![]() ![]() University of Exeter, CC BY Why we should welcome honest disagreement in science ![]() This image shows what’s left of a village. ![]() Villages and towns dotted many parts of the Amazon before colonisation. With the people gone, the trees regrew during the 17th century and covered the villages and cities, expanding the Amazon rainforest. How? By killing millions of indigenous people and destroying local empires. The central issue, in his view, is that there’s powerful evidence of much earlier global-scale impacts caused by pre- and proto-capitalist societies.įor instance, as Earth systems experts Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin have shown, the violent Portuguese and Spanish colonisation of Central and South America indirectly lowered atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. It’s not that Ellis thinks the way we live is problem-free. The AWG’s choice to systematically ignore overwhelming evidence of Earth’s long-term anthropogenic transformation is not just bad science, it’s bad for public understanding and action on global change. It’s possible to avoid the reality that narrowly defining the Anthropocene has become more than a scholarly concern. That’s why Ellis’s departure is so interesting. ![]() Since most people aren’t scientists, we rely on the scientific community to hash out debate and present the best explanations for the data. Would the public embrace the idea that our actions are making the world almost wholly unnatural? The answer, of course, depends on the quality of the science. That, in turn, makes it better at laying down sediment. The disagreement speaks to something vital to science – the ability to accommodate dissent through debate.Ĭanada’s Lake Crawford was chosen because it’s a rare meromictic lake, meaning different layers of water don’t intermix. This phenomenon has been dubbed the Great Acceleration. The other working group scientists argue 1950 is well chosen, as it’s when humans started to really make their presence felt through surging populations, fossil fuel use and deforestation, amongst other things. In short, Ellis believes pinning the start of our sizeable impact on the planet to 1950 is an error, given we’ve been changing the face of the planet for much longer. For this group, that date is around 1950.īut what didn’t get reported was the resignation of a key member, global ecosystem expert Professor Erle Ellis, who left the working group and published an open letter about his concerns. Core samples from the lake give us an unusually good record of geological change, including, some scientists believe, the moment we began to change everything. It took 14 years of scouring the world before the geoscientists in the Anthropocene Working Group chose Lake Crawford – the still, deep waters of which are exceptionally good at preserving history in the form of sediment layers. The Anthropocene is the proposed new geological epoch defined by humanity’s impact on the planet. We humans are now a geological power in our own right - as Earth-changing as a meteorite strike.It made world news last week when a small lake in Canada was chosen as the “ Golden Spike” – the location where the emergence of the Anthropocene is most clear. The Anthropocene probably began when species jumped continents, starting when the Old World met the New. Today we can say when those changes began and why. "They will be in no doubt that these global changes to Earth were caused by their own species. "In a hundred thousand years scientists will look at the environmental record and know something remarkable happened in the second half of the second millennium," Lewis said in a statement about the research, which was published in the journal Nature. The researchers decided to name the carbon dioxide dip the "Orbis Spike," using the Latin word for "world," because it marks the first time planet inhabitants intermingled so dramatically.Īn official decision about the Anthropocene Epoch and the proposal to set it at 1610 is expected from the Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy in 2016. "The growth of all those trees had sucked enough carbon dioxide out of the sky to cause a drop of at least seven parts per million in atmospheric concentrations of the most prominent greenhouse gas and start a little ice age," says a report in Scientific American. The chart includes the introduction of smallpox, measles and typhus to the New World. This chart shows the intercontinental swapping that began in 1492 and was fully felt in 1610, according to researchers. ![]()
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