It is a welcome report, but I see criticisms being mounted rather easily. Keying the evidence of climate change primarily to receding or disappearing glaciers is visually effective but presents only one piece of evidence in a complex case. Arguing the point that it will be cheaper to deal with the problem now rather than to wait opens the report to two lines of attack. First, there is no way to be sure that our successors will not find better, cheaper ways of dealing with the problem; indeed, it is likely that they will. Second, economists will apply discount rate analysis and question whether spending a dollar now is the best use of that money.
However, the report is far from being the first use of the term "Anthropocene" epoch, era, or age. Crutzen himself used it in the 1990s in scientific presentations and in a 2002 paper. Fr. Antonio Stoppani had written of the "anthropozoic era" in 1873, and Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky had written in 1926 of life as a force of geological strength that shapes the biosphere. Among the Americans who picked up the idea from Fr. Stoppani was George Perkins Marsh, whose 1874
The Earth as Modified by Human Action would likely have had greater influence in science had the World Wars not intervened. In other words, there was considerable scientific understanding that human actions were changing the systems that sustain life on earth and that this change had begun in the early 1800s.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences 2011
The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives by Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen and John McNeill.
I believe this is a report that could have greater impact had it used a different argument based upon a much wider array of evidence. Every little bit helps, however, in the effort to overcome the obfuscation and lying of the deniers of climate change.
Login
Register
FAQ
