Welcome to the Anthropocene?
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KaLeiMai
The Anthropocene is widely understood to mean the current <em>&quot;period of Earth's history during which humans have a decisive influence on the state, dynamics and future&quot;</em> of this planet. For several years, scientists in the <a href="" title="Website of the Working Group on the &#39;Anthropocene&#39; (AWG)">Working Group on the 'Anthropocene' (AWG)</a> have <a href="-releases/2016/august/media-note-anthropocene-working-group-awg" title="Media note on AWG recommendations">worked (and voted!)</a> on defining the beginning of the Anthropocene in geochemical terms. The mid-20<sup>th</sup> century provides an obvious geochemical 'timestamp': fallout from <a href="_-_6121_-_en_-_saal_2_-_201412291715_-_what_ever_happened_to_nuclear_weapons_-_michael_buker" title="Michael Büker&#39;s &#39;What Ever Happened to Nuclear Weapons?&#39; talk at 31c3">nuclear weapons detonations</a>. Which other chemicals and timestamps are being considered for marking the Anthropocene's start? How is 'define-by-committee' even working out for <a href="-chart-timescale" title="International Chronostratigraphic Chart AKA Geological Timescale">geological epochs</a>? This talk boils the scientific background of the Anthropocene debate down for non-stratigraphers.
 So, welcome to the Anthropocene, or rather the talk about this possibly up-and-coming epoch that we humans created, started, initiated might be useful verbs here. So thanks to the introduction, I can skip a little bit about this, but I do want to make it clear that I am not a geologist myself. I studied it a little bit during an Erasmus semester, and if you're a student and you have the chance to go on this EU program, I encourage you to absolutely do it. That's one of the EU programs that definitely works for you. You might have to take care of some credit points before you go at your home university, but do it. And even if they don't accept some thing from your guest university, it is worth it. So now, I think a little crash course is in order about chronostratigraphy. So this is the science of analyzing rock layers, assigning ages and events in Earth's Earth history to them. And in this example, you can see a so-called sea stack, which is located off the Irish coast. And you notice the rock layers, they are differentiated by color and by material, most obviously. And in this example, you have several hundred million years of geologic history. If you've been lucky enough to visit the Grand Canyon once, you have several billion years of depth of the geologic record. So as you walk down to the valley, you cross the different strata, these rock layers, and the deeper you go, the older the strata will be. Now, how do they form? Oops, sorry. They are simplified, they form by any kind of material sinking down through a water body, like an ocean or even just a lake, to the sea floor where they form sediments, and by a variety of processes which essentially amount to crystallization, the sediments solidify into hard rock, and then we have a stratum or in plural strata. The type of material can be really anything from sand to the biomass of the organisms that live in the water body, and whenever something changes in earth history, the sedimentation might also change. So stuff might sink faster, more stuff might sink down, or different types of material, and therefore you get a new layer which you can distinguish. And before I showed you some photos of how the geologic record looks in real life, now we're going to have a look at the textbook example. This is the average consensus international chronostratigraphic chart. It shows you all the rock layers from the past on the right hand to basically now. And please note the version number up here in the right corner. When I submitted this talk in September, it was still 2016-09. So if you thought geologists are working at a glacial pace, you're actually right because climate change makes the glaciers move much faster as well. And we're going to focus now on the very recent past. You have here from left to right the hierarchy of geological time units. We are currently living in the period of the quaternary and the epoch of the hollow scene, and that one, you can see it on the right there on the time scale, started at about 11,700 years ago, which is the end of the last ice age. And the epoch before that applies to scene was the epoch of the switches of ice and warm ages. And that's where we humans evolved, that's where we come from, and now we're living in the hollow scene. The last important detail here in this crash course are the so-called GSSPs. Again, I'm simplifying a bit, just keep in mind it's the so-called golden spikes, and these are needed by the geologists to define the boundary layers between the strata. So they can, for example, in the case of the hollow scene, be a shift in deuterium concentration in a particular ice core from the Greenland ice sheet. And there are different types of methods to define them. For example, chemical properties, physical properties, but also as this comic shows, the fossil record. For example, here in the middle in the green mesozoic, that was basically Jurassic Park, and you know that had to close because an asteroid hit it. And we find, therefore, at the upper layer of the Cretaceous period, we find a lot of dinosaur fossils, and afterwards we find only mammal fossils. And in between, we also find a chemical signature that is iridium from the asteroid. So to summarize, please read this yourself. I'm going to have a little break. It started out with a bit of stress for me. I think we're good. So just please keep these three points in mind for the next part of the talk. Now we dive into the Anthropocene discussion with the currently running definition. And that is that the Anthropocene is the present time interval in which many geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities, which have a decisive influence on the state, dynamic, and future of the Earth system. Conditions and processes, we just covered a little bit. The human activities, well, you can guess what they are, and I'm going to talk about them a bit more, and the state of end dynamics, that is the stuff you hear about in the news. So climate change, the ice caps are melting, the oceans are acidifying, species going extinct, and quite importantly, there are changes in the global cycling of nutrients for our plants, such as phosphorus, nitrogen, and obviously carbon in the form of carbon dioxide. What I do want to argue is that these forces are also what will shape the Anthropocene, and not as you sometimes hear in the popular press that this is like our age, we are in control of this planet and so on, because influence is definitely not the same thing as control. I mean, we are quite influential on many of the processes on this planet, but we don't understand them completely, and some of them will behave in ways that we cannot predict, or most of them maybe. Also the Anthropocene is currently just a concept that has been popularized in 2000 and has been floating around a little bit before that. The guy here on the left, Mr. Kruzen, he's a Nobel Prize winner for his work on the ozone hole, which is actually a very positive example that the international community can get together and solve an environmental problem with an economical component quite quickly, quite quickly if it is necessary. And in the coming years, this epoch will be proposed, so again, it is just a discussion currently. And if you're a version control fan like me, this would be the equivalent to, it is not even staged yet, so keep down everyone. It will be super interesting, but it's nothing to boil up too much now. And one important piece of, or point that I want to make is that this concept collects a lot of different parts of the discussion. We have on the one hand the geological discussion, like how do we define this in the geological record, but we also, of course, have all of these environmental problems mixed into it. And they are related, but sometimes it's necessary to focus just on one of them, but still keep the big picture. The people who are keeping the big picture are definitely the so-called Anthropocene working group or working group on the Anthropocene. They are located at the University of Leicester, and that's their secretariat, but of course it's a global consortium of scientists from a range of different disciplines. And maybe you noticed this summer, the discussion did boil up a little bit because there was a vote and an intermediary report about how this working group wants to continue preparing a formalization proposal. And what I want to do now in the next part is to walk you through of these voting options and explain a little bit what they mean, what their background is, and how they were received. And the two core points are that they are discussing which golden spike do we want to use, which chemical signal in the geologic record, and of course closely tied to that is the question, when did the Anthropocene start or when will the start be defined? And to do that, we're going to use these awesome XKCD chart. No, not yet. Oh, there we are. And we start at the end of the last ice age. You see in the middle, this white part is basically the minus one degree plus one degree range that our civilization has experienced, because after the last ice age, we started settling down, we started developing agriculture, and also one clearly negative impact already, maybe not in the case of this predator, but we did have a hand in the extinction of many large mammals. So wherever we went on this planet on every continent, we find evidence that very quickly after humans arrive, the big mammals start to vanish. In some cases, there's a climate change component in it, but sometimes we just hunted them down. The keywords here are megafauna extinction and defanation, in case you're interested. And these three parts, for example, or these three sub-discussions, they are visible in the archaeological record and also in the chemical record in the geology, and therefore there has been the suggestion that basically the whole whole of the scene should be replaced with the so-called Anthropocene. However, this has received little attention by the working group. So we move on a few thousand years, and now we have all over the world cultures and civilizations rising, and with that, of course, you can imagine you need some level of intensive agriculture. So for example, converting forest land into farmland, mechanically tilling the farmland, fertilizing it, and in some cases even changing the morphology of the landscape to suit the particular crop that is grown in some regions. So because we find these signals all over the world, and still after hundreds and thousands of years, you can still detect chemically that a particular soil was created by humans. This is called anthropogenic soils, and there were a few more votes, but essentially there's a delay here, I'm sorry. It was rejected. Let's leave it at that. Then we move on, now you're going to see the replay. I'm already at the next slide. Is there anything we can do? Okay. Well, we go to one obvious candidate, the Industrial Revolution. As you know, the coal, the fossil fuel coal became the major energy source, and with it came the pollution from coal dust, from coal soot. And now because especially the European nations, they basically conquered the world, they brought this pollution with them. So finally now we also have a global signal of anthropogenic pollution. However, for some reason, this option was also rejected. And now the question becomes political, because up to now all of this has happened in the very far away past, and nobody alive was basically at fault. But now we're entering the 20th century, and for the geologists, fortunately, a lot of candidates can be used here in the geological record, not so fortunately for us. There's also the third one, which is not in the XKCD chart, and that is the plastics from convenience products that of course rise with the consumer culture. And there is already evidence that this is entering the geological record, for example, in this case from Hawaii, where of course volcanic activity creates new rock all the time, plastic trash is simply incorporated. And additionally, microplastic particles are in all of the oceans, and they also sink down into the sediments. So now we have a show. So sorry, the plastic part was also rejected, although quite an interesting, strategic graphic evidence in my opinion. And now we basically have a little showdown between the nuclear weapons here and the fossil fuel emissions. But before we resolve this showdown, I'm a bit lucky that both of these topics have been featured at this conference before, so I encourage you to rewatch these talks in January as early as possible before you have a big tsunami of all of these talks here. There is interestingly a connection between these topics. So on the one hand, we have this engineering and physical and of course political topic of the nuclear weapons, and on the other hand, geology, chemistry and climate science, and archaeology plays into this as well. You maybe know the so-called radiocarbon method that is used to determine the age of biological samples. So you know that in the atmosphere, there's a certain amount of radioactive carbon-14 that filters down to CO2, to the plants, to the animals. And when some kind of living organism stops breathing, the decay starts both on the biological side and also in terms of radioactive carbon. And when you find a biological sample, you can measure how much radiocarbon is left and thereby calculate backwards with the help of the half-life, which is 5,370 years, how old this sample is. But because of the nuclear weapons testing, we have added a lot of... It is delayed again a bit. Not going to use the slides.com again. Or only with the LAN cable. Then it might work. Okay, now you see it. This is the so-called radiocarbon bomb spike. So we added a lot of carbon-14 into the atmosphere. So biological samples that were generated in this time start out with a lot more radioactive carbon. So in the future, archaeological record, they will appear much younger than they actually are. However, in the near future, we will reach the equilibrium point, basically, or the baseline again, and then depending on which of these representative concentration pathways we take, future samples will appear much older because we have diluted the radioactive carbon from the nuclear weapons testing with fossil fuel emissions from the... Yeah, coal and the oil we are burning. And you can easily imagine with 5,370 years half-life, the fossil fuels are millions and millions of years old. They do not contain any radioactive carbon anymore. So we are, in effect, polluting both the present and the future, but also the past, or the future's past. So now this is quite an interesting golden spike, but also rejected. So now we basically have the end of this showdown. We have, on the one hand, the plutonium fallout and the fossil fuels. They produce two possible golden spikes. That is, of course, the fuel ashes and also the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Yeah, and the final vote was 10 to 5, basically, for the nuclear weapons. And remember, I mean, we're talking about geologists here. They need to have stuff in the sediments, in the rocks. So something that actually falls out of the sky and then even is radioactive in the rock is a much more interesting signal to look for than something that stays in the sky. And now I want to make two important points here. I mean, I was talking about this a bit notionally, but these are, of course, quite problematic and horrible topics. But now the chart goes on. We have the problem here that science sometimes needs to be a bit devoid of emotions to keep it clear head, because that's how it works. Now we have to stick to the science, but we shouldn't forget that these are quite horrible topics in some cases. And also we have a mixture here now, again, as I mentioned before, between the geological part of the discussion, which is purely on the nuclear weapons side of the discussion, and all the ecological problems that arise from fossil fuel emissions. And the chart goes on, as you know. Robin Frank talked about this last year. So I encourage you to also re-watch this talk again. And now the geologists have basically everything they need. They have a clear goal what to search for in the stratigraphic records. This will take the regular amount of time in science, like projects are going on, expeditions are mounted, drill course will be drilled, and in a few years there will most likely be a formal proposal to have the Anthropocene accepted as an epoch in the geological record. And then the International Commission on Stratigraphy will vote on it. That part, I don't know how long it will take, and I have not read any good estimates. In some cases this has taken many, many decades. And those are not influenced by the glaciers. But when they do, we can be pretty sure that this nice international chronostratigraphic chart will be updated quite quickly. So sticking to the theme of this Congress, I mean, does it still work? Right now it does not, really. I mean, you saw these, the representative concentration pathways here, they are from the IPCC. We are on this path currently, and just from a few days ago the CO2 reading in the atmosphere is over 400 ppm. Before the industrial age it was 280. And please notice that these are not fossil fuel emissions. These are concentration pathways. So they include natural sources for greenhouse gases. So we have to account for that as well. But what we need to do definitely is to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. A few years ago the recommendation was by 10% each year. Let's make it 20 to be safe. So if you want to do something, try to identify something in your life that directly produces fossil fuel emissions or greenhouse gas emissions. And 20% is an easy thing to calculate. Just try to do 20% less of it. Also this is of course not an individual thing to solve. This also needs global campaigns. You probably know the students divestment campaign in the US where students try to convince their administrations in the universities to stop investing in endowment funds into fossil fuel companies. We also need to stop the operations that we are currently doing because just the resources that we have already tapped will most likely push us past the 2 degree goal or 1.5 degree goal that was at the Paris Climate Conference last year was agreed politically. So the so-called stranded assets that the companies have in their books, they are worthless and also the stuff that they think they have found that is also worthless basically. And one maybe a bit more critical thing is you can still study how to find and extract fossil fuel resources in universities. So we also have to think about maybe we need to divest educationally as well because maybe it's not ethical to train young people for jobs that will not be available in the future. Also there's a closely related to education is of course behavior and there we have a problem with the so-called rebound effects. So you sometimes expect to save some amount of energy or some amount of resources if you introduce a new technology for example but then the adaptation of behavior of people eats up all of these savings. So in the worst case you can even have a backfire effect that for example people drive more cars if they buy more fuel efficient cars and thereby in total all over the world the savings are not actually realized at all. And by the way if you know an example of the so-called super conservation where not only do you save everything that you are expecting but you save actually more. Please let me know I tried to find something. So we have as I mentioned before the cars I mean the engines are getting more efficient all the time but the cars get heavier more functions are built in they use more energy in total. Also in this community we get more batteries better batteries all the time but we use our devices much more intensively so many of us require apparently external batteries. So these are behavioral problems of course. And I don't want to pick on GitLab specifically because they really build a great product but what they are advertising is what I would like to label convenience computing. CPUs are becoming more efficient computing becomes cheaper and cheaper so we use it just for every single little thing that we can imagine. And this is ineffective behavior that invalidates the improvements in technology that we definitely have but the solution or the takeaway point here is that technology alone will not save us so we have to adapt the behavior a little bit. Or not a little bit. So to start the summary I think I'm good in time. I'm answering my own questions a little bit. So it is not yet a new geological epoch but it will be in a few years or it will at least be proposed and then we will see. Did we do it? Was it an accident? This is interesting. More than 100 years ago the discussion whether CO2 or in this case carbonic acid in the air might actually be a problem for us was already going on. I mean the pollution directly from coal was very visible but also the understanding that increases in CO2 concentration will change the chemistry of the atmosphere was already known. And there's also I think this is something Rob and Frank called for last year. There is a campaign to prosecute the managers of ExxonMobile because they through some leaks we learned that they were internally conducting pretty good research actually on how fossil fuels and carbon dioxide emissions and climate change were related in the 70s and 80s but they still continue to mislead the public as for example the tobacco industry did about the health risks of smoking for a long time as well. So it was not an accident. And the welcome part? Well that is on us of course. I want to quickly give you an overview of the blogs and podcasts that are used for this research. And also you saw maybe the academic references in some places as well. These are all highly recommendable and the slides are online as well. So that's how the opening ceremony closed you know. And also if you saw the movie, let's get to it. This is not too difficult to do. Thanks. Thank you very much. Let's see if we have any questions. Microphone, oh five minutes, okay. Everything from the internet maybe? The IRC channel? I mean while people line up I already got one question from the internet myself that I can already answer. The Anthropocene will of course end at some point most likely when there's a different type of influence globally that a new type of strata will form and a future generation of geologists will find the next gold spike. How long that will take? You see down there there's current research that probably the sea level rise for example will go on for many, many thousand years. So what we most likely have already done is to stop the cycle of ice ages and warm ages that was actually due so maybe we're lucky. But only we. I see we have one question from microphone three. Thank you for your very dense bringing everyone up to speed on the Anthropocene. I've been following it for some time because in how St. Coulthourne in Berlin has been covering it for about four years and now they've moved on to a new framing of the issue called Technosphere. And in both of these terms for me where the controversy gets really intense and perhaps the struggle gets very intense is that the term and the way it's being used by the academic departments is a bit confusing the issue in a way that points the blame on us as a human species. And there's another analysis that points the blame at something like the capital of scene or the corporate scene. And it's that the systems of our society's operating mechanisms are really are what are behind something that could and looks very catastrophic for not only the human species but millions of species. And in fact we're perhaps moving into what's being called a sixth mass extinction. And the Anthropocene the problem is that it's almost like it's describing it in a way that oh we can handle this with some technological solutions. And it's really kind of something that's out of control. And it obfuscates the fact that we really need to like kind of repair nature rather than thinking we're going to fix nature for our benefit now. And so it's a really long debate and I've been following this for some time but I think it's really something to extend the conversation from what you just gave us for information. So I thank you for that. And if you've heard about this technosphere I would ask you if you know where that's leading. Not about this particular term thanks I wrote it down research it. Yeah I did mention this mix up and I agree it is an extremely different difficult topic with many sub topics. I can agree only with you. I'll be available later for discussion up here. Thank you very much. If there are no further questions I will thank Elayma once again. How about a big round of applause for her. Thank you.
 So, welcome to the Anthropocene, or rather the talk about this possibly up-and-coming  epoch that we humans created, started, initiated might be useful verbs here.  So thanks to the introduction, I can skip a little bit about this, but I do want to  make it clear that I am not a geologist myself.  I studied it a little bit during an Erasmus semester, and if you're a student and you  have the chance to go on this EU program, I encourage you to absolutely do it.  That's one of the EU programs that definitely works for you.  You might have to take care of some credit points before you go at your home university,  but do it.  And even if they don't accept some thing from your guest university, it is worth it.  So now, I think a little crash course is in order about chronostratigraphy.  So this is the science of analyzing rock layers, assigning ages and events in Earth's  Earth history to them.  And in this example, you can see a so-called sea stack, which is located off the Irish  coast.  And you notice the rock layers, they are differentiated by color and by material, most obviously.  And in this example, you have several hundred million years of geologic history.  If you've been lucky enough to visit the Grand Canyon once, you have several billion years  of depth of the geologic record.  So as you walk down to the valley, you cross the different strata, these rock layers, and  the deeper you go, the older the strata will be.  Now, how do they form?  Oops, sorry.  They are simplified, they form by any kind of material sinking down through a water body,  like an ocean or even just a lake, to the sea floor where they form sediments, and by  a variety of processes which essentially amount to crystallization, the sediments solidify  into hard rock, and then we have a stratum or in plural strata.  The type of material can be really anything from sand to the biomass of the organisms  that live in the water body, and whenever something changes in earth history, the sedimentation  might also change.  So stuff might sink faster, more stuff might sink down, or different types of material,  and therefore you get a new layer which you can distinguish.  And before I showed you some photos of how the geologic record looks in real life, now  we're going to have a look at the textbook example.  This is the average consensus international chronostratigraphic chart.  It shows you all the rock layers from the past on the right hand to basically now.  And please note the version number up here in the right corner.  When I submitted this talk in September, it was still 2016-09.  So if you thought geologists are working at a glacial pace, you're actually right because  climate change makes the glaciers move much faster as well.  And we're going to focus now on the very recent past.  You have here from left to right the hierarchy of geological time units.  We are currently living in the period of the quaternary and the epoch of the hollow scene,  and that one, you can see it on the right there on the time scale, started at about 11,700  years ago, which is the end of the last ice age.  And the epoch before that applies to scene was the epoch of the switches of ice and warm  ages.  And that's where we humans evolved, that's where we come from, and now we're living in  the hollow scene.  The last important detail here in this crash course are the so-called GSSPs.  Again, I'm simplifying a bit, just keep in mind it's the so-called golden spikes, and  these are needed by the geologists to define the boundary layers between the strata.  So they can, for example, in the case of the hollow scene, be a shift in deuterium concentration  in a particular ice core from the Greenland ice sheet.  And there are different types of methods to define them.  For example, chemical properties, physical properties, but also as this comic shows,  the fossil record.  For example, here in the middle in the green mesozoic, that was basically Jurassic Park,  and you know that had to close because an asteroid hit it.  And we find, therefore, at the upper layer of the Cretaceous period, we find a lot of  dinosaur fossils, and afterwards we find only mammal fossils.  And in between, we also find a chemical signature that is iridium from the asteroid.  So to summarize, please read this yourself.  I'm going to have a little break.  It started out with a bit of stress for me.  I think we're good.  So just please keep these three points in mind for the next part of the talk.  Now we dive into the Anthropocene discussion with the currently running definition.  And that is that the Anthropocene is the present time interval in which many geologically  significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities, which have a  decisive influence on the state, dynamic, and future of the Earth system.  Conditions and processes, we just covered a little bit.  The human activities, well, you can guess what they are, and I'm going to talk about  them a bit more, and the state of end dynamics, that is the stuff you hear about in the news.  So climate change, the ice caps are melting, the oceans are acidifying, species going extinct,  and quite importantly, there are changes in the global cycling of nutrients for our plants,  such as phosphorus, nitrogen, and obviously carbon in the form of carbon dioxide.  What I do want to argue is that these forces are also what will shape the Anthropocene,  and not as you sometimes hear in the popular press that this is like our age, we are in  control of this planet and so on, because influence is definitely not the same thing  as control.  I mean, we are quite influential on many of the processes on this planet, but we don't  understand them completely, and some of them will behave in ways that we cannot predict,  or most of them maybe.  Also the Anthropocene is currently just a concept that has been popularized in 2000  and has been floating around a little bit before that.  The guy here on the left, Mr. Kruzen, he's a Nobel Prize winner for his work on the  ozone hole, which is actually a very positive example that the international community can  get together and solve an environmental problem with an economical component quite quickly,  quite quickly if it is necessary.  And in the coming years, this epoch will be proposed, so again, it is just a discussion  currently.  And if you're a version control fan like me, this would be the equivalent to, it is not  even staged yet, so keep down everyone.  It will be super interesting, but it's nothing to boil up too much now.  And one important piece of, or point that I want to make is that this concept collects  a lot of different parts of the discussion.  We have on the one hand the geological discussion, like how do we define this in the geological  record, but we also, of course, have all of these environmental problems mixed into it.  And they are related, but sometimes it's necessary to focus just on one of them, but still keep  the big picture.  The people who are keeping the big picture are definitely the so-called Anthropocene working  group or working group on the Anthropocene.  They are located at the University of Leicester, and that's their secretariat, but of course  it's a global consortium of scientists from a range of different disciplines.  And maybe you noticed this summer, the discussion did boil up a little bit because there was  a vote and an intermediary report about how this working group wants to continue preparing  a formalization proposal.  And what I want to do now in the next part is to walk you through of these voting options  and explain a little bit what they mean, what their background is, and how they were received.  And the two core points are that they are discussing which golden spike do we want to  use, which chemical signal in the geologic record, and of course closely tied to that  is the question, when did the Anthropocene start or when will the start be defined?  And to do that, we're going to use these awesome XKCD chart.  No, not yet.  Oh, there we are.  And we start at the end of the last ice age.  You see in the middle, this white part is basically the minus one degree plus one degree range  that our civilization has experienced, because after the last ice age, we started settling  down, we started developing agriculture, and also one clearly negative impact already,  maybe not in the case of this predator, but we did have a hand in the extinction of many  large mammals.  So wherever we went on this planet on every continent, we find evidence that very quickly  after humans arrive, the big mammals start to vanish.  In some cases, there's a climate change component in it, but sometimes we just hunted them down.  The keywords here are megafauna extinction and defanation, in case you're interested.  And these three parts, for example, or these three sub-discussions, they are visible in  the archaeological record and also in the chemical record in the geology, and therefore  there has been the suggestion that basically the whole whole of the scene should be replaced  with the so-called Anthropocene.  However, this has received little attention by the working group.  So we move on a few thousand years, and now we have all over the world cultures and civilizations  rising, and with that, of course, you can imagine you need some level of intensive agriculture.  So for example, converting forest land into farmland, mechanically tilling the farmland,  fertilizing it, and in some cases even changing the morphology of the landscape to suit the  particular crop that is grown in some regions.  So because we find these signals all over the world, and still after hundreds and thousands  of years, you can still detect chemically that a particular soil was created by humans.  This is called anthropogenic soils, and there were a few more votes, but essentially there's  a delay here, I'm sorry.  It was rejected.  Let's leave it at that.  Then we move on, now you're going to see the replay.  I'm already at the next slide.  Is there anything we can do?  Okay.  Well, we go to one obvious candidate, the Industrial Revolution.  As you know, the coal, the fossil fuel coal became the major energy source, and with it  came the pollution from coal dust, from coal soot.  And now because especially the European nations, they basically conquered the world, they brought  this pollution with them.  So finally now we also have a global signal of anthropogenic pollution.  However, for some reason, this option was also rejected.  And now the question becomes political, because up to now all of this has happened in the very  far away past, and nobody alive was basically at fault.  But now we're entering the 20th century, and for the geologists, fortunately, a lot of  candidates can be used here in the geological record, not so fortunately for us.  There's also the third one, which is not in the XKCD chart, and that is the plastics from  convenience products that of course rise with the consumer culture.  And there is already evidence that this is entering the geological record, for example,  in this case from Hawaii, where of course volcanic activity creates new rock all the  time, plastic trash is simply incorporated.  And additionally, microplastic particles are in all of the oceans, and they also sink down  into the sediments.  So now we have a show.  So sorry, the plastic part was also rejected, although quite an interesting, strategic graphic  evidence in my opinion.  And now we basically have a little showdown between the nuclear weapons here and the fossil  fuel emissions.  But before we resolve this showdown, I'm a bit lucky that both of these topics have  been featured at this conference before, so I encourage you to rewatch these talks in  January as early as possible before you have a big tsunami of all of these talks here.  There is interestingly a connection between these topics.  So on the one hand, we have this engineering and physical and of course political topic  of the nuclear weapons, and on the other hand, geology, chemistry and climate science, and  archaeology plays into this as well.  You maybe know the so-called radiocarbon method that is used to determine the age of biological  samples.  So you know that in the atmosphere, there's a certain amount of radioactive carbon-14  that filters down to CO2, to the plants, to the animals.  And when some kind of living organism stops breathing, the decay starts both on the biological  side and also in terms of radioactive carbon.  And when you find a biological sample, you can measure how much radiocarbon is left and  thereby calculate backwards with the help of the half-life, which is 5,370 years, how  old this sample is.  But because of the nuclear weapons testing, we have added a lot of...  It is delayed again a bit.  Not going to use the slides.com again.  Or only with the LAN cable.  Then it might work.  Okay, now you see it.  This is the so-called radiocarbon bomb spike.  So we added a lot of carbon-14 into the atmosphere.  So biological samples that were generated in this time start out with a lot more radioactive  carbon.  So in the future, archaeological record, they will appear much younger than they actually  are.  However, in the near future, we will reach the equilibrium point, basically, or the baseline  again, and then depending on which of these representative concentration pathways we take,  future samples will appear much older because we have diluted the radioactive carbon from  the nuclear weapons testing with fossil fuel emissions from the...  Yeah, coal and the oil we are burning.  And you can easily imagine with 5,370 years half-life, the fossil fuels are millions and  millions of years old.  They do not contain any radioactive carbon anymore.  So we are, in effect, polluting both the present and the future, but also the past,  or the future's past.  So now this is quite an interesting golden spike, but also rejected.  So now we basically have the end of this showdown.  We have, on the one hand, the plutonium fallout and the fossil fuels.  They produce two possible golden spikes.  That is, of course, the fuel ashes and also the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.  Yeah, and the final vote was 10 to 5, basically, for the nuclear weapons.  And remember, I mean, we're talking about geologists here.  They need to have stuff in the sediments, in the rocks.  So something that actually falls out of the sky and then even is radioactive in the rock  is a much more interesting signal to look for than something that stays in the sky.  And now I want to make two important points here.  I mean, I was talking about this a bit notionally, but these are, of course, quite problematic  and horrible topics.  But now the chart goes on.  We have the problem here that science sometimes needs to be a bit devoid of emotions to keep  it clear head, because that's how it works.  Now we have to stick to the science, but we shouldn't forget that these are quite horrible  topics in some cases.  And also we have a mixture here now, again, as I mentioned before, between the geological  part of the discussion, which is purely on the nuclear weapons side of the discussion,  and all the ecological problems that arise from fossil fuel emissions.  And the chart goes on, as you know.  Robin Frank talked about this last year.  So I encourage you to also re-watch this talk again.  And now the geologists have basically everything they need.  They have a clear goal what to search for in the stratigraphic records.  This will take the regular amount of time in science, like projects are going on, expeditions  are mounted, drill course will be drilled, and in a few years there will most likely  be a formal proposal to have the Anthropocene accepted as an epoch in the geological record.  And then the International Commission on Stratigraphy will vote on it.  That part, I don't know how long it will take, and I have not read any good estimates.  In some cases this has taken many, many decades.  And those are not influenced by the glaciers.  But when they do, we can be pretty sure that this nice international chronostratigraphic  chart will be updated quite quickly.  So sticking to the theme of this Congress, I mean, does it still work?  Right now it does not, really.  I mean, you saw these, the representative concentration pathways here, they are from  the IPCC.  We are on this path currently, and just from a few days ago the CO2 reading in the atmosphere  is over 400 ppm.  Before the industrial age it was 280.  And please notice that these are not fossil fuel emissions.  These are concentration pathways.  So they include natural sources for greenhouse gases.  So we have to account for that as well.  But what we need to do definitely is to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions.  A few years ago the recommendation was by 10% each year.  Let's make it 20 to be safe.  So if you want to do something, try to identify something in your life that directly produces  fossil fuel emissions or greenhouse gas emissions.  And 20% is an easy thing to calculate.  Just try to do 20% less of it.  Also this is of course not an individual thing to solve.  This also needs global campaigns.  You probably know the students divestment campaign in the US where students try to convince  their administrations in the universities to stop investing in endowment funds into  fossil fuel companies.  We also need to stop the operations that we are currently doing because just the resources  that we have already tapped will most likely push us past the 2 degree goal or 1.5 degree  goal that was at the Paris Climate Conference last year was agreed politically.  So the so-called stranded assets that the companies have in their books, they are worthless  and also the stuff that they think they have found that is also worthless basically.  And one maybe a bit more critical thing is you can still study how to find and extract  fossil fuel resources in universities.  So we also have to think about maybe we need to divest educationally as well because maybe  it's not ethical to train young people for jobs that will not be available in the future.  Also there's a closely related to education is of course behavior and there we have a  problem with the so-called rebound effects.  So you sometimes expect to save some amount of energy or some amount of resources if you  introduce a new technology for example but then the adaptation of behavior of people  eats up all of these savings.  So in the worst case you can even have a backfire effect that for example people drive more  cars if they buy more fuel efficient cars and thereby in total all over the world the  savings are not actually realized at all.  And by the way if you know an example of the so-called super conservation where not only  do you save everything that you are expecting but you save actually more.  Please let me know I tried to find something.  So we have as I mentioned before the cars I mean the engines are getting more efficient  all the time but the cars get heavier more functions are built in they use more energy  in total.  Also in this community we get more batteries better batteries all the time but we use our  devices much more intensively so many of us require apparently external batteries.  So these are behavioral problems of course.  And I don't want to pick on GitLab specifically because they really build a great product  but what they are advertising is what I would like to label convenience computing.  CPUs are becoming more efficient computing becomes cheaper and cheaper so we use it  just for every single little thing that we can imagine.  And this is ineffective behavior that invalidates the improvements in technology that we definitely  have but the solution or the takeaway point here is that technology alone will not save  us so we have to adapt the behavior a little bit.  Or not a little bit.  So to start the summary I think I'm good in time.  I'm answering my own questions a little bit.  So it is not yet a new geological epoch but it will be in a few years or it will at least  be proposed and then we will see.  Did we do it?  Was it an accident?  This is interesting.  More than 100 years ago the discussion whether CO2 or in this case carbonic acid in the  air might actually be a problem for us was already going on.  I mean the pollution directly from coal was very visible but also the understanding that  increases in CO2 concentration will change the chemistry of the atmosphere was already  known.  And there's also I think this is something Rob and Frank called for last year.  There is a campaign to prosecute the managers of ExxonMobile because they through some leaks  we learned that they were internally conducting pretty good research actually on how fossil  fuels and carbon dioxide emissions and climate change were related in the 70s and 80s but  they still continue to mislead the public as for example the tobacco industry did about  the health risks of smoking for a long time as well.  So it was not an accident.  And the welcome part?  Well that is on us of course.  I want to quickly give you an overview of the blogs and podcasts that are used for this  research.  And also you saw maybe the academic references in some places as well.  These are all highly recommendable and the slides are online as well.  So that's how the opening ceremony closed you know.  And also if you saw the movie, let's get to it.  This is not too difficult to do.  Thanks.  Thank you very much.  Let's see if we have any questions.  Microphone, oh five minutes, okay.  Everything from the internet maybe?  The IRC channel?  I mean while people line up I already got one question from the internet myself that I can  already answer.  The Anthropocene will of course end at some point most likely when there's a different  type of influence globally that a new type of strata will form and a future generation  of geologists will find the next gold spike.  How long that will take?  You see down there there's current research that probably the sea level rise for example  will go on for many, many thousand years.  So what we most likely have already done is to stop the cycle of ice ages and warm ages  that was actually due so maybe we're lucky.  But only we.  I see we have one question from microphone three.  Thank you for your very dense bringing everyone up to speed on the Anthropocene.  I've been following it for some time because in how St. Coulthourne in Berlin has been  covering it for about four years and now they've moved on to a new framing of the issue called  Technosphere.  And in both of these terms for me where the controversy gets really intense and perhaps  the struggle gets very intense is that the term and the way it's being used by the academic  departments is a bit confusing the issue in a way that points the blame on us as a human  species.  And there's another analysis that points the blame at something like the capital of scene  or the corporate scene.  And it's that the systems of our society's operating mechanisms are really are what are  behind something that could and looks very catastrophic for not only the human species  but millions of species.  And in fact we're perhaps moving into what's being called a sixth mass extinction.  And the Anthropocene the problem is that it's almost like it's describing it in a way that  oh we can handle this with some technological solutions.  And it's really kind of something that's out of control.  And it obfuscates the fact that we really need to like kind of repair nature rather  than thinking we're going to fix nature for our benefit now.  And so it's a really long debate and I've been following this for some time but I think  it's really something to extend the conversation from what you just gave us for information.  So I thank you for that.  And if you've heard about this technosphere I would ask you if you know where that's leading.  Not about this particular term thanks I wrote it down research it.  Yeah I did mention this mix up and I agree it is an extremely different difficult topic  with many sub topics.  I can agree only with you.  I'll be available later for discussion up here.  Thank you very much.  If there are no further questions I will thank Elayma once again.  How about a big round of applause for her.  Thank you.
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