Golden spike definition12/7/2023 ![]() ![]() The scientists at the heart of the controversy were cleared of wrongdoing, but the whole affair helped seed doubt and slow our transition away from fossil fuels. Bad faith actors seized on perceived issues in the emails and used them to claim anthropogenic climate change was fabricated. Consider Climategate, the 2009 incident in which an attacker stole emails from a key climate research centre in the United Kingdom. One issue with such tensions is what happens when they hit the media. If the Anthropocene group were to shift tack and label the start of the epoch a multi-century event (a “long Anthropocene”), we’d still benefit from having labels for periods such as our current one where the human impact ramped-up significantly. Longer term, a compromise may well be reached. Ellis clearly believes the Anthropocene group has gone from debate to group think, which, if true, would challenge the free exchange at the heart of science.Ī Canadian lake holds the key to the beginning of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch He’s not alone – other group members and experts have also worked to refute the epoch idea.Īs philosopher of science Karl Popper and others have argued, productive scientific debate can only occur if there’s space for dissent and alternative perspectives. Scientists have been debating in recent years over whether the Anthropocene should be deemed an “epoch” with a specific start date, or else an historically extended “event” caused by different human practices in different places, such as early agriculture, European colonisation and the spread of European and North American capitalism worldwide.Įllis’ resignation stems from this debate. ![]() 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. ![]() 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. ![]()
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