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.
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?”
Also movement of large amounts of rocks from one area to another. Our concrete momuments to arrogance and excess, even when theyre rubble, will be hard to explain without the human element.
> 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
Our current impacts are significantly different from what they were four hundred years ago. They will probably be even more different in another few centuries. Assuming we do not wipe ourselves out, our eventual impact will be very different from our current impact. Maybe we will even reverse many things, and a millennium is just a blip in geological time.
In any case, the Holocene is defined by human impacts on the environment, so really Anthropocene is more of an alternative name for the Holocene than a separate epoch: https://www.britannica.com/science/Holocene-Epoch
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.
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.
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!
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.
The political implications may be the strongest argument against it. Science should strive for neutrality, to present facts without getting tangled up in politics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> That’s like saying spheres aren't real because no perfect sphere exists.
This analogy is deeply flawed. For spheres, we at least have some kind of mathematical model for what a sphere would be. For a “neutral point of view”, we don’t even have a good intuitive model for what that would look like, at least, not one that withstands a little bit of scrutiny.
There are simply opinions that are not worth the time to summarize or compare. I am not going to give my attention to a journalist who takes a serious look at holocaust denial conspiracies and tries to write about "both sides" of the equation in a neutral way.
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.
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.
Most papers in climate change are not theoretical model heavy. They are empirical / methodology papers. If a graduate level Physics or Chemistry training does not equip one to read and understand what those papers are saying, then there is something seriously wrong with that graduate program or the person.
On the other hand, it is indeed hard for many scientists who do climate change work to understand or critique theoretical physics papers, which are mostly abstract algebra or topology papers these days.
I like to read IPCC tech section and papers referenced there and these are not, barring a few exceptions, hard to read.
To claim Nobel laureates in physics or chemistry cannot opine on these is absurd level of gatekeeping.
The statement made was not that John Clauser cannot express an opinion.
The opinion offered was that John Clauser's 60 odd years of work in Quantum mechanics don't magically make him authoritive or even well versed in the practicalities of cloud cover.
Appeal to authority is a fallacy. There is no authority in Science. Anyone can critique a paper. Content of the criticism is what matters, not the degree that the critic holds.
It is unfortunate that Science communication to "retail customer" too often appeals to authority. It is also unavoidable result of big business getting involved. Climate change is a lucrative billion dollar business now, where money mostly comes from governments and that attracts charlatans like fleas to manure.
It isn't a fallacy in the sense that it's useless. Appeal to authority and the closely-related ad hominem are useful arguments in practice, something like a heuristic.
It's true that an expert is more likely to give correct information than a non-expert, though it's not sufficient to prove or disprove the claims of either. In practice, you don't have time to give every claim from any source the same level of treatment, so you're probably going to "appeal to authority" when deciding whether to listen to your doctor or your aunt that's into woo.
Anyone can critique a paper but it is most definitely not the case that every critique carries the same impact. Peer review isn't done by randos for a reason.
Ok, now that's out of the way that leaves his only real public "critiques", such as they are, his interview with the Epoch Times, and his podcast with sacked SkyNews Australia journalist Chris Smith.
These are dealt with elsewhere at length and frankly riddled with demonstrably false claims by Clauser; he asserts that recent IPCC reports don't deal with clouds when they have chapters on them, he asserts models don't allow for cloud reflectivity when they in fact do, etc.
These are, embarrassingly, just long rambling examples of once distinguished old man yelling at clouds (literally) and proving only that has not read (or perhaps read and forgotten) the very source material he claims to debunk.
I believe (and by all means offer your thoughts) that the most generous interpretation here is that Clauser was riffing off of Richard Lindzen's 20+ year old thoroughly debunked Iris hypothesis that he (Clauser) hadn't really bothered to follow up on given it was all outside his ken.
I'm sure you're familiar with people that just mouth off objections to climate related science that they've half heard about but have never really looked at in detail . . .
We've all heard them .. some just have Nobel prizes for unrelated work.
> 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.