Welcome To The Anthropocene

By about 1920, a fair majority of humans had come to understand just how big and impressive Earth really is.

We were awestruck, and rightly so - this joint is big and beautiful and all but eternal.

But the net result was to reinforce the idea that mere mortals couldn't fuck it up even if we tried.

So we tried.

And we fucked it up.

We're living in a real-time demonstration of The Tragedy Of the Commons, but that's a (slightly) different part of the story.

The official timeline of Earth’s history — from the oldest rocks to the‌ dinosaurs to the rise of primates, from the Paleozoic to the Jurassic and all points before and since — could soon include the age of nuclear weapons, human-caused climate change and the proliferation of plastics, garbage and concrete across the planet.

In short, the present.

Ten thousand years after our species began forming primitive agrarian societies, a panel of scientists on Saturday took a big step toward declaring a new interval of geologic time: the Anthropocene, the age of humans.

Our current geologic epoch, the Holocene, began 11,700 years ago with the end of the last big ice age. The panel’s roughly three dozen scholars appear close to recommending that, actually, we have spent the past few decades in a brand-new time unit, one characterized by human-induced, planetary-scale changes that are unfinished but very much underway.

“If you were around in 1920, your attitude would have been, ‘Nature’s too big for humans to influence,’” said Colin N. Waters, a geologist and chair of the Anthropocene Working Group, the panel that has been deliberating on the issue since 2009. The past century has upended that thinking, Dr. Waters said. “It’s been a shock event, a bit like an asteroid hitting the planet.”

The working group’s members on Saturday completed the first in a series of internal votes on details including when exactly they believe the Anthropocene began. Once these votes are finished, which could be by spring, the panel will submit its final proposal to three other committees of geologists whose votes will either make the Anthropocene official or reject it.

Sixty percent of each committee will need to approve the group’s proposal for it to advance to the next. If it fails in any of them, the Anthropocene might not have another chance to be ratified for years.

If it makes it all the way, though, geology’s amended timeline would officially recognize that humankind’s effects on the planet had been so consequential as to bring the previous chapter of Earth’s history to a close. It would acknowledge that these effects will be discernible in the rocks for millenniums.

“I teach the history of science — you know, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo,” said Francine McCarthy, an earth scientist at Brock University in Canada and member of the working group. “We’re actually doing it,” she said. “We’re living the history of science.”

Still, the knives are out for the Anthropocene, even though, or maybe because, we all have such firsthand familiarity with it.

Stanley C. Finney, the secretary general of the International Union of Geological Sciences, fears the Anthropocene has become a way for geologists to make a “political statement.”

Within the vast expanse of geologic time, he notes, the Anthropocene would be a blip of a blip of a blip. Other geologic time units are useful because they orient scientists in stretches of deep time that left no written records and sparse scientific observations. The Anthropocene, by contrast, would be a time in Earth’s history that humans have already been documenting extensively.

“For the human transformation, we don’t need those terminologies — we have exact years,” said Dr. Finney, whose committee would be the last to vote on the working group’s proposal if it gets that far.

Martin J. Head, a working group member and earth scientist at Brock University, argues declining to recognize the Anthropocene would have political reverberations, too.

“People would say, ‘Well, does that then mean the geological community is denying that we have changed the planet drastically?’” he said. “We would have to justify our decision either way.”

Philip L. Gibbard, a geologist at the University of Cambridge, is secretary general of another of the committees that will vote on the working group’s proposal. He has serious concerns about how the proposal is shaping up, concerns he believes the wider geological community shares.

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We Are The Stoopid Country

At the intersection of 

Fantasy

and

Too Fuckin' Stoopid To Live

ABC Channel 4 - Salt Lake City

UTAH COUNTY, Utah (ABC4) – A man has been arrested for the wildfire growing east of Springville after he allegedly told police he was using a lighter to burn a spider.

Fire personnel said when they first got to the fire around 5 p.m. Monday, they saw a man walking his dog up in the mountain where the fire had started.

According to the Utah County Sheriff’s Office, Cory Allan Martin, 26, told law enforcement that he was using a lighter to burn a spider. Martin said he started the fire by accident, setting some brush on fire.

“Not sure exactly why he felt the need to need to have to burn the spider but you know, all the regret in the world doesn’t change the outcome based on whatever reason there was for him doing that, said Utah County Sergeant Spencer Cannon.

Sgt. Cannon says he’s still scratching his head over the incident.

Following his arrest, deputies found marijuana and drug paraphernalia.

Martin was booked into Utah County Jail and is facing a drug possession charge and a reckless burning charge — which carries up to a year in prison and a fine of up to $2,500 dollars.

Carlin Was Right

How do we know the earth wasn't sitting around goin', "Y'know what I really want? Plastic."

The planet is fine. We're fucked, but the planet is just peachy dandy.

The Guardian:

Microplastics found deep in lungs of living people for first time

Particles discovered in tissue of 11 out of 13 patients undergoing surgery, with polypropylene and PET most common

Microplastic pollution has been discovered lodged deep in the lungs of living people for the first time. The particles were found in almost all the samples analysed.

The scientists said microplastic pollution was now ubiquitous across the planet, making human exposure unavoidable and meaning “there is an increasing concern regarding the hazards” to health.

Samples were taken from tissue removed from 13 patients undergoing surgery and microplastics were found in 11 cases. The most common particles were polypropylene, used in plastic packaging and pipes, and PET, used in bottles. Two previous studies had found microplastics at similarly high rates in lung tissue taken during autopsies.

People were already known to breathe in the tiny particles, as well as consuming them via food and water. Workers exposed to high levels of microplastics are also known to have developed disease.

Microplastics were detected in human blood for the first time in March, showing the particles can travel around the body and may lodge in organs. The impact on health is as yet unknown. But researchers are concerned as microplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory and air pollution particles are already known to enter the body and cause millions of early deaths a year.

“We did not expect to find the highest number of particles in the lower regions of the lungs, or particles of the sizes we found,” said Laura Sadofsky at Hull York medical school in the UK,a senior author of the study. “It is surprising as the airways are smaller in the lower parts of the lungs and we would have expected particles of these sizes to be filtered out or trapped before getting this deep.”

“This data provides an important advance in the field of air pollution, microplastics and human health,” she said. The information could be used to create realistic conditions for laboratory experiments to determine health impacts.

The research, which has been accepted for publication by the journal Science of the Total Environment, used samples of healthy lung tissue from next to the surgery targets. It analysed particles down to 0.003mm in size and used spectroscopy to identify the type of plastic. It also used control samples to account for the level of background contamination.

A 2021 study in Brazil on autopsy samples found microplastics in 13 of the 20 people analysed, whose average age was higher than those assessed by Sadofsky’s study. Polyethylene, used in plastic bags, was one of the most common particles. The researchers concluded: “Deleterious health outcomes may be related to … these contaminants in the respiratory system following inhalation.”

A US study of lung cancer patients in 1998 found plastic and plant fibres (such as cotton) in more than 100 samples. In cancerous tissue, 97% of samples contained the fibres and in non-cancerous samples, 83% were contaminated.

Huge amounts of plastic waste are dumped in the environment, and microplastics contaminate the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. Microplastics have been found in the placentas of pregnant women, and in pregnant rats they pass rapidly through the lungs into the hearts, brains and other organs of the foetuses.

A recent review assessed cancer risk and concluded: “More detailed research on how micro- and nanoplastics affect the structures and processes of the human body, and whether and how they can transform cells and induce carcinogenesis, is urgently needed, particularly in light of the exponential increase in plastic production.”