Consider This from NPR - The Anthropocene

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

As we confront the realities of a changing climate, a group of scientists says we're living in a world of our very own making - a world altered by the burning of fossil fuels, the explosion of nuclear weapons, plastic pollution and environmental degradation. The scientists call it the Anthropocene. And they have identified a geological site in Canada they say best reflects this new epoch in Earth's history. We hear from NASA's Chief Scientist and Senior Climate Advisor Kate Calvin. Also, NPR's Adrian Florido speaks with Francine McCarthy, a professor of Earth Sciences, who led a working group of scientists who identified Canada's Crawford Lake as the best example of a place that demonstrates humanity's impact on the planet.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. This week, Vermont saw its worst flooding in decades. Peter Hirschfeld from Vermont Public spoke with NPR on Tuesday after surveying the flood damage. Apocalyptic is one word I've heard a few people use to describe what they're witnessing. Roads were washed out, businesses were flooded, including the fire department, the police department, and City Hall. Devin Andrews was trapped on the second floor of her apartment complex in Montpelier,

the state's capital, on Tuesday, and she had to be rescued by boat. I've now evacuated with my pet. Really scary. Never been through anything like this before. We're seeing, obviously, the worst flooding since 1992. The waters are finally receding in Montpelier, but it will take months, possibly years, for Vermont to fully recover from this. Meanwhile, the South and Southwest are experiencing extreme heat, with temperatures expected to hover well above 100 degrees for several days in some areas. We're seeing these extreme temperatures pop up in places that we didn't expect, lasting longer and getting hotter than even the most sort of sophisticated climate scientists thought about a decade or so ago.

That is journalist Jeff Goodell. He's the author of The Heat Will Kill You First. We know that as we continue to burn fossil fuels, our planet is getting hotter. And as it gets hotter, it changes the dynamics of the atmosphere, which can lead to these kinds of extreme events. And heat waves are the clearest manifestation of that. Goodell spoke with climate scientists for his book, and he asked them, how hot can it get? He's in Austin, Texas, where it was 115 degrees last week. And he asked these scientists, can it get to 120, 125?

They can't give a clear answer because we don't know. We're living in a new climate, and the rules are different, and we don't know where that exactly is going to take us. And as we confront the realities of climate change, a group of scientists says that we're living in a world of our very own making, a world altered by the burning of fossil fuels, the explosion of nuclear weapons, plastic pollution, and environmental degradation. The scientists call it the Anthropocene, and they have identified a geological site in Canada that they say best reflects this new epic in Earth's history. it would be accepting that the effects of humans have so altered the planet that the system, the Earth's system, no longer behaves the way it has. So then, how do we come to terms with climate change

and all the other ways that we have altered the Earth's environment? Coming up, we're going to discuss what confronting our impact on the planet really means for all of us going forward. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang. It's Wednesday, July 12th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. This message comes from Pushkin. In Revenge of the Tipping Point, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell returns to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points and the dark side of contagious phenomena.

Available wherever books are sold and wherever you get your audiobooks. It's Consider This from NPR. Extreme weather events have become more and more common. NASA's chief scientist and senior climate advisor Kate Calvin is closely watching the extreme weather events that the U.S. is facing. She spoke with NPR about the new normal that we're living with and says just how hot the planet gets is in large part still up to us. So how much future warming we experience depends on future emissions.

So we know that the warming we've experienced up until now is driven by greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. There's a large community of people that look at what future climate might look like, and they look at very different warming levels. Everything from looking at what if we were to keep warming around 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and going up above that. And what you see from that is that impacts rise with warming. And so how much more impacts we experience depends on how much more warming we experience. How much more warming we see in the future depends on future emissions. But she expressed some hope that scientific discoveries could help us deal with the crisis. I think we know more about our planet than we ever have. There are scientists and engineers all around the world that are learning more every day. We're able to provide that information

publicly. And we have options available today that can help us respond to climate change, whether that's options available to help reduce emissions or adapt the changes we experience. Those all exist now. There are also things that are related to climate change in our environment that we might not be thinking about quite yet. So one of the things, you know, a lot of ecosystems and animal species, they're adapted to a particular climate and even small changes in warming can change their geographic extent or how they function. And so I think thinking about things like biodiversity and ecosystems and some of that carries with it implications for human in terms of human health and other factors. And so thinking about that, I think we often don't always think about the fact

that a small change in temperature can affect the way an ecosystem or species functions. That was Kate Calvin, NASA's Chief Scientist and Climate Advisor. A few years ago, a group of scientists proposed that, yes, humans have so altered the planet that we have left the Holocene epoch and are now living in the Anthropocene epoch. Anthro for humans, meaning

the planet is marked irreversibly by human behavior. To make their case, the scientists had to find a spot on Earth that best preserved the evidence of the indelible impact that humans have had on the planet. And now they say they have found that very spot. It's a small lake outside Toronto. Francine McCarthy is a professor of earth sciences at Brock University in Ontario, who led the research group. She spoke with my colleague, Adrian Florido, and Adrian started out by asking Professor McCarthy what this lake in Canada, Crawford Lake, tells us about the influence of humans on this planet. So it is the sediments of that small lake that record things like the atmospheric pollution,

particularly from the combustion of fossil fuels. It records the testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. It records everything that went on on a yearly basis. Each layer is distinct from the one that was deposited the year before, like tree rings. So we can actually sample individual years of sediment and measure all sorts of aspects of that sediment to reconstruct what the world was like in 1945 or 1950 or 1955. And we know that dramatic change has happened in the early 1950s, not just at Crawford Lake, all around the world, but recorded there best.

You hinted at this, but when do you and your team consider this a new epic to have begun, the Anthropocene epic? Literally the year 1950 is what we've suggested. Well, not all scientists are in favor of establishing this new geologic epic. Some point to the fact that other epics haven't been named until thousands of years after they occurred. Is the last several decades enough, you think, to constitute an epic when others have been defined by millennia, by much longer time spans? That's certainly a question that we've gotten. I think what we respond is it's not how long the planet has been different that should matter to put a line on the time scale and and identify a new epoch it is how different the environment of the planet is from what it used to be lines on the geologic time scale are there to illustrate when massive things happen like when

the asteroid hit the planet and the dinosaurs and a bunch of other things became extinct that's a pretty obvious big thing it deserves a really big line on the on the time scale and that includes an era as well as the epic and period and so so on. So it is what happened then. It's not that it was 66 million years ago that matters. It's that massive changes happened to the entire planet. So what happens next, Professor? What has to happen to make this new epoch official? We're going to write up our proposal

that's going to include data from Crawford Lake and a few of the other sites that we studied along the way to make that strong case that the Earth system has shifted to the point that a new line on the timescale needs to be drawn. It's not our responsibility to do that, so we'll submit the proposal to the group that has that responsibility. They will assess the evidence and they will make a decision, yes or no. But either way, whether there is a new line on the timescale or not, opening up this conversation the way our activity has done in the last five years, looking for evidence of this major shift, I think that is the most important thing that we've done to get people talking about this. That was Francine McCarthy, a professor of earth sciences at Brock University in Ontario, speaking with NPR's Adrienne Florido. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.