Guest Post by David Middleton
I just love it when the authors of these sorts of articles start out with a series of mistakes…
The Anthropocene: Can Humans Survive A Human Age?
by Adam Frank
About 12,000 years ago (give or take a thousand) the glaciers covering much of the northern hemisphere disappeared and an ice age gripping the Earth ended. The planet became warmer, wetter and entered the geological era scientists call the Holocene. Marked by a stable climate, the Holocene has been good to humans. The entire history of our civilization (agriculture, city building, writing etc.) is bound within the Holocene and its bounty of productive land and oceans.
Now, it appears, the Holocene is over…
[…]
The author, an astrophysicist, must have never taken a course in Quaternary geology.
Mistake #1: “About 12,000 years ago (give or take a thousand) the glaciers covering much of the northern hemisphere disappeared and an ice age gripping the Earth ended.”
The glaciers retreated; but we are still very much in the grip of an ice age that began about 35 million years ago (the x-axes of first four graphs are denominated in millions of years ago (MYA) – Today is to the left)…
The boundary between the Eocene and Oligocene marks the beginning of the Cenozoic ice age. It’s the fourth major ice age of the Phanerozoic Eon…
The Holocene is an interglacial period within an ice age. The only thing that distinguishes the Holocene from previous Pleistocene interglacial episodes is the fact that modern man migrated out of Africa and hunted the megafauna of Europe and North America into extinction…
Yes… I know that there’s not much evidence that our ancestors were capable of causing so much extinction prior to the invention of capitalism – But those megafauna had coped with all of the previous glacial-interglacial cycles just fine, so long as our ancestors stayed in Africa.
At this point in time there is no reason to assume that the Holocene marked the end of the Cenozoic ice age… There’s not even any reason to think that it marked the end of very cold Quaternary Period…
Mistake #2: “Marked by a stable climate, the Holocene has been good to humans.”
The Holocene has been a heck of a lot more stable than the preceding Pleistocene glacial episode (the x-axes of next three graphs are denominated in calendar years – Today is to the right)…
But it has been far from stable…
And it hasn’t always been nice to humans…
The Holocene of the Dark Ages Cold Period and Little Ice Age were quite often very unkind to humans.
Will there one day be a clear geological distinction between the “Anthropocene” and the Holocene and the rest of the Quaternary? I seriously doubt it – But no one will know for hundreds of thousands of years.
Professor Frank started out with a paragraph-full of mistakes; which then formed the basis of his sheer speculation about the Anthropocene’s future relevance in the geologic record.
H/T to Bill Illis for much of the paleoclimate data.
Well this is definitely the new panic meme. I first ran into the concept a couple of months ago. It occurred to me the alternative was interesting. And prayed for by the authors. In that Kevorkian is finally dead, perhaps they can do all of us the favor without assistance.
David Middleton:
You have lined those ducks up… nicely! Thx. GK
David, cheers from one of your Bretheren.
Indeed, here was another anthropocentric professor who needed some pointers…
Hi David,
Being completely igneous about geology, I couldn’t resist leaving my stoopid question of the day. From another source, I’d read that the current Ice Age–punctuated with relatively brief interglacials–started around 5 million years ago. Now you’re saying 35 million. Which is it?
Or is it both? Did the already-existing Ice Age get a lot bigger, badder, and hairier around 5 million years ago, when the two Americas linked up.
There is scant evidence that modern man migrated out of Africa. The best we can say is that a number of hominid species evolved in Africa and eventually populated much of Eurasia prior to the evolution of Homo sapiens. That is it. We don’t know where or when modern man originated or from which precursor species it arose, although there are some good candidates, like “Homo erectus”
There is just WAY too much speculation and supposition passed as fact in this field as well as in climate “science”.
Thanks! But are you sure the last graph is a correct one?
I thought that the MWP was much warmer than now.
I respectfully suggest that the difference between the Anthropocene and the Holocene is that the latter is a recognisable geological period based on empirical data whereas the former is a political construct devised as a means to a political end.
PS. Thanks for the larger print.
RE: http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Neogene-1.png
AGW as a theory needs to explain the paradox of scale. When zoomed in to the last couple of hundred years, linear projections predict future continued warming. However, when zoomed out to millions of years, linear projections predict future continued cooling, which cooling has been happening since about 7 million years ago.
When looking at the cooling over the past 7 million years, it appears that something happened between about 2 million and 1 million years ago, judging from the large increase of variance in temperature anomalies with respect to the variance before then. It is as if the climate of the earth had been rung like a giant bell. What happened between 1 and 2 million years ago that might be associated with this change? I would submit that the formation of the isthmus of Panama may be responsible. Before formation of the isthmus of Panama, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans were connected near the equator. After the formation of the isthmus, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans are only connected at relatively high latitudes. It follows that global ocean circulation would have changed dramatically with the formation of the isthmus of Panama and that this large change in ocean circulation may in turn have influenced global climate patterns.
He talks about how the Holocene has allowed humans to thrive. Why could be not call this a human age if it was so good to us?
It’s the Age of Stupid but not the way they thought it was going to be
This crude mockery of Monty Python is sacrilegious!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcxKIJTb3Hg&w=425&h=349%5D
At some point the ice will reclaim the space most of us currently inhabit – it will happen whether we like it or not. Many of us will die. That time may not be too far into the future. Until then I guess we inbetweeners might as well make the best of it and that doesn’t include being dictated to by CAGW liars… Bring on the dancing girls!
Hopefully there will be an anthropocene. Otherwise the planet will soon (any millenium now) be dropping into another 100,000 year glacial period. So long as we don’t get derailed by warming hysteria, we ought to be able to geo-engineer a way to forstall this looming tragedy. Problem is, the eco-lunatics are already succeeding in collapsing our economy. Still, there is this report from 2030.
David,
I have some massive problems with the Ljungqvist paper.
When you dig into the text you’ll see a host of caveats concering the proxies
used to covered and reconstruct the MWP and the LIA temperatures.
When you get to the citations roughly every third one has a “Team” member
leasing the work, or is listed as a coauthor.
The text indicates that the HadCRUT3 is actually part of the database that’s
been “revised” by Phil Jones, et al., but not acknowledged as having been
“adjusted”.
Splicing what’s called the “modern” instrumental temperature record onto
the reconstructed proxy temperature interpretations is a questionable
statistical technique.
Finally, every third citation in Ljungqvist (2010) involves a well recognized
member of the “Team”. These citations involve unmentioned database
issues. They are relied upon for comparisons of proxy interpretations and
trends.
See:
http://agbjarn.blog.is/users/fa/agbjarn/fines/ljungqvist-temp-reconstruction-2000-years.pdf
So many megafauna,so few people,so many thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of square miles to cover hunting on foot with stone age spears.. think again.
“….In response, it will be through intelligence that we will engineer our way through the Anthropocene to a planet that can handle our ever-growing numbers…..”
Population projections show a peak of about 8 – 9 billion, but only if the CAGW hysteria does not stop the natural and otherwise inevitable rapid economic development worldwide which invariably brings with it a great reduction in fertility rates.
“….Since the Anthropocene appears to mark a sixth great extinction, one has to wonder what it will take for us to make it out of own era with civilization intact….”
Extinction rates have been greatly exaggerated: ‘a new method for calculating the extinction rates of animals produces numbers 83-165 percent lower than using the old habitat loss models” and ‘a third of all mammal species declared extinct in the past few centuries have turned up alive and well’.
http://e360.yale.edu/digest/extinction_rates_exaggerated_according_to_controversial_new_study_/2952/
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/circular-reasoning-and-species-extinction
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1315964/One-extinct-animals-turn-again.html
Forgive me if I’m wrong, I’m no scientist but, aiui, ….
Man migrated out of Africa 50,000 years ago – well before the Holocene.
Also if man devoured all the european megafauna, why didn’t he devour all the African megafauna – that would’ve involved less walking.
Will there one day be a clear geological distinction between the “Anthropocene” and the Holocene and the rest of the Quaternary? I seriously doubt it – But no one will know for hundreds of thousands of years.
Is the human race eternal? Will there be anyone around in n×10E5 years to make the distinction?
But thanks for pointing out a myth writer.
It’s fairly routine for people to refer to the recent glacial advances as ice ages. Calling someone on that is sort of nit-picky.
There’s lots of evidence that modern humans left Africa 50-100 thousand years ago. They co-existed with Neanderthals in Europe up to the latter’s extinction ~30,000 years ago. Aboriginal Aussies were there (in Australia) perhaps as much as 60,000 yrs ago. Modern humans were settled in China 50,000 yrs ago. Humans migrated to North America across the ice bridge at what is now the Bering Straight and probably made it to Central and South America as much as 45,000 yrs ago.
I’ve been introducing the Anthropocene concept for the last few years in my “Astrophysics of Planets” course. It such a deep perspective-shift…
More like a perspective shrinkage: just self centered. Emotional virginity.
The first point to absorb is that there are no politics in the designation. It is neither a value judgment nor a critique.
This article continues with a series of mistakes.
…ever-growing numbers.
And pointless speculations.
Humanity is merely a pin-prick on the surface of our planet. We are outweighed by the mass of the biosphere by many orders of magnitude and are outweighed even by the humble bacteria.
Time the ego-nuts developed a sense of perspective about are true place in the order of things!
Does this mean we have left behind the Ecocene?
That terrible period when those rapacious, resource gobbling Plants stripped the atmosphere of an essential fuel, CO2, and with NOT A THOUGHT…… NOT A THOUGHT I tell you, for recycling, these incredibly reckless little devils simply buried it under the ground.
Only a few PPM from starvation, they passed “Peak CO2” ages ago.
I bet at the banner waving, Eco protests of the plant world, they are cheering and praying for the Anthropocene.
Isn’t it the grasses that dominate the planet?
@sleepalot: LOL yes, and even now with modern rifles and vastly higher numbers man has STILL not managed to devour the African megafauna… so what on earth was wrong with these pathetic European and North American megafauna? No survival fitness? Or was the devourer not the same african man who migrated north? Strange how common sense logic gets in the way of science… (sarc or not? Who knows?)