Myths about the Anthropocene

Myths about the Anthropocene
smithsonianmag.com

Geologists reject declaration of Anthropocene epoch

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/22/geologists-r...

This article is a response that can be summed up as "no, we're changing the environment faster than anything before, so it counts". It's framed not as a genuine debate, but as an attempt to dispel "myths".

"Why this matters" is left as an exercise for the reader...

How many common assumptions about the Holocene are already broken?

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With much less at stake, I think it was out of touch and impractical to choose scientific terminology at odds with existing common language, when "dwarf planet" was defined as not a subcategory of "planet".

It defies common usage, and also common language forms. Prefixed nouns usually refer to subcategories, not excluded categories.

What science fiction story is going to carefully distinguish "dwarf planets" as being a completely separate category from "planets" because one didn't completely clear its orbit of debris?

A better (equivalent, and just as useful) nomenclature would have left the common definition of "planet" alone: i.e. a body circling a star, too small to be a star or brown dwarf (no continuous or aborted fusion), but large enough to form a near sphere based on its own gravitational field.

THEN, subdivide "planets" into "major planets" and "minor planets". We have 8 major planets, and it turns out, many many dwarf planets.

Pluto is a "planet", specifically a "dwarf planet". Earth and Jupiter are "planets", specifically "major planets".

"Rogue planets" are "planets" that left their systems. Some were originally major, some dwarf. "Protoplanets" are new "planets" actively accumulating mass by clearing their orbital field. They may stabilize as "major" or "dwarf" planets.

The new exlusionary definition of "planet" also opens the doors to inevitable conundrums:

Some day a huge planetary type body will be discovered in the outreaches of a solar system where it has not cleared its area of debris. So not a "planet"?

Some day a small planetary body with a cleared orbital field will be found between the orbits of larger planetary bodies that haven't cleared their fields. So it is a planet, but the larger bodies surrounding it are not?

But the boundaries of other epochs are also only estimated and didn't unfold completely overnight, not even for the K-Pg impactor, probably the most sudden change in the geological record. It still took thousands of years for the consequences to shake out into a steadier state.

If we were studying the current transition hundreds of thousands or millions of years from now starting with zero knowledge, the disappearance of megafauna (ongoing and has been for tens of thousands of years), the large scale transformation of forests to grassland, the invasion of species to every corner of the earth, the mass extinction most severely in the tropics and oceans, the appearance of so much carbon, plastic, and other pollution in the geologic record, and the disappearance of glaciers (tens of thousands of years to go there, even in worst case scenarios) would appear virtually instantaneous. There'd be error bounds on it but eventually no disagreement that the Earth took a corner.

So the argument starts to sound a bit like denial. But that's OK. We've been through lots of denial around whether extinction happens, if mass extinction happens, if the K-Pg impact happened, if it caused a mass extinction, or whether continents move around. All settled now.