The Anthropocene may be an event, not an era

An informative article by Peter Brannen in The Atlantic contrasts the plausible duration of the geological evidence of human civilization against the scale at which we normally designate geological epochs. It suggests convincingly that the idea of an Anthropocene epoch is misplaced:

What humans are doing on the planet, then, unless we endure for millions to tens of millions of years, is extremely transient. In fact, there exists a better word in geology than epoch to describe our moment in the sun thus far: event. Indeed, there have been many similarly disruptive, rapid, and unusual episodes scattered throughout Earth history — wild climate fluctuations, dramatic sea-level rises and falls, global ocean-chemistry disasters, and biodiversity catastrophes. They appear as strange lines in the rock, but no one calls them epochs. Some reach the arbitrary threshold of “mass extinction,” but many have no name. Moreover, lasting only a few tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years in duration, they’re all considered events. In our marathon of Earth history, the epochs would occasionally pass by on the side of the road like towns, while these point-like “events” would present themselves to us only fleetingly, like pebbles underfoot.

Fifty-six million years ago, the Earth belched 5,000 gigatons of carbon (the equivalent of burning all our fossil-fuel reserves) over roughly 5,000 years into the oceans and atmosphere, and the planet warmed 5 to 8 degrees Celsius. The warming set off megafloods and storms, and wiped out coral reefs globally. It took the planet more than 150,000 years to cool off. But this “Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum” is considered an event.

Thirty-eight million years before that, buried in the backwaters of the late Cretaceous, CO2 jumped as many as 2,400 parts per million, the planet warmed perhaps 8 degrees Celsius, the ocean lost half its oxygen (in our own time, the ocean has lost a — still alarming — 2 percent of its oxygen), and seawater reached 36 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit) over much of the globe. Extinction swept through the seas. In all, it took more than half a million years. This was Cretaceous Oceanic Anoxic Event 2. Though it was no epoch, if you had been born 200,000 years into this event, you’d die roughly 300,000 years before it was over.

A similar catastrophe struck 28 million years before, in the early Cretaceous, and again 60 million years earlier still in the Jurassic. And, again, 201 million years ago. And halfway through the Triassic, 234 million years ago. And 250 million, 252 million, and 262 million years ago. The first major mass extinction, 445 million years ago, took place in multiple pulses across a million years. An event. The second major mass extinction, 70 million years later, took place over 600,000 years — 400,000 years longer than the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. These are transformative, planet-changing paroxysms that last on the order of hundreds of thousands of years, reroute the trajectory of life, and leave little more than strange black lines in the rocks, buried within giant stacks of rocks that make up the broader epochs. But none of them constitute epochs in and of themselves. All were events, and all — at only a few tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands of years — were blisteringly short.

Until we prove ourselves capable of an Anthropocene worthy of the name, perhaps we should more humbly refer to this provisional moment of Earth history that we’re living through as we do the many other disruptive spasms in Earth history. Though dreadfully less catchy, perhaps we could call it the “Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum.” After all, though the mammoths are gone, their Ice Age is only on hold, delayed as it is for a few tens of thousands of years by the coming greenhouse fever. Or perhaps we’re living through the “Pleistocene Carbon Isotope Excursion,” as we call many of the mysterious global paroxysms from the earliest era of animal life, the Paleozoic. Or maybe we’re even at the dawning of the “Quaternary Anoxic Event” or, God forbid, the “End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction” if shit really hits the fan in the next few centuries. But please, not the Anthropocene. You wouldn’t stand next to a T. rex being vaporized 66 million years ago and be tempted to announce to the dawning of the hour-long Asteroidocene. You would at least wait for the dust to settle before declaring the dawn of the age of mammals.

Instead of our cities or our plastics or our radioactive isotopes, the author suggests: “The most enduring geological legacy, instead, will be the extinctions we cause.” Humanity’s impact may be more perceptible in what we have taken away from the totality of life, instead of in what we have built or even the pollution we created.

Related:

Nuclear papers

Over the years I have written a variety of academic papers on various aspects of nuclear weapons and nuclear power:

1) Written for an undergrad international relations course at UBC and subsequently published in a journal and given an award:

The Space Race as ‘Primitive’ Warfare.UBC Journal of International Affairs. 2005. p. 19-28.

2) Written during my M.Phil at Oxford:

Climate Change, Energy Security, and Nuclear Power.St. Antony’s International Review. Volume 4, Number 2, February 2009. p. 92-112.

3) Written as part of my PhD coursework at U of T:

Climate change and nuclear power in Ontario (self-published on Academia.edu)

Canada’s mixed nuclear policy experiences.

Shuttle lesson: no crew capsule on the side designs

Of course, the Columbia and Challenger accidents have reminded us we need to be ever vigilant. Despite more than two years of careful work to prevent foam shedding from the shuttle’s main tank, my STS-114 mission lost a large piece of foam on ascent, in a circumstance very similar to what happened to Columbia on STS-107. Preventing foam loss was a top objective for the return-to-flight effort, and while this turned out to be an embarrassment, I believe it sent a clear message—future boosters and spacecraft should be designed to protect the ship’s reentry system (the heatshield) because rockets will always shed “stuff” like insulation and ice during the tumultuous minutes of ascent to orbit. This is why we will see future spacecraft designed with the reentry ship on the top of the rocket, rather than beside it, as was the case with the space shuttle. The STS-114 incident was a very sobering reminder that a complex system like the shuttle can never be made completely safe, despite everyone’s best efforts. Our future space travelers will be safer due to the lessons learned from the shuttle missions.

Leinbach, Michael and Jonathan Ward. Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew. Arcade Publishing; New York. 2018. p. 294

The monarchy and Canada’s Indigenous relationships

John Fraser, former head of Massey College, has an article in today’s National Post: Canada’s First Nations and the Queen have a kinship like no other.

I’d like to see a rebuttal from someone like Pamela Palmater. Personally I think it’s rather questionable to be upholding the idea that the crown has behaved honourably less than four years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada finished its work.

The CIA holding out on the FBI before 9/11

The [redacted by the CIA] picture [of Khallad, alias of Walid bin Attash] had been in the CIA’s possession when Steve Bongardt and the Cole team had been shown the [redacted] three pictures on June 11, 2011. If it has been shown to the Cole team, Steve and the other agents would have identified the man in the picture as Khallad. We knew exactly what Khallad looked like from the Cole investigation. And if we had learned that the CIA had had a picture of Khallad in June 2001, and had been monitoring him, we would have gone straight to headquarters saying that the CIA had lied about not knowing about Khallad, and we would have demanded that they hand over the information.

If that had happened, at a minimum, Khalid al-Mindhar would not have been allowed to just walk into the United States on July 4, 2001, and Nawaf al-Hazmi, [Mohammed] Atta’s deputy, would have been arrested. At a minimum.

Soufan, Ali H. The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda. 2011. p. 296

Blown by Cheney’s office

‘So let me get this right,’ I said. ‘I am one of less than a handful of people working inside al-Qaeda for Western governments. I have identified senior leaders, was on the inside of plots in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and provided the only intel you have on al-Qaeda’s WMD programme. And in my spare time I tracked networks here in England, a job that’s more urgent now.

‘And MI6 thought my work was so important that you shared it with the CIA, which then took it to the White House, which then gave it to a journalist. Which means you now have one fewer than a handful of agents inside the world’s most dangerous terrorist group.’

It was useless. I knew MI6 was not responsible for the leak; there was a bigger play going on. The British liked to show the US they punched above their weight, still brought gold to the table, still knew how to deploy and gather human intelligence better than anyone. In the process, they shared information that was thrown into the roulette wheel of leaks and spin for which the US government was notorious.

Dean, Aimen with Tim Lister and Paul Cruickshank. Nine Lives: My time as the West’s top spy inside al-Qaeda. 2018. p. 322

Our generalization defect

One big surprise from Michael Leinbach and Jonathan Ward’s Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew is the claim that people at NASA hadn’t anticipated the catastrophic loss of a Shuttle during reentry. That despite of the delicacy of the thermal protective tiles and the fatal consequences expected from their failure, the lack of engines and thus any way to salvage a single failed landing attempt, and the long period of commitment to a particular landing site from deorbit burn to touchdown. The lesson drawn from Challenger, in spite of all the training of all the people at NASA in statistics and rigour, is that ‘these things fail during liftoff’ — a bit of a mad generalization for a vehicle built to take the crew through a series of environments, each of which would almost immediately kill them without technological protection, from the extremely high pressure from drag at max-Q during liftoff, through the fatal vacuum of space, through fiery reentry through plasma above mach 18 to an unpowered glider landing. Assuming that the first thing that went fatally wrong would be the standard is like getting on the back of a charging bull covered in poison-tipped spines in the middle of a minefield and thinking: “This is the one that kills you by stomping on your head”.

One small quibble: the subtitle of this book is misleading. I expected it to be much more about Columbia’s crew and final mission, whereas the bulk of it is about the debris recovery efforts across the country after the shuttle disintegrated.

Search Canada’s Parliamentary record

Tanya Whyte, one of my classmates at U of T, has been integrally involved in setting up Lipad: a searchable online database of everything said in Canada’s Parliament since 1901.

It’s sure to be valuable to everyone from elementary school students researching projects to academic researchers, journalists, and politicians.

There was a segment about it on TVO yesterday: Every Parliamentary Word Ever Spoken.

Incidentally, it seems that perhaps the first reference to climate change in Parliament was Cyril Lloyd Francis (Liberal) in 1974. Admittedly, it doesn’t discuss anthropogenic climate change, but simply the possibility that the climate will revert of its own accord to something less accommodating for humanity. Nonetheless, some of the predicted consequences align with what we now expect from continuing with unfettered fossil fuel burning.

What it’s like to hear but not see the Toronto Air Show

A tweet of mine, written in a moment of irritability aggravated by the sound of jets roaring overhead, has gotten some attention by virtue of being incorporated into some news articles about social media commentary on the Toronto Air Show.

In addition to my standard gripes about the wastefulness of jet engine use, the undesirability of unwanted background noise, and the militarism embodied in combat aircraft development, I suggested that there are people in Toronto who find the experience of being a bystander during the noise as troubling or a reminder of trauma, having heard military jets operating at close quarters during any number of recent conflicts, from Gaza to Afghanistan to Yemen, or during interception flights carried out by domestic air forces.

A disturbing amount of the response on Twitter expressed anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly an assertion that (a) people who have experienced conflict and now live in Toronto now live in preferable life circumstances and therefore (b) they owe certain moral obligations to people who previously lived in the place they now inhabit, to wit just lumping it and not complaining while these acrobatic displays are put on. To some extent my interpretation of the comments was inevitably coloured by Twitter’s reputation as an especially hostile and personal platform, but I think even when viewed with as much objectivity as can be mustered they brought unnecessary hostility to a discussion ultimately about public policy, specifically whether such spectacles should continue.

It’s entirely fair to criticize me for assuming what somebody else’s life experience would mean, in terms of their experience of these noises. That being said, the basic parameters of something like post-traumatic stress disorder are publicly known and it seems plausible to me that anyone who has traumatic memories of being close to combat in which jets operated (whether as a soldier or a civilian) would have some chance of being triggered by the sound of an air show. Given the population of Toronto, it’s plausible that hundreds of people with PTSD are within earshot of each loud noise made by flying aircraft. It’s much more speculative, but I have also wondered about the number of people who can have panic attracts triggered by a stimulus like a jet engine sound find it triggering due to associations they have made through fiction, specifically quasi-realistic military computer games and films which realistically depict violence like Saving Private Ryan. Statistically very few people, even during times of mass conscription, faced intense combat of the kind depicted in the film, but probably a majority of the adult population has now seen multiple detailed immersive representations, whether through films like Spielberg’s or depictions like HBO’s Generation Kill or Band of Brothers.

I don’t want to suggest that it’s the same thing at all, but I have my own negative associations with hearing but not seeing military jets at low altitude nearby, as I lived in North Oxford within earshot of at least some of the approaches to RAF Brize Norton and we used to listen to Vickers refuelling aircraft and B-52s flying in at all times of day and night (familiar eventually in their shrieks and rumbles) and speculate about whether they were coming back from Iraq or from Afghanistan, maybe carrying coffins.

I don’t think social media griping is going to lead to the abolition of the airshow, but I do think it’s a good thing to have a public dialog about what people in the city are going through in terms of their mental health and the choices we make together affecting it.

Those with any opinions on the matter are invited to comment, anonymously if you like.