I laid out because of the dental work, but I’ll tell you, I had a moment in the garden that machine pretty well paid for itself. One of those nasty things that happens to you as you get older is that where YOU think you’ve lifted your feet to is not where you’ve REALLY lifted your feet to…meaning you can misstep or trip much more easily, particularly if you’re out of shape.
Well, there’s this rock—must be somebody’s escaped pet rock, because it almost daily turns up on the garden path, and this time it was complicated by a looped back garden hose and a prone but branchless extracted oak sapling we decided to replace with a dogwood.
I hit the damn rock, lost my balance, and as you may recall, our garden paths have basalt chunks as edges, so if you’ve run out of gravel walkway, you have to step over that and hope not to put your foot in a hole under the juniper branches…I lost my balance and did a zig-zag dance over obstacles vaguely like NFL trainees over a course of tires. Unscathed.
Exercise may cause pain—but it can save you from it. Couldn’t have done that a week ago, and those basalt chunks are sharp, nasty things to hit on landing. I am happily continuing on the exercise thingie.
Geologists are recommending that we declare the start of the Anthropocene epoch.
“Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropocene-epoch-experts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth
Mankind has been doing major things to the environment since it discovered fire and axes, viz the vanished forests and species of Europe and China, but it’s worked in tandem with profound climate change. There is a theory that more than Toba (volcano in, I think, Indonesia, which is alleged to have bottlenecked the genetic makeup of humankind)—have altered the climate one way and another during human history, perhaps accounting for various barbarian surges into urban civilizations. Whenever the grass failed in the Tarim Basin (near Himalayas) throughout ancient history, the barbarians started a shoving match that would push the weakest and most westerly into urban empires…and there is some correlation with ice cores. One went off at a time that might have brought Rome down. There’s a profound interaction of our environment with us as well as what comes from us, so all our figures on what the environment’s going to do cannot possibly factor in what tends to go on constantly…but highly unpredictably. One supervolcano can outdo everything we’ve done to ourselves. But then—it might also ‘fix’ things. I think we AMOUNT to a supervolcano, but Earth has a number of mechanisms that can come into play, and in any given year, one of the natural ones could shift things massively.
What would we consider the beginning of mankind’s significant impact on the world? Tool usage? First regular use of fire? Transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian? Even if you go back to man’s first primitive stone choppers (a couple million years back) that’s barely a sneeze, geologically speaking. Although it had profound implications for humanity, I would opine we needed to be further along the tech tree before we could say we altered our environment.
Well, it’s a more prolonged sneeze than used to be believed. They’re finding stuff dating back well more than 40,000 years, more like 200,000 for things we used to believe were 40,000 and later. But as far as impact, it was more climate on us—climate and volcanoes, driving us north, then east. We didn’t go urban until about 10,000, at Jericho, but that’s the site we’ve found, and it’s pretty well developed, indicating we haven’t found everything. Canals were the first big alteration in nature (Sumer, Egypt). Water management was the big deal all the way up to Rome…the Greeks lucked out in terms of natural springs, many, many such. But elsewhere, water was the deal, water and making it move. [Minoans had sewers, but failed to pass them on, so far as we know.]
The nasty habit of slash-and-burn agriculture tended to happen northward, clear-cutting of forests, distrust of forests as harboring bad things. Urbanization thrived in near deserts, then on river-banks or on the sea, and they were fairly ecologically reasonable, except they never had a sewage treatment concept, and let rivers become polluted.
But all the while, the ice up north which had begun a major melt 13,000 years ago just kept melting, a process which, yes, the decision to burn the accumulated aeons of carboniferous (coal/petroleum) forests all in a hundred or so years has lit a burner under what remains. Do I believe the world is warming and we had a hand in it? Sure. Do I also believe that we did it all and that the ice was not melting before we invented the steam engine? No, because if it weren’t, we’d all be wearing furs and Europe would freeze over. It used to. It doesn’t now.
Can we have another mini ice age? Or a big one? Sure can. There are triggers we can trip…the thermohaline conveyor is theorized to be one. A supervolcano can do it without our help. The ice melting off old Katla up in Iceland could wake her up, and she’s a messy, sulfurous lady as I generally recall, which affects the atmosphere.
My point being, we didn’t start it, we didn’t cause it, we’ve made it significantly worse, but tech is now what we need to understand how to cope with it, particularly since we have not yet met all the planet’s coping mechanisms, ie, how it reacts when heating gets out of control.
IMO, we did cause the Anthropocene Epoch, by definition.
As to jumping on that slippery slope, axes and fire, canals and water management are big, but weren’t a problem until Farming, i.e. the domestication of plants improving reliability in our diet and enabling/requiring more reproduction by us.
That natural catastrophies have been causing extinction events, q.v. Younger Dryas, (12,900 to 11,700 YBP) and Older Dryas (27-24,000 YBP), is certainly both true and not out of the picture yet. What some think debatable is whether the Anthropocene Epoch can have a similar effect, and/or whether it can exacerbate the natural effects. Scientists think that decided, of course.
This year has seemed very hot, yet cooler overall here than last year, and the official temps versus forecasts, various for both, differ. The upshot being, in July and August here, we went above 100 again for several days, not always consecutively like one or two summers ago, but there, and we have been above 85 at night many times also. And that is really not comfortable without air conditioning. (I can’t afford to replace my AC compressor.)
However, some nights have been cooler, and around mid-August, the night time temps have gone down to the low 80’s or upper 70’s, which really helps a lot.
Global warming pushed higher by man-made causes? Oh, yeah, absolutely. By natural causes too? Yes, I think so. How to solve it? Oh, I’monly one person, and no one much listens to me and I have little personal effect. I do put in as much as I can for recycling, rather than trash. I try to do my part, but I am not perfect. I have between 20 and 50 more years on the planet, best chances, so the idea of even hotter temps, five or ten more degrees during my lifetime? Eek. I guess we’ll find out what happens.
When I got curious and looked to see if local temps really were pushing records as much as I thought, I was surprised by overall national / world data showing such an increase. My local temps are rising along with the national and global rates.
But what got me were the warnings about sea level rise, due to glacial melting at the poles. Oh, wow. They’re now saying 400 feet might be more like it, rather than only 100 feet, and that’s apparently the conservative side of it. This means, according to articles I saw, that many coastal and low-lying aress and islands, including a great many major cities and historically / culturally quite significant sites, could end up submerged, lost to us, within the next hundred years or so. Uh, that could likely include my city. Yikes.
That doesn’t mean a “water world” or “raft / boat culture,” necessarily, but it does mean that millions of people could be displaced (or drowned) and the folks displaced would have to be absorbed by their own inland countries, or else they’d be refugees without a country, taken in by other countries. That would mean a significant mixing of the world cultural blend, even though they’d tend to settle near their now-flooded former nations / islands / cities. (For example, people along the US Gulf Coast have things like Texan versus Cajun/Creole/Louisianan and Anglo versus Hispanic and Black backgrounds, with some other variants thrown in, such as various Asian groups that moved to the Gulf Coast as refugees.) So everyone gets a little blending of cultural makeup if people have to resettle. That can be a good thing, long-term, but short-term, it creates a lot of pressure on the local native population and the incoming refugees, to get along and find a new way to live.
Changes like that, loss of major cities, rebuilding and moving over years and decades, or over a single summer or winter storm, say, could have really prfound effects, economically, culturally, politically, religious-wise, all of it. What about farming and fresh water? What about desertification? What about areas that might (hurray) transform from deserts to grasslands or forests, jungles or wetlands? So in other words, there are major effects possible and yet some can be very positive, not all will be negative. It’s a lot of change, though, for the people going through it.
Er, and thanks to extra hot weather and lack of air conditioning? I now think it wasn’t just a more relaxed attitude about the human body. I think it was the very practical matter of keeping cool enough in hot weather. So all those ancient (or recent) people running around wearing little or nothing? You try sweating day and night and see how fast you decide shorts and not much else are a really good idea, at least at home. Or maybe less. Heheh. That, too, is a cultural attitudinal and religisou change possible. Submitted for your amusement, and yet, really, I suspect it was simple practicality. If it’s that hot out, most people have to stay as cool as possible.
Somehow, when Bob Dylan said, “You don’t need a Weatherman to see which way the wind blows,” I’m sure he wasn’t talking about that, though. 😉
Uhhmmm… I thought you said sewing machine. I thought to myself, “Isn’t that Jane’s”?
I saw swinging machine and my brain parsed it as sewing machine myself. clearly it needs another million or so years of beta testing
The invention of agriculture certainly is the beginning of human reshaping of the world but for thousands of years it was localized reshaping. And, yes, I would agree with CJ, that it generally was related to the quest for or control of water resources. Hundreds of years, if not millennia, of field irrigation drawn from the Tigris and Euprates rivers left salt deposits behind in the irrigated fields that negate their fertility today. But that is basically a local, human impact. I think for local actions which have a worldwide impact (much the same as CJ’s excellent, local volcano example with worldwide atmospheric impact), you do indeed have to wait until “modern” times. In addition to the seductive nature of petrochemicals, one has to point the finger population—at the immense multitude of humans. And, our current extreme population levels all trace back to the adoption of agriculture as a preferred lifestyle.
An aside on Slash & Burn Agriculture, or “Shifting Horticulture” as it seems to be anthropologically called today. Used at the traditional, low population levels, this style of clearing/planting/harvesting does not tax the densely forested landscape in which it takes place. The burnt over clearing is used for 10 or so years max (often much less) and then abandoned to the forest again. Some 20+ years later, the forest has renewed itself enough that another cycle of Slash & Burn can take place without environmental degradation. However, the long “resting”, fallow period is essential… And only works with very light population levels and a large area of forest.
You don’t really need water management until you’re farming. Some places, e.g. the banks of the Nile, didn’t even as farmers–they needed geo-metry. 😉 There are villages in Africa where women walk 5-10miles to collect houshold water daily. They’re herdsmen.
Indeed, water as a key resource (beyond just drinking) to be managed basically occurs with farming. Hunters & Gatherers (I.e. Those who forage for food) are /were basically nomadic. Herdsmen, or pastoralists, only came into being as a lifestyle after farming. I suppose one could add in fish farmers as needing to manage water resources too… But they also date post the rise of farming too.
Hunter-gatherers might well have extincted easily hunted species, like the mammoths and, in North America, horses. This could have secondary (etc.) effects. For example, the huge seed of avocados co-evolved with some mega-fauna; avocados were saved by human cultivation, so at that early point we were picking winners and losers.
It occurs to me (entirely non-authoritatively) that slash-and-burn might have been a comfortable step from hunter-gatherer: you would still move frequently. You pick losers in what you burn and winners in the seeds, and animals, you carry from site to site. Again, that has further effects.
Probably, additional effects occurred due to where farms and then cities formed. Swamps and tundra and the species in them weren’t going to be heavily affected, but nice fertile earth by clean water–the species there, plant and animal, were going to get uninvited guests.
We’ve greatly narrowed the number of significant species. If you look at an average restaurant menu, you’ve got chickens, cattle, corn, wheat, and potatoes making up the bulk of the offerings–tempting to add sugar, but it’s probably corn syrup.
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Coal was mined at least as far back as 3500 BC in China and by the Greeks, Romans, and Aztecs. It holds a lot more energy than wood, which makes it more portable. (It would be interesting to know if the Romans used fly ash, coal ash, as they used volcanic ash to make very high quality concrete.) However, with applications limited to heating (including kilns and metal-working furnaces), it’s not clear to me the effect was significant.
“Coal was so abundant in Britain that the supply could be stepped up to meet the rapidly rising demand. In 1700 the annual output of coal was just under 3 million tons. Between 1770 and 1780 the annual output of coal was some 6¼ million long tons (or about the output of a week and a half in the 20th century). After 1790 output soared, reaching 16 million long tons by 1815 at the height of the Napoleonic War. By 1830 this had risen to over 30 million tons.”–Wikipedia, History of coal mining
Also, in the Napoleonic War, England was largely deforested to build tall ships, at least of oak and other desirable construction woods.
The tipping point, I think, came when coal power was used to mine more coal: de-watering pumps, air pumps, railroads. Then coal power started to replace wind, water, and animal power for mills, factories, ships. This provided a model for the use of petroleum.
The rise of modern science allowed cities to stay healthy at large sizes, though it took some time for the ideas to get through our thick primate skulls.
For example, the huge seed of avocados co-evolved with some mega-fauna; avocados were saved by human cultivation, so at that early point we were picking winners and losers.
That would be more plausible if there was a thick shell on the seeds. (Avocado seeds actually sprout quite easily.) There might be birds or mammals (other than humans) who like to eat the fleshy part, which would make it even easier, but the seeds don’t need to be eaten, unlike those of other animal-dependent plants.
Agreed. The bulk of an avocado seed is endosperm, as evidenced by the fact that it splits in halves, being a dicot.
Endosperm is a tissue produced inside the seeds of most of the flowering plants around the time of fertilization. It surrounds the embryo and provides nutrition in the form of starch, though it can also contain oils and protein. This can make endosperm a source of nutrition in human diet. For example, wheat endosperm is ground into flour for bread (the rest of the grain is included as well in whole wheat flour), while barley endosperm is the main source for beer production. Other examples of endosperm that forms the bulk of the edible portion are coconut “meat” and coconut “water”, and corn. Some plants, like the orchid, lack endosperm in their seeds. Wikipedia
The question is, how do the avocado seeds spread far enough to escape the canopy of the parent tree? If that parent is in a depression, the species can’t escape.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avocado#Coevolution
Avocados have been domesticated long enough that the lack of a thick shell could be human-induced. It’s much easier sticking the toothpicks in with a soft seed.
The avocado trees I’ve been close to – my grandparents had one that was big enough to climb ten feet
up, more than 50 years ago – tend actually to be on little mounds, and they’re about 20 or 30 feet across. I don’t know how common they are in the wild, but I’d guess that the fruit will roll if there’s enough slope. If critters eat them they’d probably be monkeys or sloths that can carry them a distance; dogs and even some cats will eat the flesh.
They’ll sprout if you put them base down on the surface of a pot of soil, no toothpicks needed. (We never put them all the way into the water, but they grew fine anyway.)
I think the point is that there will be a distinct change in the geological record, starting about the mid 20th century. This will come from radioactive particles the world from nuclear bomb tests, plastic waste, concrete, ash from fossil fuels, global warming and higher sea levels, a dramatic increase in erosion, extinction of species and the spread of other species such as chickens.
From the statement to the International Geological Congress:
The Anthropocene concept, as articulated by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000, is geologically real. The phenomenon is of sufficient scale to be considered as part of the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, more commonly known as the Geological Time Scale.
• Majority AWG opinion is for assignation as an Epoch/Series. This option is preferred over either a lower rank (e.g. Age/Stage, i.e. as a subdivision of the Holocene) or a higher rank such as a Period or Era. In such a step, and in common with all other geological time units, the Anthropocene would comprise both a ‘pure time’ unit (an Anthropocene Epoch) and an equivalent unit of strata (an Anthropocene Series).
If the Anthropocene is adopted as an Epoch, this would mean that the Holocene has terminated, but that we remain within the Quaternary Period and Cenozoic Era.
• Human impact has left discernible traces on the stratigraphic record for thousands of years — indeed, since before the beginning of the Holocene. However, substantial and approximately globally synchronous changes to the Earth System most clearly intensified in the ‘Great Acceleration of the mid-20th century. The mid-20th century also coincides with the clearest and most distinctive array of signals imprinted upon recently deposited strata.
• Hence, the mid-20th century represents the optimal beginning of a potential Anthropocene Epoch (and, simultaneously, the base of the Anthropocene Series).
• Changes to the Earth System that characterize the potential Anthropocene Epoch include marked acceleration to rates of erosion and sedimentation, large-scale chemical perturbations to the cycles of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and other elements, the inception of significant change to global climate and sea level, and biotic changes such as unprecedented levels of species invasions across the Earth. Many of these changes are geologically long-lasting, and some are effectively irreversible.
• These and related processes have left an array of signals in recent strata, including plastic, aluminium and concrete particles, artificial radionuclides, changes to carbon and nitrogen isotope patterns, fly ash particles, and a variety of fossilizable biological remains. Many of these signals will leave a permanent record in the Earth’s strata.
• The Anthropocene beginning might conceivably be defined by a Global Standard Stratigraphic Age (GSSA), i.e. a numerical age that can be expressed as a calendar date such as 1945. Or more, conventionally it could be defined by a Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), which is more colloquially a ‘golden spike’, and is a physical reference point in strata at one carefully selected place. Majority opinion on the AWG is to seek and choose a candidate GSSP, as this is the most familiar and widely accepted method of defining geological time units.
• The AWG has already begun the process of identification of potential GSSPs, by initial analysis of the general environments in which the best combinations of stratigraphic signals may be found (e.g. undisturbed lake or marine sediments, annually banded coral skeletons, polar snow/ice layers, speleothems and so on).
• This will lead to selection of sites for sampling and further analysis, to provide full descriptions of relevant signals in the strata, a process that we hope will lead to the identification of one or more suitable candidate sites for a GSSP. We would hope to complete this process over the next 2-3 years.
• This would then form the basis for the preparation of a formal proposal, to our immediate parent body, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), on defining a formal Anthropocene unit. If the SQS recommends this by supermajority vote, the proposal will go on to its parent body, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) to be voted on, with any vote in favour still needing to be ratified by the Executive Committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS).
• If all of these conditions can be fulfilled, then the Anthropocene would become a formal part of the Geological Time Scale.
I have no doubt humans have helped cause climate change, but I don’t think agriculture was the only big game changer. The natives in north America used to use fire to clear forest underbrush and to burn the grasslands in order to make hunting easier. Massive fires would be a big problem of course, but controlled burns kept the woods clear and easier to hunt while helping prevent massive killing fires. It also helped stimulate new growth and formed the prairies to support larger herds. I would be surprised if other grass land cultures didn’t also use controlled fires to help manage their world.
Australian aborigines do as well, as much as the white-fella lets them.
The Parks service is now working with the traditional owners to do the controlled burns.
I count various Native American groups’ (I don’t know the Australian Aboriginal) use of controlled fire as “localized” change of the environment. I was arguing above for farming (and the resultant growth of villages > cities) as criteria before wider scale environmental change by humans came about. I will concede, though, that the hypothesized killing of North American mega-fauna by Paleo-Indians would be a counter example if proven more.
How do we know that Ariane Emory did not create our Earth?
I think you just made my day, lol! (Cyteen has been my go-to listen during several recent medical procedures.) I don’t think Ari 1 could *create* Earth, but she might certainly have a hand in re-forming it. Ari II, on the other hand . . .
There’s a theory going around that a comet or meteor made a near impact or atmospheric impact with Earth after the first groups of Paleo-Americans were established, and that this left selenium and other rare mineral traces across North America, and diverted the glacial patterns and rivers, so that it wiped out both a widespread early Paleo-American culture and may have been the major contributor to the extinction of North American mega-fauna at the time, along with human hunting pressure. I believe the documentary also discussed micro-diamond or micro-glass beads (carbon and silicon) as a result of the impact along with the selenium boundary layer. This was in a TV documentary sometime after 2000, maybe after 2010, from one of the major cable channels.
However, they also did not dispute the idea that humans have had major impacts on the environment since Ice Age times.
A couple of days ago, I’d posted in the thread, but either the filter ate it or it seemed too “out there,” on what I’ve seen from predictions on the rise of sea levels after more recent data on global temperature rise had been looked at by scientists. They were saying the earlier prediction of 100 feet was too low, and the conservative rise might be 400 feet above current sea level. Er, that would put a great many coastal cities, probably including mine, underwater, if we can’t do enough to offset it within the next 100 years..
Also, several (4?) near-Yellowstone volcanic eruptions occurred just in Indonesia.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/ estimates that if everything melts, the rise is 80.32 meters, 263.52 feet. I think this doesn’t account for thermal expansion or more water going to the oblate part of our home spheroid.
My greatest concern is an avalanche type sudden collapse of one of the major ice sheets, especially if it creates a tsunami–and I don’t see how it doesn’t.
Water saturated sand has a very gentle slope, so a foot rise might encroach many feet. For now, coral growth and “polder-ization” (like the various artificial islands constructed in the Persian Gulf and the East China Sea) is keeping pace with sea level rise, but Florida and Louisiana are only 100′ at average. We can polderize NOLA and Miami and Orlando; polderizing entire states would be very challenging, especially Florida.
Some areas, like the Northeast US or the Los Angeles area, land is so valuable, we could easily make polders and make a huge profit. Indeed, my father had a home on an artificial “archipelago”, little polder islands with channels and bridges, where I learned to sail. A lot of Boston, and the Netherlands, of course, were reclaimed. But, that needs construction time.
it’s not the ice sheets collapsing that would worry me, it’s something like the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. If the volcano decides to let go, it could release an undersea landslide worse than the December 26, 2004 Indian Ocean landslide off Sumatra that killed so many people in so many faraway places from the slide itself.
A slide from La Palma would create a tsunami well in excess of 150 feet high, which would devastate the entire Eastern Seaboard of North America, and effects would be felt in South America and the Caribbean as well.
Mother Earth has many ways to kill us pesky humans……..we should step very warily when she’s upset with us.
I just had to chuckle to myself–this is one hell of a brainy bunch!
BTW, the “Natal Day Felicitations Manager” on Shejidan says, “Happy Birthday to you, CJ!”
What do you know! Congratulations on your victory over yet another year!