The Human Planet: How We Created The Anthropocene

[kenneal - lagger]

I just read "The Human Planet: How We Created The Anthropocene" by Simon L Lewis and Mark A Maslin, two Earth Systems scientists. It explains how Homo Sapiens has changed the planet and set it on a different course to that which it would have gone forward on without the interference from the human race. There is also a technical discussion about which date to chose to set the start of the Anthropocene which is a little less interesting but, overall, I found the book fascinating.

At this time we should be entering the next ice age having had over 10,000 years of interglacial but the human invention of farming many thousands of years ago released enough carbon dioxide from former forest land to raise the temperature of the earth enough to prevent us slipping into the glacial period that the Milankovitch cycles predicted. Further the release of trillions of tonnes of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels has made it likely that the earth could get even hotter and destroy most life on earth, the sixth great extinction.

The date the authors prefer for the start of the Anthropocene is 1610 when there was a cooling in the earth's temperature caused by the loss of over 50 million people in the Americas from diseases imported by the Spaniards and the subsequent conversion of agricultural land back to tropical forest causing a dip in the CO2 content of the atmosphere and a cooling of the earth over a number of years. This cooling is noted in sediments and ice cores all across the earth and is their chosen Golden Spike to denote the start of the Anthropocene era.

[clv101]

Snap, I read this last week. They do a good job of placing humans in the Earth system.

[kenneal - lagger]

Seems a good pandemic in tropical areas with a few billion killed could cause a big enough reduction in agriculture and increase in forest cover which, with its subsequent uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere, could drop the earth's temperature by a degree or so for a few decades at least. Just what the earth doctor ordered!!

[emordnilap]

Seems a good pandemic in tropical areas with a few billion killed could cause a big enough reduction in agriculture and increase in forest cover which, with its subsequent uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere, could drop the earth's temperature by a degree or so for a few decades at least. Just what the earth doctor ordered!!

Surely better in a predominantly white area? Like the states, Europe, Australia etc - those are the people causing the problem.

[clv101]

Seems a good pandemic in tropical areas with a few billion killed could cause a big enough reduction in agriculture and increase in forest cover which, with its subsequent uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere, could drop the earth's temperature by a degree or so for a few decades at least. Just what the earth doctor ordered!!

Surely better in a predominantly white area? Like the states, Europe, Australia etc - those are the people causing the problem.

The point is in tropical areas biomass grows much faster, taking in much more CO2.

The population reduction in Europe with the black death wasn't as marked in the CO2 record party because higher latitude trees grow slower.

[emordnilap]

Well, all the brown people could move to cleared white areas and let nature take over where they once were.

🙄

[Little John]

Firstly, is CO2 production higher in white western countries per capita or in total per country?

Secondly, CO2 production is one of a number of issues facing the world. The other major issue is ecological degradation. Is this actually happening faster in white western countries than elsewhere? I suspect not. Or, at least, it wasn't until our governments embarked on an insane project to replace static and/or falling fertility levels with mass immigration.

[kenneal - lagger]

Well, all the brown people could move to cleared white areas and let nature take over where they once were.

🙄

It would be interesting to see what a study about the combined CO2 output from third world living plus the expanding population and land use changes was compared to first world living with a falling population.

This in no way is an excuse for our over the top lifestyles, the impact of which must be reduced, but it could put a new onus on reducing the population increase in the third world and their encroachment on forested areas. Mind you it is the whole world's increasing appetite for meat which is driving rainforest destruction in the South American rainforest and the similar appetite for vegetable oil which is the driver of destruction in the far east/Indonesia/Malaysia.

[vtsnowedin]

A while back the King ranch in Texas was up for sale due to the failure of a probate fight over a will. It occurred to me the government (USA or Israel) could buy it and give it to the Palestinians in the Gaza strip. At 825,000 acres it is nine times the size of the strip and has rivers and lakes plus some thousand working oil wells plus , crop land ,and cattle grazing. Much better land and better watered then the lands the Palestinians lost fighting with the Israelis but I doubt if the apartment dwellers in Gaza would move to a new land if they had to make their own way once there.

[Little John]

A while back the King ranch in Texas was up for sale due to the failure of a probate fight over a will. It occurred to me the government (USA or Israel) could buy it and give it to the Palestinians in the Gaza strip. At 825,000 acres it is nine times the size of the strip and has rivers and lakes plus some thousand working oil wells plus , crop land ,and cattle grazing. Much better land and better watered then the lands the Palestinians lost fighting with the Israelis but I doubt if the apartment dwellers in Gaza would move to a new land if they had to make their own way once there.

What utter, twisted, brainwashed bullshit. You are like a character out of "Starship Troopers". The shite you have just come out with would not have looked out of place coming out of the mouths of the Third Reich when talking about the Jewish "problem" in 1940.

And by the way. I do NOT expect this post to be deleted. This joker has just dehumanised an entire nation of people who are being driven to extinction. In that context, the above response is entirely appropriate.

[emordnilap]

A while back the King ranch in Texas was up for sale due to the failure of a probate fight over a will. It occurred to me the government (USA or Israel) could buy it and give it to the Palestinians in the Gaza strip. At 825,000 acres it is nine times the size of the strip and has rivers and lakes plus some thousand working oil wells plus , crop land ,and cattle grazing. Much better land and better watered then the lands the Palestinians lost fighting with the Israelis but I doubt if the apartment dwellers in Gaza would move to a new land if they had to make their own way once there.

The yanks are said to lack a sense of irony. Maybe in some cases.

More often, and more tragic, they mostly lack a sense of empathy.

[vtsnowedin]

A while back the King ranch in Texas was up for sale due to the failure of a probate fight over a will. It occurred to me the government (USA or Israel) could buy it and give it to the Palestinians in the Gaza strip. At 825,000 acres it is nine times the size of the strip and has rivers and lakes plus some thousand working oil wells plus , crop land ,and cattle grazing. Much better land and better watered then the lands the Palestinians lost fighting with the Israelis but I doubt if the apartment dwellers in Gaza would move to a new land if they had to make their own way once there.

The yanks are said to lack a sense of irony. Maybe in some cases.

More often, and more tragic, they mostly lack a sense of empathy.

Yes I have little empathy for someone whose grandfather lost a war and sits in an apartment paid for by welfare checks and has his obedient wife pop out seven children all with no prospect of a decent future.
Do I understand why he is angry? Yes.
Do I have a solution for him? NO.

[kenneal - lagger]

...... Yes I have little empathy for someone whose grandfather lost a war and sits in an apartment paid for by welfare checks and has his obedient wife pop out seven children all with no prospect of a decent future.
Do I understand why he is angry? Yes.
Do I have a solution for him? NO.

So you support ethnic cleansing then, VT? You support the rights of someone to invade a country, kick the inhabitants into a ghetto and slowing wring the life out of them?

Gazza isn't the only part of Palestine where the Israelis are kicking people off their land; it's happening on the West Bank as well where the Israelis have built a wall and are building houses for Jews only on land formerly owned for nearly two thousand years by Palestinians. Oh! Come to think of it; that is how the US was formed in the first place so there would be considerable support for the right to theft by conquest.

You had better build that wall along the Mexican border pretty quickly or the same thing will happen to you as happened to the Palestinians and the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

[vtsnowedin]

So you support ethnic cleansing then, VT?

I said I had no solution and certainly not that one.
Acquisition by conquest has been the rule of the world sense the stone age and it is only with the end of WW2 and the invention of nuclear war that we have tried to move away from it. Don't expect me to apologize for human history or shoulder the blame for current conditions.
Yes the Israelis have built a fence and closed the border with Gaza. What would you do if your neighbor kept firing rockets at your houses and schools?

[Little John]

It's not a "border", it's a prison perimeter. They are not "neighbours", they are prisoners. These things are literally true and to deny their literal reality requires a monumental level of imbecility, hypocrisy or straight up lying.