Climate Change(d)?

[steve_bank]

B B B Buh buh buh...the highway in southerner Ca was closed by a blizzard.

It is not warming, it is getting colder.

 

[lpetrich]

Are We in the ‘Anthropocene,’ the Human Age? Nope, Scientists Say. - The New York Times - "A panel of experts voted down a proposal to officially declare the start of a new interval of geologic time, one defined by humanity’s changes to the planet."

In the end, though, the members of the committee that voted on the Anthropocene over the past month were not only weighing how consequential this period had been for the planet. They also had to consider when, precisely, it began.

Which technology? What point in each technology's adoption?

Still, to qualify for its own entry on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene would have to be defined in a very particular way, one that would meet the needs of geologists and not necessarily those of the anthropologists, artists and others who are already using the term.

International Commission on Stratigraphy - Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Points (GSSP's)
gives what a GSSP's location ought to satisfy: some strong marker, like a fossil appearing or a geological change. The K-Pg iridium spike is a good example.

Geologists Make It Official: We’re Not in an ‘Anthropocene’ Epoch - The New York Times - "The field’s governing body ratified a vote by scientists on the contentious issue, ending a long effort to update the timeline of Earth’s history."

GSSP's have been ratified for nearly all the recognized divisions of geological time in the Phanerozoic Eon, with the oldest one being at the base of the Ediacaran Period, just before the Phanerozoic.

International Commission on Stratigraphy

It is with the delegated authority of the IUGS President and Secretary General and on behalf of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) that the vote by the ICS Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) to reject the proposal for an Anthropocene Epoch as a formal unit of the Geologic Time Scale is approved. The voting members of SQS have extensive experience and wide expertise in Quaternary stratigraphy and chronology. Their vote was approved by the ICS executive, and that approval was overwhelmingly supported by the chairs of the ICS subcommissions. Despite its rejection as a formal unit of the Geologic Time Scale, the Anthropocene will nevertheless continue to be used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. It will remain an invaluable descriptor of human impact on the Earth system.

 

[lpetrich]

Opinion | Scientists Just Gave Humanity an Overdue Reality Check. The World Will Be Better for It. - The New York Times

For starters, the word Anthropocene problematically implies that humans as a species are responsible for the sorry state of the earth’s environments. While technically true, only a fraction of humanity, driven by greed and rapacious capitalism, is responsible for burning through the planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate. Billions of humans still lead lives with relatively modest environmental footprints, yet the terminology of the Anthropocene wrongly lays blame at their feet. Responding to the vote, a group of outside scientists wisely noted in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution that “our impacts have less to do with being human and more to do with ways of being human.”

What’s more, inaugurating a new geologic epoch is an unacceptable act of defeatism. Geologic epochs are not fleeting moments. The shortest one, the Holocene — the one we live in — is 11,700 years long and counting. The idea that we are entering a new epoch defined by human-caused environmental disaster implies that we won’t be getting out of this mess anytime soon. In that way, the Anthropocene forecloses on the possibility that the geologic future might be better than the present.

So it would be defeatist? I think that that's silly.

In recent years, philosophers have bandied about alternative names: the Capitalocene, the Plantationocene and even the Ravencene, a reference to the raven who figures widely in North Pacific Indigenous mythology as a trickster figure, reminding humans to be humble amid our destructive capacity. For my part, I’m partial to “post-Holocene,” an admission that the world is vastly different than it was 10,000 years ago, but that we can’t possibly predict — or name — what it might look like in another 10,000 years.

In the end, it might be too late to find a better term. The “Anthropocene” has already entered the popular lexicon, from the cover of The Economist to the title of a Grimes album. The scientists who coined the term do not have the power to extinguish it.

We Should Be Talking about the Capitalocene | TDR | Cambridge Core

The term “Anthropocene” is obfuscatory, and as an analytic framework it has a serious blind spot: the conflicts stemming from the uneven distribution of the costs and benefits of the “Age of Man,” which are the very eco-conflicts on which artists in our field should focus. We should be talking about the “Capitalocene,” a term that locates climate change within the history of capitalism and colonialism, and suggests stories that deserve time on our stages.

Introduction: Plantationocene | Society for Cultural Anthropology

Plantations, as Katherine McKittrick argues, are an “ugly blueprint” of such change (McKittrick 2013, 11). They have long been themes of anthropological inquiry (see Besky 2013; Jegathesan 2019; Stoler 1995), and plantations, arguably, provided the impetus for the mechanized factory production system sometimes referred to as an inflection point of the Anthropocene (Manjapra 2018; Mintz 1986; Wolford 2021). The Plantationocene—the theme of this series of interventions—has only emerged more recently. Coined in a conversation between anthropologists and ecologists in Aarhus, Denmark, the term was deployed as a signature for “devastating transformations of diverse kinds,” sparked by “extractive and enclosed plantations” (Haraway 2015, 162).

The Mutable, the Mythical, and the Managerial in: Environment and Society Volume 6 Issue 1 (2015)

The Anthropocene is rooted in the proposition that human activity has disrupted earth systems to the extent that it has caused us to enter a new geological age. We identify three popular discourses of what the Anthropocene means for humanity's future: the Moral Jeremiad admonishes the transgression of planetary boundaries and advocates reductions to live sustainably within Earth's limits; the Technofix Earth Engineer approach depicts the Age of Humanity as an engineering opportunity to be met with innovative technological solutions to offset negative impacts; and the New Genesis discourse advocates re-enchantment of humanity's connections to earth. By contrast, we find that in many indigenous and premodern narratives and myths disseminated across the North Pacific and East Asia, it is the trickster-demiurge Raven that is most closely linked to environmental change and adaptation. Whereas Raven tales among northern Pacific indigenous communities emphasize a moral ecology of interdependence, creative adaptation, and resilience through practical knowledge (mētis), robustly centralizing Zhou Dynasty elites transposed early Chinese Raven trickster myths with tales lauding the human subjugation of nature. Raven and his fate across the northern Pacific reminds us that narratives of environmental crisis, as opposed to narratives of environmental change, legitimate attempts to invest power and authority in the hands of elites, and justify their commandeering of technological xes in the name of salvation.

What might be more proper Latin or Greek?

For "plantation" (large farm)
Latin lātifundium - Latifundiocene

For "capital" (wealth)
Latin dītiae - Ditiocene
Latin dīvitiae - Divitiocene
Greek ploutos - Plutocene

For "raven"
Latin corvus - Corvocene
Greek korax, korak- - Coracocene

 

[bilby]

Opinion | Scientists Just Gave Humanity an Overdue Reality Check. The World Will Be Better for It. - The New York Times

Geologic epochs are not fleeting moments.

Yes, they are, by definition.

An era is a period of time. The boundaries between eras are points in time, and are called epochs.

Journalists get this wrong all the time. If they stopped making this error, it would be the end of an era (and notably NOT the "end of an epoch" - epochs have zero duration, and therefore, unlike eras, have neither a beginning nor an end).

The Holocene is an era; The decision they are reporting on is a decision not to declare the Anthropocene as a new era, and a major sticking point for doing so is the inability to define a geological epoch that clearly separates the Holocene and Anthropocene eras.

There's only one way to describe the NYT's era error here:

Epoch Fail.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Are We in the ‘Anthropocene,’ the Human Age? Nope, Scientists Say. - The New York Times - "A panel of experts voted down a proposal to officially declare the start of a new interval of geologic time, one defined by humanity’s changes to the planet."

In the end, though, the members of the committee that voted on the Anthropocene over the past month were not only weighing how consequential this period had been for the planet. They also had to consider when, precisely, it began.

Which technology? What point in each technology's adoption?

Still, to qualify for its own entry on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene would have to be defined in a very particular way, one that would meet the needs of geologists and not necessarily those of the anthropologists, artists and others who are already using the term.

Yup--for us to be in it it must have started and the scientists do not yet agree on what the dividing line is. Even if it's obvious that some things are Xs it's not useful unless you have a clear definition of exactly what constitutes an X.