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- cross-posted to:
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12 scientists, some of which weren’t even supposed to be voting on the resolution since their terms were over, voted that the Anthropocene hasn’t started.
I think we can safely ignore this.
It sounds like most others will, too
FTA:
Even if the Anthropocene does not yet have an official place on the geologic time scale, the term will “continue to be used not only by earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large,” the statement from the geological union said. “It will remain an invaluable descriptor of human impact on the earth system.”
The statement did not directly address Dr. Zalasiewicz’s and Dr. Head’s concerns about the voting process. It said only that the committee members had acted with integrity and had wide expertise as geologists. “The scientific decision is clear, and the specialists do not see any value in adding a new epoch in the geological record,” the union’s president, John Ludden, said by email.
Even though the voting results have been declared valid, Dr. Head, an earth scientist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, said he expected the Anthropocene episode to prompt geologists to change their procedures for deciding on future updates to the time scale.
The vote, which a committee of around two dozen scholars held in February, brought an end to nearly 15 years of debate about whether to declare that our species had transformed the natural world so thoroughly since the 1950s as to have sent the planet into a new epoch of geologic time.
So, 24 people.
With the Anthropocene issue behind them, the keepers of the geologic timeline can now turn to other matters. Next on their agenda, among other things, is deciding precisely when the late Pleistocene epoch began.
Thank god we can finally get to the really important issues.
