 2y ago
[flagged]
- acdha 2y ago
  That comparison falls apart once you look at the details: geologists are qualified and expected to have strong opinions about geological terms but the handful of people with strong scientific credentials who deny climate change are inevitably speaking well outside of their professional experience — physicists who studied quantum mechanics or semiconductors should not expect their opinions to carry more weight than any other laymen.
  - richrichie 2y ago
    “Climate Science” - unlike areas like Geology - is a recent phenomenon and is an interdisciplinary field of study. I bet none of the experts on either side have BS/MS/PhD in Climate Sc.
    - acdha 2y ago
      The problem isn’t that someone has a BS in physics, it’s that they didn’t establish expertise in a relevant field – for example, a physicist grad who studied atmospheric physics or how the sun’s fluctuations affects temperature would have something relevant to say. The trend is quite pronounced: people saying climate change is real and poses a serious threat have spent decades studying it but the multiple orders of magnitude smaller group of people dismissing it studied unrelated things, and demand to be treated as peers despite doing none of the actual work. For example, John Clauser is clearly highly intelligent and if you had a question about quantum entanglement or light particles he’s clearly qualified. However, he’s never published a paper related to climate change and his big argument is about one factor (cloud cover) which has been studied heavily and is incorporated in the models used by actual climate scientists to make predictions. Those predictions have a half century of increasing accuracy so any criticism would need to account for that, as well multiple other lines of evidence supporting the scientific consensus.
      - 2y ago
stefantalpalaru 2y ago
[dead]

51 points by Hooke 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

As much as precision is important, I think bickering about what we're scientifically calling the current man-made catastrophe is like arguing whether an aeroplane that's had its wings sheared off is still technically an aeroplane while it's plummeting to the ground.

GrumpySloth 2y ago
Except the plane is going to survive. Only the passengers aren’t going to. On the other hand, there are going to be new passengers. Assuming we don’t blow up the plane with nukes.
- basil-rash 2y ago
  And if we do blow up the plane with nukes, there will still be new passengers. They’ll just be red-hardened. Maybe even rad-metabolizing. Evolution loves well-adapted organisms!
- concordDance 2y ago
  The idea that we're headed towards extinction due to our impacts on the environment is not supported by any scientific institution I am aware of. Why do you believe this?
lazide 2y ago
Have you met taxonomists? That’s like complaining that lawyers argue, or engineers build things.

j9461701 2y ago

I find myself in an odd position - I am pro-Anthropocene but I find this reasoning suspect: > 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.

bjornsing 2y ago
Makes sense to me. What’s the counter argument?
- defrost 2y ago
  There's some long hashing out of pro's and cons in the Smithsonian link and thread comments here Myths about the Anthropocene ( 67 points, 2 days ago, 58 comments ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40079014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40079014
mordymoop 2y ago
Also, geology isn’t just sedimentation. Erosion, from various causes, removes layers of rock, sometimes sweeping away thousands of feet of sediment. Our mining industry has removed rock on the scale of a significant meteor bombardment. Future geologists might ask “why is there a massive stratigraphic absence here?” as often as they ask “why is there a weird sedimentary layer here?”
- 2y ago

gabaix 2y ago

> In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I am an Anthropocene partisan. 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.

klodolph 2y ago
I don’t think journalistic neutrality is either possible or desirable, the more I think about it.
- mongol 2y ago
  I definitely think an article like this can be written from a neutral mindset. The ideal neutral journalist is one who is not emotionally invested in an outcome. In domestic politics almost everyone has an opinion but a piece about a scientific dispute is not something most have an opinion about.
  - reedf1 2y ago
    They might be dispassionate but they are not "neutral", neutrality is a position defined relative to two other positions and will always be a disputable ephemeral target. Even topic choice is an implied opinion.
    - unholythree 2y ago
      That’s like saying spheres aren't real because no perfect sphere exists. I think objectively exploring the merits of both sides of an argument is possible, and in many cases laudable. 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.

seydor 2y ago

This obviously has considerable political implications since it will inevitably be intertwined with climate change. So it's not merely a scientific discussion. 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.

bradley13 2y ago
The political implications may be the strongest argument against it. Science should strive for neutrality, to present facts without getting tangled up in politics.
- Mordisquitos 2y ago
  On the other hand, now that the previous commenter mentioned that, I can see an objective reason to be against the term 'Anthropocene' regardless of whether the epoch itself is accepted. '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.
- optimalsolver 2y ago
  Science has always been political, even back in the time of Galileo.
- kevin_b_er 2y ago
  And when the politics of greed and the science of truth come to odds? Therein lies the rub.

ozymandias1337 2y ago

& according to Urban Dictionary we are living in the "Assholocene" https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Assholocene https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Assholocene

_nalply 2y ago

It seems some geologists don't want stratigraphy speculating about the future. 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.

richrichie 2y ago

[flagged]

acdha 2y ago
That comparison falls apart once you look at the details: geologists are qualified and expected to have strong opinions about geological terms but the handful of people with strong scientific credentials who deny climate change are inevitably speaking well outside of their professional experience — physicists who studied quantum mechanics or semiconductors should not expect their opinions to carry more weight than any other laymen.
- richrichie 2y ago
  “Climate Science” - unlike areas like Geology - is a recent phenomenon and is an interdisciplinary field of study. I bet none of the experts on either side have BS/MS/PhD in Climate Sc.
  - acdha 2y ago
    The problem isn’t that someone has a BS in physics, it’s that they didn’t establish expertise in a relevant field – for example, a physicist grad who studied atmospheric physics or how the sun’s fluctuations affects temperature would have something relevant to say. The trend is quite pronounced: people saying climate change is real and poses a serious threat have spent decades studying it but the multiple orders of magnitude smaller group of people dismissing it studied unrelated things, and demand to be treated as peers despite doing none of the actual work. For example, John Clauser is clearly highly intelligent and if you had a question about quantum entanglement or light particles he’s clearly qualified. However, he’s never published a paper related to climate change and his big argument is about one factor (cloud cover) which has been studied heavily and is incorporated in the models used by actual climate scientists to make predictions. Those predictions have a half century of increasing accuracy so any criticism would need to account for that, as well multiple other lines of evidence supporting the scientific consensus.
    - 2y ago

stefantalpalaru 2y ago

[dead]