Adapting to the Anthropocene

[AbruptSLR]

There is a risk that the rest of the world will follow China's AI lead, leaving the USA on the sidelines (which will destabilize world geopolitics):

Title: "The AI Cold War That Could Doom Us All"

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-cold-war-china-could-doom-us-all/

Extract: "The US could try to wrap Beijing in a technology embrace. Work with China to develop rules and norms for the development of AI. Establish international standards to ensure that the algorithms governing people’s lives and livelihoods are transparent and accountable. Both countries could, as Tim Hwang suggests, commit to developing more shared, open databases for researchers.

But for now, at least, conflicting goals, mutual suspicion, and a growing conviction that AI and other advanced technologies are a winner-take-all game are pushing the two countries’ tech sectors further apart. A permanent cleavage will come at a steep cost and will only give techno-authoritarianism more room to grow."

[vox_mundi]

As Heat Sweeps Over the Arctic, Moscow Seeks Way To Adapt
https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/arctic-ecology/2019/01/arctic-heat-sets-moscow-commissions-climate-change-adaption-plan

A global heatwave is gaining force and the Russian government appears to acknowledge that its Arctic will be among the regions worst hit. But the country’s response is not combat of climate change, but rather adaption to the new reality.



... In the Kara Sea, the average temperature since 1998 has increased by 4.95°C. In 2017, the most staggering anomaly was found in the Kara Sea in March, the researchers said. Then, the average temperature was 13°C degrees higher than normal.

The meteorological institute now warns that rapidly increasing temperatures could have dramatic effects on life in the north. That message was sent to decision makers in Moscow.

... According to Roshydromet leader Maksim Yakovenko, the climate adaption plan includes measures on how to avoid negative consequences on the economy, industry and other sectors. Among the potentially devastating elements are melting  permafrost effects on infrastructure located on the tundra.

A 2017 climate report from the institute included alarming data about the permafrost melting. According to researchers, all sites in the country’s European parts of the Arctic in 2017 saw a reduction of the permafrost layer by about 10 cm/a. The largest melting was observed at a site in the Pechora River delta, where the decrease was as large as 33 cm/a.

At the same time, extreme weather is getting more frequent. According to Yakovenko, the number of cases of extreme weather conditions in the country has over the last few years more than doubled. Previously, there were about 400 cases per year, now there are more than 1,000, he told news agency TASS.

---------------------------------------

Brazil Was a Global Leader on Climate Change. Now It’s a Threat.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/04/brazil-was-a-global-leader-on-climate-change-now-its-a-threat/

Jair Bolsonaro’s government could roll back decades of progress on clean energy and reducing deforestation.

Bolsonaro, who took office Jan. 1, clearly believes that economic development is at odds with environmental protection and that considerations about the planet should not be allowed to inhibit industry, particularly Brazil’s huge agricultural sector. During the campaign Bolsonaro earned the support of Brazil’s agribusiness lobby, the ruralistas, which make up one of the country’s most powerful congressional blocs.

The newly inaugurated president has grumbled that environmental policy is “suffocating” the economy. He has threatened to withdraw Brazil from the Paris agreement on climate change (although he recanted after an international backlash). His environment minister, Ricardo Salles, is a former legal director of the Brazilian Rural Society, an agricultural group, and was fined this past December for changing plans for an environmentally protected area to benefit businesses in the state of São Paulo when he was head of an environmental agency there.

Bolsonaro has also promised to remove some protections for the Amazon rainforest, including by rolling back indigenous reserves, such as Raposa Serra do Sol—he has advocated for agriculture and mining exploration there and said the area is too large for its inhabitants. In one of his first acts as president he shifted the power to regulate and create indigenous reserves—which account for about 13 percent of Brazil’s territory, including vast swaths of rainforest—from the National Indian Foundation agency to the agriculture ministry.

-----------------------------

How Your Brain Stops You From Taking Climate Change Seriously
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/how-your-brain-stops-you-from-taking-climate-change-seriously

... Part of the reason it takes us so long to act is because the human brain has spent nearly 200,000 years focused on the present.

[AbruptSLR]

Food for thought:

Title: "Who Are The San Bushmen? | The World's Oldest People"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oQ5Jd7p2aY&list=PLivC9TMdGnL_nFh7EtyLykEbzxCMH7nkB

Extract: "Who are the San Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert? A people that lived in the same way for about 100,000 years up until very recently. These San Bushmen give us a glimpse into the world of our ancestors, the world of hunter-gatherers. For the vast majority of human history, we have not been farmers we were hunter-gatherers. Like the San Bushmen. So join me as we look at the history and culture of the San Bushmen and what it says about hunter-gatherers and even our own modern world."

[sidd]

Water warming land:

"As water temperatures rise in the Atlantic Ocean and its connected gulfs and bays, the warmth may spread inland "

"The water-to-land effect appears along the Great Lakes, which also are warming"

"Nowhere more so than Rhode Island: The state’s average temperature has increased 3.64 degrees compared with its 20th-century norm"

"New Jersey came in 3.49 degrees warmer; Connecticut, 3.22; Maine, 3.17; Massachusetts, 3.05; and New Hampshire, 2.93."

"the ocean works like a thermos, providing a lasting heat source even as winter temperatures descend around it. The effect always existed but is more pronounced."

"four Connecticut counties hugging the coastline averaged 2.9 degrees warmer than normal, compared with 2.6 degrees for the four inland counties."

"It’s even more amplified in Pennsylvania and New York where mountain ranges act as natural barriers"

"Over the past decade, an “extraordinary” change has hit the Gulf Stream, causing its path to become unstable, wobbling off the normal course and often bringing warmer waters nearer to shore ...The stream emits more “warm core rings” – eddies of water up to 60 miles wide that spin toward land and can hold warm temperatures for months. Along the way, the rings can increase water temperatures in a given area as much as 12 degrees above average ... such rings have spiked from about 18 annually before the new millennium to 33 annually now. "

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/12/25/climate-change-northeast-warming-faster-united-states/2743119001/

sidd

[morganism]

Physicists predict Earth will become a chaotic world, with dire consequences

By Paul Sutter published 25 May 22

In the new study, researchers modeled the introduction of the Anthropocene as a phase transition. Most people are familiar with phase transitions in materials, for instance when an ice cube changes phase from a solid to a liquid by melting into water, or when water evaporates into a gas. But phase transitions also occur in other systems. In this case, the system is Earth's climate. A given climate provides for regular and predictable seasons and weather, and a phase transition in the climate leads to a new pattern of seasons and weather. When the climate goes through a phase transition, this means that Earth is experiencing a sudden and rapid change in patterns.

If human activity is driving a phase transition in Earth's climate, that means we are causing the planet to develop a new set of weather patterns. What those patterns will look like is one of the most pressing problems of climate science.

Where is Earth's climate headed? That depends significantly on exactly what our activity is over the next few decades. Drastically reducing carbon output, for example, would lead to different outcomes than changing nothing at all, the researchers wrote in the study.

To account for the different trajectories and choices that humanity could make, the researchers employed a mathematical tool called a logistic map. The logistic map is great at describing situations where some variable — such as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere — can grow but naturally reaches a limit. For example, scientists often use the logistic map to describe animal populations: Animals can keep giving birth, increasing their numbers, but they reach a limit when they consume all the food in their environment (or their predators get too hungry and consume them).

Our influence on the environment is definitely growing, and it has been for over a century. But it will naturally reach a limit, according to the researchers. For example, the human population can only grow so large and can only have so many carbon-emitting activities; and pollution will eventually degrade the environment. At some point in the future, carbon output will reach a maximum limit, and the researchers found that a logistic map can capture the future trajectory of that carbon output very well.
Everything is chaos

The researchers explored different ways that the human logistic map could evolve, depending on a variety of factors like our population, introduction of carbon reduction strategies and better, more efficient technologies. Once they found how human carbon output would evolve with time, they used that to examine how Earth's climate would evolve through the human-driven phase transition.

In the best cases, once humanity reaches the limit of carbon output, Earth's climate stabilizes at a new, higher average temperature. This higher temperature is overall bad for humans, because it still leads to higher sea levels and more extreme weather events. But at least it's stable: The Anthropocene looks like previous climate ages, only warmer, and it will still have regular and repeatable weather patterns.

But in the worst cases, the researchers found that Earth's climate leads to chaos. True, mathematical chaos. In a chaotic system, there is no equilibrium and no repeatable patterns. A chaotic climate would have seasons that change wildly from decade to decade (or even year to year). Some years would experience sudden flashes of extreme weather, while others would be completely quiet. Even the average Earth temperature may fluctuate wildly, swinging from cooler to hotter periods in relatively short periods of time. It would become utterly impossible to determine in what direction Earth's climate is headed.

"A chaotic behavior means that it will be impossible to predict the behavior of Earth System in the future even if we know with great certainty its present state," Bertolami said. "It will mean that any capability to control and to drive the Earth System towards an equilibrium state that favors the habitability of the biosphere will be lost."

Most concerning, the researchers found that above a certain critical threshold temperature for Earth's atmosphere, a feedback cycle can kick in where a chaotic result would become unavoidable. There are some signs that we may have already passed that tipping point, but it's not too late to avert climate disaster."

https://www.livescience.com/humanity-turns-earth-chaotic-climate-system


Chaotic Behaviour of the Earth System in the Anthropocene

https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08955

"It is shown that the Earth System (ES) can, due to the impact of human activities, behave in a chaotic fashion. Our arguments are based on the assumption that the ES can be described by a Landau-Ginzburg model, which on its own allows for predicting that the ES evolves, through regular trajectories in the phase space, towards a Hothouse Earth scenario for a finite amount of human-driven impact. Furthermore, we find that the equilibrium point for temperature fluctuations can exhibit bifurcations and a chaotic pattern if the human impact follows a logistic map. "

[DanLittle]

Uncertainty in boundedly rational household adaptation to environmental shocks

Alessandro Taberna, Tatiana Filatova, Antonia Hadjimichael, and Brayton Noll
Edited by Noelle E. Selin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; received November 21, 2022; accepted August 29, 2023 by Editorial Board Member William C. Clark

October 23, 2023

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2215675120

Significance

Understanding household behavior and its macro consequences for society is pivotal for climate change adaptation. Yet, traditional policy decision-support models for nature–society systems oversimplify human behavior. Using original modeling and survey data, we assess uncertainty in adaptation diffusion and in damages along a gradient of assumptions about behavior. We show that adaptation is below economically optimal, largely due to diverse adaptation constraints (awareness, self-efficacy, social norms) rather than heterogeneous financial constraints. By modeling behavior change shaped by social institutions—descriptive norms and markets—we trace mechanisms affecting inequality dynamics. Our results demonstrate that behavioral uncertainty can mediate the importance of physical factors traditionally thought to be decisive for the uptake of adaptation measures, calling for a tailored policy design.

Abstract

Despite the growing calls to integrate realistic human behavior in sustainability science models, the representative rational agent prevails. This is especially problematic for climate change adaptation that relies on actions at various scales: from governments to individuals. Empirical evidence on individual adaptation to climate-induced hazards reveals diverse behavioral and social factors affecting economic considerations. Yet, implications of replacing the rational optimizer by realistic human behavior in nature–society systems models are poorly understood. Using an innovative evolutionary economic agent-based model we explore different framings regarding household adaptation behavior to floods, leveraging on behavioral data from a household survey in Miami, USA. We find that a representative rational agent significantly overestimates household adaptation diffusion and underestimates damages compared to boundedly rational behavior revealed from our survey. This “adaptation deficit” exhibited by a population of empirically informed agents is explained primarily by diverse “soft” adaptation constraints—awareness, social influences—rather than heterogeneity in financial constraints. Besides initial inequality disproportionally impacting low/medium adaptive capacity households post-flood, our findings suggest that even under a nearly complete adaptation diffusion, adaptation benefits are uneven, with late or less-efficient actions locking households to a path of higher damages, further exacerbating inequalities. Our exploratory modeling reveals that behavioral assumptions shape the uncertainty of physical factors, like exposure and objective effectiveness of flood-proofing measures, traditionally considered crucial in risk assessments. This unique combination of methods facilitates the assessment of cumulative and distributional effects of boundedly rational behavior essential for designing tailored climate adaptation policies, and for equitable sustainability transitions in general.

Agent-based models (ABMs) are designed to simulate boundedly rational behavior of many heterogeneous actors who interact with each other and their environment and continuously learn (19, 20). ABMs rely on social science theories and data to define rules of action, interactions, and learning that drive behavioral change and evolution of institutions (21, 22). With respect to climate-induced hazards, ABMs increasingly examine the cumulative consequences of household adaptation, including ramifications in damages and recovery from climate-induced hazards. However, current models still face several limitations, including the lack of microdata on human behavior, derivation of distributional impacts, and lack of modeling households’ interactions with firms that offer jobs and endogenously define incomes crucial for adaptive capacity and individual as well as regional socio-economic resilience (8, 9). Here, we employ behavioral survey data in an evolutionary economic ABM (23), endowed with firms and households that interact through socio-economic institutions (markets and social networks) to quantitatively explore the spectrum of household adaptation behavior to the most costly climate-induced hazard: floods.

Our results uniquely reveal that socio-behavioral factors mediate the importance of physical factors traditionally thought to be decisive for Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) uptake. Without considering these interactions between physical and behavioral uncertainty, the design of policies could be misguided: resources could be misdirected on factors that are inconsequential, by either investing in collecting data on their effectiveness or in running information policy campaigns.

The gap between CCA as estimated by a perfectly rational decision maker and reality produces an unaccounted “adaptation deficit”—insufficient (public or private) adaptation compared to what is economically optimal.

Tailored Policies for Closing the Adaptation Deficit.

While many ABMs model heterogeneous agents, most report only population-level outcomes (44). Leveraging on this natural strength of ABMs, we present results differentiating per household adaptive capacities (AC). Our analysis supports previous findings that shocks disproportionally impact Low AC who have the longest recovery despite suffering the lowest damages. Surprising was to find that Medium AC, who have assets to lose and sometimes enough finances, postpone adaptation due to the awareness or self-efficacy constraints. These soft constraints are the main reasons the damages pathways for Medium AC (and the overall adaptation deficit) vary so much for  vs.  agents.
Compared to the optimal, the insufficient level of adaptation pursued by  households with empirically grounded behavior is so significant that it calls for tailored CCA policies that explicitly motivate private adaptation. Our analysis reveals different channels via which CCA policies could reach various vulnerable households by removing their adaptation constraints. For example, Low AC households will benefit from tailor-made subsidies (e.g., anchored to property values/incomes) for most effective (instead of just any) CCA measures and from uplifted education. Conversely, Medium AC households will benefit from information policies with personalized narratives appealing to perceptions and social identity. Such strategies can complement the communication of climate-driven risks to avert households from locating in climate-sensitive regions or investing too late in private CCA. Designing tailored policies to overcome such soft adaptation constraints could result in nearly a fivefold drop of residual damages per household according to our analysis.

[kiwichick16]

where did the others go  ?   ......possibly lack of cooperation was a factor

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/nov/18/where-did-other-human-species-go-vanished-ancestors-homo-sapiens-neanderthals-denisovans

[Sebastian Jones]

Given that humans like killing each other- the main cause of wild human deaths is each other- it is almost certain that other hominids were killed off by our variety.

[vox_mundi]

This seems similar to the dynamic between chimps vs bonobos. ....

Bonobos are not known to kill each other, and are generally less violent than chimpanzees.

Observations in the wild indicate that the males among the related common chimpanzee communities are hostile to males from outside the community. Parties of males 'patrol' for the neighboring males that might be traveling alone, and attack those single males, often killing them.[112] This does not appear to be the behavior of bonobo males or females, which seem to prefer sexual contact over violent confrontation with outsiders

Due to the great Congo River, the natural territories of bonobos and chimps don't overlap, so the two species will never come into contact in the wild. However, if you were to place a wager on which species would win in a fight, chimpanzees would be the safer bet.

Primatologist Frans de Waal states bonobos are capable of altruism, compassion, empathy, kindness, patience, and sensitivity,[41] and described "bonobo society" as a "matriarchal".

The two species behave quite differently even if kept under identical conditions.[44] A 2014 study also found bonobos to be less aggressive than chimpanzees, particularly eastern chimpanzees.

Aggressive encounters between males and females are rare, and males are tolerant of infants and juveniles. A male derives his status from the status of his mother.[58] The mother–son bond often stays strong and continues throughout life. While social hierarchies do exist, and although the son of a high ranking female may outrank a lower female, rank plays a less prominent role than in other primate societies.[59] Relationships between different communities are often positive and affiliative, and bonobos are not a territorial species.[60] Bonobos will also share food with others, even unrelated strangers.[61]

Female bonobos have also been observed fostering infants from outside their established community.

Infanticide, while well documented in chimpanzees, is apparently absent in bonobo society. This is a reproductive strategy that seems specific to bonobos; infanticide is observed in all other great apes except orangutans.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo

[kassy]

Dear last three posts, none of that has to do with adapting to the Anthropocene.

[kiwichick16]

dear kassy  trying to work out why we survived and 8? other hominid varients died out, would seem to be of significant value , given that we may need to make many changes and adaptations in the future ....especially if it becomes more chaotic than most of us would wish.

[Ranman99]

I'm not so sure those lessons are instrumental now. We developed the memory-based symbolic representation, i.e. complex language, and it was fearful, so we used it to try and get more and more safety, and it is destroying our habitat now. We arranged ourself to conquer nature rather than to be integrated. We got to the point that we think what we are is what we think.
It even thinks it needs to spread through the near universe. As if ....🤣

“Men fear thought more than they fear anything else on earth — more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.
It sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. But if thought is to become the possession of many, not the privilege of the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds men back — fear lest their cherished beliefs should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by which they live should prove harmful, fear lest they themselves should prove less worthy of respect than they have supposed themselves to be.”
― Bertrand Russell

[johnm33]

where did the others go  ?   .

My guess is that when the groups swapped genes the offspring hardwired for language and or endowed with a voicebox prosperred a little better in whatever group they emerged. Together and seperately these traits homogenised them all. According to some traditions women fully adopted these traits first and ran things for a while. I've never seen any study that follows the transmission of these genes through time which seems curious.

[gerontocrat]

It seems that "Adapting to the Anthropocene" may be officially impossible.
A bunch of scientists getting in a tiswas about some procedural rules while the shit is hitting the fan.

tiswas in British English
(ˈtɪzˌwɒz ) noun. a state of anxiety, confusion or excitement.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/07/quest-to-declare-anthropocene-an-epoch-descends-into-epic-row

Quest to declare Anthropocene an epoch descends into epic row

Vote against formal geological recognition of ‘age of the humans’ is claimed to have violated committee rules


A new epoch requires a specific location and sediments were collected in a sinkhole lake in Canada. Photograph: Peter Power/AFP/Getty Images

The quest to declare the Anthropocene an official geological epoch has descended into an epic row, after the validity of a leaked vote that apparently killed the proposal was questioned.

Supporters of the idea have been working on the proposal for 15 years. They say it would formalise the undeniable and irreversible changes that human activity has wreaked on the planet. It would mark the end of the Holocene epoch, the 11,700 years of stable global environment in which the whole of human civilisation developed.

Opponents argue that pinpointing the start of the human age to a particular date fails to recognise the long history of anthropogenic changes, through farming for example.

The proposal set the start date of the Anthropocene in 1952, marked by the worldwide fallout of plutonium from nuclear weapons’ tests. A new epoch also requires a specific location to represent the change and the sediments collected in a sinkhole lake in Canada were selected in July.

However, a geological committee – the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) – voting in February sank the proposal by 12 votes to four, according to a report by the New York Times. Subsequently, the chair of the SQS said the “alleged” vote was in “violation of the statutory rules” and requested an inquiry into the affair.

The chances of the Anthropocene being formally adopted appear slim, with the chair of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which oversees the SQS having told Nature magazine that the proposal “cannot be progressed further”.

If the vote is confirmed, a new proposal could be submitted. Either way, the concept of the Anthropocene is already widely used to describe the planet-altering impact of humanity.

An alternative proposal could be to declare the Anthropocene a geological “event”. These take place over time, are not part of the official geological timescale and do not need committee approval. Mass extinctions and the oxygenation of the atmosphere 2bn years ago are called events.

“Human impact goes much deeper into geological time,” said Prof Mike Walker, SQS member and at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. “If we ignore that, we are ignoring the true impact, the real impact, that humans have on our planet.”

However, the SQS chair, Prof Jan Zalasiewicz, from the University of Leicester, said: “The alleged voting has been performed in contravention of ICS statutes. Violation of the statutory rules included those about the eligibility to vote and other vital rules for securing a due scientific process. The [leak] has exposed the SQS, and by default its parent scientific bodies, to a considerable potential for reputational damage.”

Zalasiewicz, supported by one of the SQS vice-chairs, said he had requested an inquiry “including instituting a procedure to annul the putative vote”.

Philip Gibbard, an SQS member from the University of Cambridge, told Nature that the crux of the annulment challenge was an objection to the voting process kicking off on 1 February, when the rest of the committee wanted to move forward: “There’s a lot of sour grapes going on here.”

Prof Colin Waters, chair of the Anthropocene Working Group that developed the proposal, told the Guardian: “Irrespective of the vote, the AWG stands fully behind its proposal, which demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the Earth system now clearly lies outside of the relatively stable interglacial conditions of the Holocene [and] that the changes are irreversible.“

Waters said: “Anthropocene strata are also distinct from Holocene strata. They can be characterised using more than 100 durable sedimentary signals including anthropogenic radionuclides, microplastics, fly ash and pesticide residues, most of which show sharp increases in the mid-20th century.

“The Anthropocene, though currently brief, is of sufficient scale and importance to be represented on the geological timescale,” he said. “We will continue to argue the case and I would not be surprised if there is a future call for a proposal to be reconsidered.”

[HapHazard]

That's Crawford Lake, in southern Ontario. Nice place, brings back memories.

[kassy]

An epic row. Not even surprised. Nowadays we have plastic rocks in places so maybe they can use that as a demarcation line eventually. 

Of course you can stretch the Anthropocene back many thousands of years as Ruddiman argues but that is more important for climatology. Maybe another candidate would be the start of mining. This does change the landscape and traces can be found faraway (in ice cores mainly).

[John_the_Younger]

Welcome to The ‘Plutocracene’
The ‘Anthropocene Epoch’ bites the dust? is an Earth-logs post about the 'end' of the fight for a geological Anthropocene.  Some excerpts:

On 11 May 2011, the Geological Society of London hosted a conference, co-sponsored by the British Geological Survey, to discuss evidence for the dawn of a new geological Epoch: the Anthropocene, supposedly marking the impact of humans on Earth processes.
...
In the third week of May 2019 the 34-member Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) of the ICS convened to decide on when the Anthropocene actually started. The year 1952 was proposed – the date when long-lived radioactive plutonium first appears in sediments before the 1962 International Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty.
...
This procedure reached a climax on Monday 4 March 2024, at a meeting of the international Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS): part of the ICS. After a month-long voting period, the SQS announced a 12 to 4 decision to reject the proposal to formally declare the Anthropocene as a new Epoch. Normally, there can be no appeals for a losing vote taken at this level, although a similar proposal may be resubmitted for consideration after a 10 year ‘cooling off’ period. Despite the decisive vote, however, the chair of the SQS, palaeontologist Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester, UK, and one of the group’s vice-chairs, stratigrapher Martin Head of Brock University, Canada have called for it to be annulled, alleging procedural irregularities with the lengthy voting procedure.

The article concludes:

There can be little doubt that the variety and growth of human interferences in the natural world since the Industrial Revolution poses frightening threats to civilisation and economy. But what they constitute is really a cultural or anthropological issue, rather than one suited to geological debate. The term Anthropocene has become a matter of propaganda for all manner of environmental groups, with which I personally have no problem. My guess is that there will be a compromise. There seems no harm either way in designating the Anthropocene informally as a geological Event. It would be in suitably awesome company with the Permian and Cretaceous mass extinctions, the Great Oxygenation Event at the start of the Proterozoic, the Snowball Earth events and the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. And it would require neither special pleading nor annoying the majority of geologists. But I believe it needs another name. The assault on the outer Earth has not been inflicted by the vast majority of humans, but by a tiny minority who wield power for profit and relentless growth in production. The ‘Plutocracene’ might be more fitting. Other suggestions are welcome …

[The text ends with the ellipsis!]
Related posts:

See also: Witze, A. 2024. Geologists reject the Anthropocene as Earth’s new epoch — after 15 years of debate. Nature, v. 627, News article; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-024-00675-8; Voosen, P. 2024. The Anthropocene is dead. Long live the Anthropocene. Science, v. 383, News article, 5 March 2024.

[gerontocrat]

Welcome to The ‘Plutocracene’
The ‘Anthropocene Epoch’ bites the dust? is an Earth-logs post about the 'end' of the fight for a geological Anthropocene.

The decision was made by geologists,which I find strange, since there are now geological strata formed or influenced by human activity that demonstrate we are surely in the anthropocene age.

[kiwichick16]

Adaptation effectiveness declines if temperature increase above 1.5 degrees C

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-climate-adaptation-becomes-less-effective-as-the-world-warms/?utm_source=cbnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2024-03-15&utm_campaign=DeBriefed+Global+methane+surge+Europe+faces+urgent+climate+risks+Surprising+origin+of+Trump+s+drill+baby+drill+

[Rodius]

Adaptation effectiveness declines if temperature increase above 1.5 degrees C

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-climate-adaptation-becomes-less-effective-as-the-world-warms/?utm_source=cbnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2024-03-15&utm_campaign=DeBriefed+Global+methane+surge+Europe+faces+urgent+climate+risks+Surprising+origin+of+Trump+s+drill+baby+drill+

That doesn't bode well for us

[kassy]

Indeed:

Our findings show that the effectiveness of water-related adaptation declines markedly once warming passes 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – from a central estimate (median) of 90% to 69%, 62% and 46% at 2C, 3C and 4C, respectively.

...

For example, adaptation measures under “changes in cropping patterns and crop systems” include approaches such as shifting planting dates or substituting different crops. Measures related to “water and soil moisture conservation” include approaches such as reduced tilling (turning of the soil) or introducing mulching (covering topsoil with plant material).

...

Our findings suggest a concerning picture: adaptation options are effective in reducing risks in most assessed settings up to 1.5C of warming, but with increased warming, effectiveness declines across all options and regions.

The central estimate (that is, the median) of adaptation effectiveness across all assessed measures at 1.5C is 90%. However, this declines to a median effectiveness of 69% at 2C and 62% at 3C – a level that current policies could still take warming close to.

At 4C, effectiveness declines even further to a median of 46%, indicating that less than half of projected impacts would be avoided under the adaptation measure.

The decline in effectiveness is most pronounced for adaptation options related to agriculture. For example, changes in cropping patterns and crop systems show high effectiveness at 1.5C, with more than 50% of data points in this category, but the share of highly effective adaptation decreases to 14% at 4C.