The Anthropocene: Has human impact changed Earth forever?

Despite our early existence compared to Earth’s age (humans have only been around for 200.000 years, whereas the planet emerged 4.6 billion years ago), the mark we are leaving on our world is already pretty obvious.

We’ve started by chopping down trees in order to clear the land for agriculture. Then we’ve settled permanently and created the first civilisations, that is to say, the first cities. We have also managed to develop complex technologies and learned how to use external sources of energy, including fossil fuels, with consequences we would soon find out.

And it was over the last two centuries — which cover the Industrial Revolution (18th century) and “The Great Acceleration” onset around the 1950’s — that the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable.

Humanity has brought about such a planetary change that Paul Crutzen, a Dutch Nobel laureate chemist, could no longer agree that he was living in the Holocene — the current geological epoch which began around 10.000 years ago. So back in 2000, he and a colleague, Eugene Stoermer, decided to coin what they considered to be the new geological epoch we were entering as the Anthropocene — the age of man.

Read the Medium story- “The Anthropocene: Has human impact changed Earth forever?”

Fooling some of the people all of the time

Greg Fishel is a fellow meteorologist who works on air in Raleigh, NC, and like me he is not afraid to tell the truth about climate science, in spite of the fact that some his viewers think it’s all a hoax. Like all of us, he often gets messages via email/social media purporting to show that he and every major science organization on Earth is wrong, and he had one just last week.

It turns out that this is a perfect example of how to fool some of the people all of the time, especially if their preconceived beliefs make them want it to be true. Science denial in all of its forms relies heavily on confirmation bias, and cherry picking to inspire doubt. This is true of vaccines, evolution, the Earth’s age, and especially climate change.

Read the American Geophysical Union blog by Dan Satterfield - “You Can Fool Some of The People All of The Time.”