[CoreSet]

As an addendum, the author, Peter Brannen, published another article with The Atlantic titled "What Made Me Reconsider the Anthropocene" four days ago.

In it, he responds to criticism and ultimately comes to the conclusion that - even if no trace of humanity is left (no civilization, tools, etc) in "deep time" - the biosphere itself has been changed by humanity, and that gives the concept of the Anthroprocene validity.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/10/anthropo...

[FooHentai]

I think this should be front-and-center rather than an addendum point - Can't help but question the good faith of an author putting this article up while only recently having published one that appears to take an opposite view. Frankly, smells like click bait dressed up as high-brow op-ed.

I was going to post a comment in response to some of the points in the article, but upon seeing that the other article existed... what's the point?

[nostrademons]

I read both and think that the second supports the point made in the first.

The point of the anthropocene, as presented in the second article, is to acknowledge the effect humans have already had on the earth. The point of the first is to acknowledge how little an effect that is, relative to other events in geologic time. The events described in that article still stand - global temperature differences of 8C over a few tens of thousands of years, sea levels 400 feet lower (and that was a blink of an eye ago in geologic time), a 90M year long ice age.

[acqq]

> The point of the first is to acknowledge how little an effect that is, relative to other events in geologic time.

And speaking only about that geologic time is deceptive, without mentioning context: for the biggest part of the whole geologic time, not even multi-cellular life existed. Half of the whole geologic time, nothing was able to depend on oxygen as the modern life does -- there wasn't much of it in the atmosphere.

The time human civilizations existed is microscopic in comparison to these spans, but that much shorter time is what defines us.

And in that time, the climate was indeed quite stable. Until the last hundred or two years.

And humans did make immense impact on the life forms, and will continue to make.

[nostrademons]

I thought that was actually the point of the article. The author freely admits that from a human perspective, climate change and habitat destruction and the bleaching of coral reefs are a big deal. The point he's making is that from a planetary perspective, humans are insignificant. Indeed, from a planetary perspective multi-cellular life is insignificant, and life at all is a minority.

The thing is that much of the debate over global warming has been framed in planetary terms. If you frame it in human terms, you already have a good argument: climate change will cause mass migrations, historically mass migrations have caused massive wars and the collapse of civilizations, I don't want to die in a war while my whole civilization collapses, ergo it's probably a good idea to solve or at least adapt to this climate change thing before shit hits the fan. But if you frame it in terms of "climate change will make the earth uninhabitable" or even "climate change will lead to the extinction of humanity", a.) you're probably wrong - our species is remarkably resilient, and we have lived through large planetary-scale shifts in the earth's climate b.) the earth has been made uninhabitable to much of life in the past, and yet we're here and c.) so what, we'll all be dead.

[AstralStorm]

From planetary perspective, multicellular life was and is huge. Oxygen catastrophe is not called that because it was invisible from space. Nor are ok deposits geologically insignificant.

It is big timeframe though compared to anthropocene.

The warming is indeed planetary, but not the magnitude of the earlier atmospheric changes. The crust changes are more visible for now, especially mining. The temperature will be pretty important at about +1 C out more globally - not quite yet. At that level moisture circulation would get affected a lot...

[cavanasm]

It's a little backwards. The top level article is the original. The grandparent linked article is the author's response from last week indicating responses to the top level article made him re-think and feel he was wrong.

[FooHentai]

Ah, thank you. I mistakenly believed this one was new given it being posted.

[Sandman]

Cool, I didn't know about that one! I'm going to check it out, thanks for the link!