"The Anthropocene: Where on Earth are we going " by Will Steffen. Euroapeum Winter School 2022

Summary

In "The Anthropocene: Where on Earth Are We Going," Will Steffen delves into the concept of the Anthropocene, a term coined to describe the epoch in which human activity significantly impacts Earth's geology and ecosystems. The lecture discusses the historical context and evidence of human-driven change, emphasizing the 'Great Acceleration' of human activity post-1950. Steffen highlights the unprecedented rate of climate change, the transformation of the biosphere, and the dire consequences of continuing on our current trajectory. He calls for a shift in societal values towards a biosphere-centric approach, urging for systemic changes in global economic and governance systems. The talk concludes with reflections on indigenous perspectives, advocating for humanity's role as stewards of the Earth, aimed at balancing human activity with ecological well-being.

Highlights

• Will Steffen discusses the concept of the Anthropocene, highlighting its importance in understanding human impact on Earth 🌎.
• The 'Great Acceleration' post-1950 marks a sharp increase in human-induced changes, seen in population growth, GDP, and energy use 📈.
• Climate change is occurring at an unprecedented rate, faster than any known historical periods, raising alarm for global impacts ⚠️.
• Steffen underscores how biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation are central issues alongside climate challenges 🐝.
• He emphasizes the necessity of a paradigm shift in societal values, prioritizing ecological and social equity 🌱.
• The need for urgent action to mitigate climate change is highlighted, with a focus on avoiding critical tipping points 🕒.
• Steffen stresses on understanding and integrating indigenous knowledge and practices to foster sustainable living 🌏.
• The lecture calls for redefining economic and governance systems in more holistic earth-centric ways 🌐.

Key Takeaways

• The Anthropocene marks an epoch defined by human impact on Earth, highlighting our role in altering natural systems 🌍.
• Will Steffen emphasizes the 'Great Acceleration' post-1950, showing a rapid increase in human activity's impact 🚀.
• The lecture illustrates the unprecedented rate of climate change, drawing parallels to historical events like the extinction of dinosaurs 🌡️.
• Transformations in the biosphere are dire, with significant losses in biodiversity driven predominantly by human activities 🐾.
• Steffen argues for a critical shift in societal values towards more ecological and equitable global systems 🧠.
• The challenges posed by climate change require urgent systemic changes by 2040 to prevent potential tipping points 🔄.
• Recognition of existing inequalities within and between nations is crucial for addressing shared global environmental challenges 🤝.
• The talk concludes by advocating for approaches informed by indigenous perspectives on living sustainably with nature 🌿.

Overview

Will Steffen's lecture on the Anthropocene deftly portrays the humans' transformational impact on Earth's systems. He lays a strong foundation starting with the concept coined at the dawn of the 21st century, making a compelling case for how human activities have led to significant, measurable changes in the environment since the industrial revolution, peaking in the mid-20th century. With vivid graphs and historical context, Steffen reveals how these changes culminate in what we know as the 'Great Acceleration' — a rapid increase in population, economic growth, and resource consumption that has outpaced natural processes.

Steffen doesn't shy away from highlighting the dire consequences of this unchecked human impact. He discusses the unprecedented rate of climate change, backed by geological evidence, and explains how human activities are hastening biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation at alarming rates. His analysis extends to potential future scenarios, offering stark projections of temperature rise, which could potentially trigger destructive tipping points in Earth's climate systems. The message is clear: without immediate systemic and cultural shifts, humanity faces significant threats to its survival.

The lecture concludes with a stirring call for action, pointing towards indigenous knowledge and a biosphere-centric societal approach as crucial elements for future resilience. Steffen advocates for a reevaluation of economic and social structures, emphasizing equality and ecological integrity. This transformation requires profound changes in human values, moving away from anthropocentric views towards a sustainable coexistence with the planet. His insights challenge us to rethink our role and responsibility in safeguarding Earth's future, urging communities worldwide to engage deeply with these issues.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction The speaker introduces themselves from Australia, highlighting the seasonal difference as they are in summer while participating in a winter course. They note the time differences since it's evening in Australia. Despite the geographical and temporal differences, they emphasize that the discussions will focus on planetary issues, which transcend such boundaries.
• 00:30 - 01:00: The Interconnected Planet The chapter titled 'The Interconnected Planet' begins with an emphasis on the unity of Earth, stating that regardless of location—be it China, Australia, South America, or the ocean—we all inhabit the same planet. The speaker is preparing to share a presentation, typical for scientists, using PowerPoint slides featuring images and graphs to elucidate points about the interconnectedness of the planet. The attempt to share the screen is underway, setting the stage for a detailed visual explanation.
• 01:00 - 02:00: The Concept of the Anthropocene The chapter introduces the concept of the Anthropocene, highlighting our interconnectedness across the globe, as exemplified visually by the North Atlantic Ocean. The focus is on discussing the future of our planet in the context of this new geological epoch, indicative of significant human impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems.
• 02:00 - 03:00: Defining the Anthropocene The concept of the Anthropocene was introduced in 2000 by the late atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen. During an international meeting in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Crutzen addressed the notion that the Earth was experiencing significant changes. However, the narrative kept referring to the Holocene, a period representing the last 12,000 years of stable planetary conditions. Paul Crutzen interjected to suggest that the Earth is now entering a new epoch, the Anthropocene, marked by human impact on the planet.
• 03:00 - 04:00: The Great Acceleration The chapter titled 'The Great Acceleration' introduces a pivotal moment where an individual disrupts a meeting by declaring that humanity is no longer in the Holocene epoch, but rather in the 'Anthropocene.' This term, initially blurted out in a moment of desperation, has since become one of the most significant concepts in contemporary discourse. The chapter underscores the importance of defining the Anthropocene with a clear reference point, illustrating its integral role in understanding the rapid changes characterizing the 21st century.
• 04:00 - 05:00: Impact on Earth's Geosphere and Biosphere This chapter discusses the impact of climate changes on Earth's geosphere and biosphere. It highlights data from ice cores that show global average temperature changes over the past hundred thousand years. The chapter notes the erratic and generally cold climate until a significant warming trend occurred between twenty thousand to twelve thousand years ago. This period of more stable and moderate climate is identified by geologists as the Holocene epoch, which has been crucial for the development and sustainability of human civilization.
• 05:00 - 06:00: Climate Change Observations The chapter titled 'Climate Change Observations' discusses the evolution of human society from simple agricultural practices to the development of complex societies and cities, emphasizing how these advancements have shaped the world we live in today. It highlights the importance of maintaining a stable earth system for human well-being. The chapter also focuses on the studies conducted at the beginning of the 21st century, examining changes in humanity by looking into various aspects of human life and its impact on the environment.
• 06:00 - 07:00: Historical Context and CO2 Levels The chapter discusses the concept of the Anthropocene, a term popularized by Paul Crutzen, suggesting that a new geological epoch has begun due to human activity. The narrative begins in 1750, marking the start of the Industrial Revolution in England, which subsequently spread to Europe and globally, significantly impacting populations, economies, energy use, and more. The chapter sets the stage for understanding historical CO2 levels and their correlation with human development.
• 07:00 - 08:00: Rate of Change in Temperature and CO2 The chapter titled 'Rate of Change in Temperature and CO2' discusses the rapid increase in human activities and economic growth post-1950. It highlights how activities were relatively gradual until the mid-20th century, after which there was a significant explosion in GDP and other economic metrics. This period, known as the 'Great Acceleration' of human activity, is a focal point in this chapter.
• 08:00 - 09:00: Biosphere Transformation The chapter 'Biosphere Transformation' discusses the impact of human activities on the Earth system. While local environments have been affected for thousands of years by humans, the focus here is on the global scale. Researchers examined historical data starting from 1750 to understand the imprint of human actions on the Earth as a whole.
• 09:00 - 10:00: Human Domination of the Biosphere This chapter focuses on the dominance of humans over the biosphere. It introduces the concept of the geosphere, the non-living components of the earth system, including gases in the atmosphere such as stratospheric ozone, climate, and the ocean. It then differentiates this from the biosphere, the living components, including land, ocean, and coastal zones. The chapter highlights the observable changes in these systems, such as the increase in greenhouse gases and ocean acidity, as well as significant changes in the ocean biosphere due to human activities like aquaculture and fish capture. The shape of the environmental graphs reflects these impacts, illustrating the extent of human influence on the biosphere.
• 10:00 - 11:00: Anthropocene Biosphere In 'Anthropocene Biosphere,' the discussion centers on the significant changes that began occurring around 1950, which are starkly different from historical norms observed over the past 12,000 years during the Holocene epoch. Scientists aimed to establish two critical proofs: first, that these changes were unprecedented in the context of the Holocene's geological records; and second, that human activity was the driving force behind these changes. This points to a pivotal shift in the Earth's biosphere, marking the beginning of the Anthropocene era.
• 11:00 - 12:00: Holocene vs Anthropocene The chapter 'Holocene vs Anthropocene' discusses the transition from the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene. It highlights the evidence suggesting that the rapid changes on Earth are primarily driven by human activities rather than natural variability. This is supported by substantial data from both the social and natural sciences, indicating that human impact on the planet has been significant and occurs at an unprecedented scale and speed. This transition underpins the concept of the Anthropocene and marks a period where human activities have drastically altered the Earth's systems.
• 12:00 - 13:00: Geological Perspective on the Anthropocene The chapter discusses the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, emphasizing the significant changes in the Earth's climate and environment due to human activities. It highlights the shift from a stable Earth system that allowed human civilization to thrive, to a future fraught with uncertainty due to climate change. The chapter also presents actual observations of global average temperature starting from the 1850s, demonstrating the drastic changes in temperature, especially from the 1900s onwards, attributable to human actions.
• 13:00 - 14:00: Earth System Perspective This chapter discusses the change in Earth's climate since the mid-20th century, noting that the current global temperature is approximately 1.2 degrees Celsius above the late Holocene norm. This is contrasted against an ice age, which is about 4 degrees colder than a warm period, indicating that we are moving away from the stable climate conditions of the Holocene. The chapter places this change in a longer historical context using a 2,000-year baseline and references paleo reconstructions to illustrate climate changes over millennia.
• 14:00 - 15:00: Future Temperature Projections The chapter discusses future temperature projections, drawing on data sources such as pollen and ice cores. It highlights the stability of global temperatures over the past two thousand years, with only minor variations of one or two tenths of a degree during the Roman Empire era. However, in just a century, there has been a 1.2-degree rise, indicating significant human impact on Earth's system. The unprecedented temperature increase marks the era of the Anthropocene.
• 15:00 - 16:00: Tipping Points and Climate Risks The chapter titled 'Tipping Points and Climate Risks' discusses the unprecedented rate of temperature increase and climate change over a long historical period. It highlights how geologists have traced the recent surge in temperatures to the rapid rise in atmospheric CO2 levels. This increase in CO2, a critical greenhouse gas, is largely responsible for the changing temperatures as it absorbs outgoing heat in the atmosphere.
• 16:00 - 17:00: The Critical Decade The chapter discusses the rapid increase in global temperatures due to the greenhouse effect, a basic physics concept. It highlights the alarming rate at which carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have increased, particularly over the past few decades. Compared to the post-Ice Age period 20,000 years ago, when CO2 levels rose from 180 parts per million to 280 parts per million, the current rate of increase is described as one hundred times faster.
• 17:00 - 18:00: The Climate Emergency The chapter titled 'The Climate Emergency' discusses critical changes in the planet's climate patterns. It highlights alarming statistics, such as the increase of carbon dioxide levels to 415 parts per million, which is significantly higher than historical levels during the Holocene. This surpasses the natural variations seen between ice ages and warm periods, but in a direction leading to warming rather than cooling. Additionally, it notes that the global average temperature rise in the past fifty years is about 170 times faster than the natural background rate over the last 7,000 years. New findings by geologists emphasize the unprecedented speed and scale of these changes, pointing to a pressing climatic crisis.
• 18:00 - 19:00: Human Systems and Decisions In this chapter, the unprecedented nature of current CO2 and temperature changes is discussed. It is highlighted that the rapid rate of increase in these factors is nearly unmatched in Earth's 4.5 billion-year history. The only comparable event occurred 66 million years ago, when a meteorite impact led to a significant cooling of the planet, which ultimately contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs. This contrast emphasizes the alarming nature of the current climate change trend, as it represents the fastest known temperature rise.
• 19:00 - 20:00: Inequality and Social Outcomes The chapter 'Inequality and Social Outcomes' discusses the impact of human transformation on the biosphere and its implications for both environmental and human well-being. It highlights the importance of recognizing the biosphere as a crucial regulator of climate, which provides essential resources for human survival and development. The discussion emphasizes the need to consider both ecological and social factors in addressing climate challenges, underscoring the interconnectedness of environmental health and human inequality.
• 20:00 - 21:00: Systems View of Life This chapter covers a significant study conducted in 2019, likened to the IPCC but focused on the biosphere. The study is commonly referred to as IPBES. One of the key findings highlighted in the report is that nature is declining at unprecedented rates in human history, a decline attributed to the simplification and erosion of natural systems.
• 21:00 - 22:00: Economic Systems and Values The chapter discusses the biodiversity on Earth, emphasizing its vast diversity and the concerning rate at which it is decreasing. Approximately 1 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction, which could occur in a few decades. This is out of the 8 to 9 million known species. The key takeaway is the metaphor of the 'web of life' on Earth becoming smaller and increasingly frayed, highlighting that these changes are significant and concerning.
• 22:00 - 23:00: Donut Economics This chapter discusses the concept of 'Donut Economics' in the context of earth's systems and how human actions are contributing to changes in the biosphere. Climate change is recognized as a major factor, though direct human impact on the biosphere is currently more significant in driving changes. Historically, there have been five mass extinction events over the past 500 million years, but today, humanity is on the brink of initiating a sixth mass extinction. This impending event is unprecedented as it is primarily driven by human activity.
• 23:00 - 24:00: Legal and Governance Challenges The chapter discusses the unique impact humans have as a biological species on the Earth, unlike previous disruptions caused by geological events. It mentions the work of scientist Valclav Smil, who quantifies the extent of human-induced changes to both ourselves and the planet.
• 24:00 - 25:00: Conclusion: Indigenous Perspectives The chapter explores the overwhelming presence and impact of domesticated animals from an indigenous viewpoint. It emphasizes the staggering realization that two-thirds of the biomass of terrestrial vertebrates consists of humans and their domesticated animals, such as cattle, pigs, and chickens. This highlights significant environmental and ecological concerns from indigenous perspectives.
• 25:00 - 26:00: The Need for a Rethink The chapter titled 'The Need for a Rethink' highlights the overwhelming impact of humans on the terrestrial biosphere, pointing out that humans dominate to such an extent that all known wildlife (elephants, kangaroos, deer, etc.) only make up three percent of the land's biomass. This unprecedented domination requires reconsideration of our relationship with the natural world.

"The Anthropocene: Where on Earth are we going " by Will Steffen. Euroapeum Winter School 2022 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 you might guess i am coming to you from australia so um it's a bit odd for us to be involved in a winter course because we are in the middle of summer down here and it is about uh half past eight in the evening so uh we're on the other side of the planet but that's quite all right because we're talking about planetary issues and it doesn't matter whether we're sitting uh in europe
• 00:30 - 01:00 whether you're sitting in china australia south america whether you're out in the ocean somewhere it's all one planet which is what i want to talk about tonight so i'm going now to try to share screen because as usual being a scientist we have what we have powerpoint slides we like to show images graphs etc so please bear with me and i'll see if i can get this going uh it looks like it's coming up all right let's see if i can
• 01:00 - 01:30 uh get it up okay hopefully you're now seeing uh my screen with the introductory slide of our planet our future and you can see just from the slide there visually how interconnected we are particularly across the north atlantic ocean but what i really want to talk about now is where our future is going and i do want to start with a concept which you kindly already introduced which is that
• 01:30 - 02:00 concept of the anthropocene it was introduced in the year 2000 uh by the atmospheric uh chemist the late paul critzen and he made an interjection in a big international meeting uh that in fact was held in mexico in cuernavaca uh and he was listening to accounts of how the earth was changing but the speaker kept referring to the holocene which is the last 12 000 years a very stable planetary history and paul got
• 02:00 - 02:30 really upset he interjected stood up and sort of pounded his fist on the desk and said we aren't in the holocene anymore we're in the and you could hear him search you could see him search for a word he didn't have a word right then so he just sort of blurted out anthropocene and it's really stuck and as you all know it's become one of the most most important concepts of the 21st century so when we define the anthropocene we need a reference point and this is the
• 02:30 - 03:00 reference point we use this graph is global average temperature and it goes back hundred thousand years it comes from ice cores uh and we humans have been on the planet of course a hundred thousand four hundred thousand and more uh but notice how erratic and cold this climate is until a fairly steep warming trend from twenty thousand years ago to 12 000 years ago and this fairly even and steady climate is what's been called the holocene by the geologists this is the only state of the earth system that's allowed human population
• 03:00 - 03:30 to expand for us to develop agriculture complex societies villages cities and the world that we inhabit today so it's considered to be a really good state of the earth system for human well-being what we wanted to do when we were studying how the earth was changing at the beginning of this century we looked at how humanity was changing and we looked at several different facets of humans our
• 03:30 - 04:00 population our economy our energy use our resource use our telecommunications transport and we wanted to discover what what paul krutzen said is they're actually really data to back up this idea of the anthropocene so we started at 1750 because paul thought that the anthropocene must have begun with the beginning of the industrial revolution in england in the late 1700s spreading through europe and then around the rest of the world so we started our graphs at 1750
• 04:00 - 04:30 and we saw enormous increases in human numbers economy activities resources but it wasn't an even line we saw that things crept up until the middle of the 20th century and then around 1950 everything exploded everything took off and you can really see it in gdp the economy very small still and then this absolute explosion and eminent historian john mcneil has named this the great acceleration of human activity around the planet
• 04:30 - 05:00 but of course being natural scientists we were curious to see whether all is human activity whether we could actually see an imprint on the earth system as a whole not on the local environment we knew it was having impacts on local environment in fact humans for thousands of years have impacted local environments but we were really looking at the earth system as a whole so we did the same thing we took 12 little grafts started them in 1750 and this is what we came up with so the top
• 05:00 - 05:30 six are what we call the geosphere the non-living part of the earth system so if gases in the atmosphere stratospheric ozone climate ocean the bottom six are the biosphere the land the ocean the coastal zone now you can just look at the shape of these graphs whether it's increase in greenhouse gases temperature the acidity of the ocean or if you look at the biosphere how much we're changing the ocean biosphere in terms of aquaculture fish capture and so on
• 05:30 - 06:00 so what we can say is that again somewhere around 1950 many of these started to change in fact quite dramatically so we looked at that and said all right being scientists we had to prove two things one is that all of these are outside of the norms of the holocene for the last 12 000 years well we went back to geological records and we're pretty certain that these are outside of those norms second of all we had to prove that these were human
• 06:00 - 06:30 activities driving them and not natural variability and of course there was an enormous amount of evidence that that was the case so we made the link between the first 12 graphs and the second 12 graphs of the great acceleration this was really the basis for the anthropocene this was the solid evidence both from the social sciences and the natural sciences that we were indeed enormously changing the planet at the scale of the planet at rates that were extraordinarily rapid in other words this planetary sweet spot of the
• 06:30 - 07:00 holocene was back now in the rearview mirror we had left the state of the earth system in which we humans have thrived now we are facing in my view a very uncertain future so let's now look at climate change and look at the biosphere well here are actual observations of global average temperature we could start in the 1850s and as we got more instruments certainly from 1900 onwards you can see how radically temperature has changed again
• 07:00 - 07:30 since about the mid-20th century we are now about 1.2 degrees above the late holocene norm to put that in context an ice age is about 4 degrees colder than a warm period so we're already over a quarter of a way away from the stability of the holocene so it's moving in obviously in the opposite direction of an ice age to put this in a longer context here's a 2 000 year baseline this jagged uh blue line is one of the so-called reconstructions from paleo
• 07:30 - 08:00 data from pollen data ice cores and so on uh and there are four ways that this has been damaged they're all basically the same but notice that over the last two thousand years this is the ear of the roman empire uh for for in a european context the temperature only varied by one or two tenths of a degree right around the planet this is the 1.2 now that's occurred in only a century so this is the human influence on the earth system this is the anthropocene this temperature rises unprecedented over 2000 years and in
• 08:00 - 08:30 fact it's unprecedented over a much longer time frame so geologists have now gone back and looked at what this recent increase in temperature in climate actually looks like first of all they looked at the rate of atmospheric co2 increase co2 is the most important of the greenhouse gases that are driving this change in temperature these gases are increasing in concentration in the lower atmosphere they are absorbing outgoing
• 08:30 - 09:00 heat from the earth's surface and trapping more of it at the earth's surface raising the temperature this is basic physics uh that's but not been known for about two centuries but the speed at which this is occurring is phenomenal over the last couple of decades co2 is increasing about a hundred times the maximum rate the last time it increased rapidly which is when we came out of the last ice age 20 000 years ago then co2 went from about 180 parts per million during the ice age to 280 parts
• 09:00 - 09:30 per million which was the average over the holocene now it's 415 parts per million even greater than the difference between an ice age and a warm period but in the opposite direction last half century global average temperature has risen at a rate about 170 times the background rate over the last 7 000 years of the holocene and in the opposite direction the geologists just last year came up with an astounding uh finding these two rates the current rate
• 09:30 - 10:00 of co2 and temperature change is almost unprecedented in the entire history of our planet 4.5 billion years the only time geologists can find an instance when co2 and temperature are changing as rapidly was 66 million years ago when the meteorite struck and wiped out the dinosaurs uh and by the way that temperature change was in the opposite direction it was cooling so as far as we can see this is as fast as the temperature has ever risen in the history of our planet
• 10:00 - 10:30 this is an astounding finding it has enormous implications for the biosphere and of course for human well-being as well so that's the the climate system it gets a lot of attention but we need to talk also about the human transformation of the biosphere that's equally important it's a very important part of the earth system it's a regulator of climate that provides many of the resources that we humans need to survive and to thrive
• 10:30 - 11:00 so what's happening to the biosphere well there was a big study done equivalent to the ipcc for the biosphere in 2019 as a very long name you can read it on the bottom there but it's just called ip best for short and they had a number of what i call headline findings from their report nature is declining at rates unprecedented in human history such a general term we are simplifying and and leading to the decline of nature
• 11:00 - 11:30 its diversity its functioning and increasing at an increasing rate about 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction many within decades that's out of 8 or 9 million plant and animal species that we know of i think this last one is just sums it up really well the web of life on earth is getting smaller and it's getting increasingly frayed in other words getting more fragmented so these i think are at least as important in terms of changes that are happening
• 11:30 - 12:00 to the earth system as are the climate changes now interestingly climate is leading to some of these changes but even as we speak today the more dominant factor is direct human degradation of the biosphere climate change comes in as number two of course we've seen mass extinction events in the past there have been five of them in the last 500 million years but now we are entering the sixth mass extinction event but this is the first time that a mass extinction event has
• 12:00 - 12:30 been caused by a biological species that is humans all the others have been caused by geological events which caused big big big disruptions to the functioning of the earth system but this is the first time a biological species has actually caused this there's a scientist named valkov smil who does some very interesting work on trying to analyze and quantify how much humans are changing ourselves and the planet this
• 12:30 - 13:00 to me is staggering when you look at all the animals who live on the land that's terrestrial and all of them that have a backbone so it's mammals it's birds it's amphibians and it's reptiles and you add up their their mass their weight of all of them and then you look at the proportion two-thirds of it two-thirds of the weight of all vertebrate creatures on land are our domesticated animals cattle pigs chickens and so on we humans just our body weight account
• 13:00 - 13:30 for nearly a third of all the mass of all the living creatures on land all the wildlife that we know the elephants the kangaroos the deer all these they comprise in total three percent of the biomass on land that is how thoroughly humans now dominate the terrestrial biosphere nothing like this has ever happened in the history of earth before a colleague of mine mark williams who
• 13:30 - 14:00 works with geologists another paleo scientist and he specializes in the biosphere he's written a wonderful paper he and his colleagues call the anthropocene biosphere so what he tries to do is gather all sorts of information about how the biosphere is changing because of human activity and then compare it to longer term changes in the biosphere so here are his big findings we are homogenizing flora and fauna at an extraordinary rate in other words not
• 14:00 - 14:30 only are species going extinct we're mixing them a good example is my continent of australia come down here what do you see increasingly rabbits horses uh plants that have been brought in by europeans and are now competing and pushing out much of the native foreigner we are commandeering somewhere between 20 and 40 of the net primary productivity of the whole biosphere that is the energy that the biosphere produces every year through photosynthesis and that
• 14:30 - 15:00 keeps the entire biosphere healthy plants animals and everything but we are now taking up to 40 percent of that away from what the rest of nature needs and using it for our own needs we're directing the evolution of other species now through genetic engineering and we're increasingly changing the biosphere with the technosphere with with pollutants with all sorts of chemicals that we're pouring into the biosphere and mark and his colleagues reckon that this is a new third stage of
• 15:00 - 15:30 the evolution of the biosphere in earth history the first stage was when life appeared 3.5 to 4 billion years ago the second stage was when we went from simple single-celled organisms to complex organisms like ourselves but what we are doing is so profound that mark argues that this is now possibly the new third stage of evolution in the history of the biosphere on earth a good way of looking at what this holocene anthropocene biosphere really looks like is some work put together by
• 15:30 - 16:00 jaya savitsky it's really quite simple but extraordinarily profound again he looks at us humans we're driving the climate we're driving the biosphere changes it looks at three things our population our cumulative energy use and our gdp our economy this is the holocene 12 000 years to the present so for most of that we were just at zero this shaded area is from 1670 before just before the industrial revolution look at these enormous spikes
• 16:00 - 16:30 that's how much humanity has changed in a few centuries and then if you just expand from 1670 to the present you can see the right hand panel where again changes were occurring but very slowly till the mid 20th century and then the explosion of human activity so this is something extraordinary in the history of the planet now let me now move a little bit to the geologists because they have a strong role to play in the anthropocene when
• 16:30 - 17:00 paul krutzen uttered the word anthropocene at cornerback of mexico in february 2000 in his mind he already had a dual meeting for the anthropocene he was an atmospheric chemist he already had won a nobel prize for his work on the ozone hole so he was already thinking about the state of the earth system an earth system science view of the anthropocene referenced against the holocene but he also proposed from the very beginning that this should be a geological epoch that would terminate the holocene so we
• 17:00 - 17:30 had a dual uh uh meaning for the anthropocene well we in the earth system science community got took off with this very early on through the 2000s and so on developing the concept but it actually took the geologist a few a few years to sort of get their act together and join us and in 2009 the geological society of london formed a working group on the anthropocene it was formerly part of the subcommission on quaternary stratigraphy
• 17:30 - 18:00 so stratigraphy is looking at all the lathes the geological layers and teasing out when there were big changes in the earth in the deep past so this is the process that's required then to formalize the anthropocene in the geological time scale it has to go up through whoops a number of various working groups on stratigraphy and geology before it is formally approved we've passed one hurdle we've we've actually made the recommendation from
• 18:00 - 18:30 this anthropocene working group it's now up to that next group to look for a single core supported by 10 or 12 cores that will be the marker used for the anthropocene so the question we asked ourselves in terms of the formalization as a working group was should the anthropocene be formalized in the geological time scale is there enough geological evidence even though it would only be 70 years old that you know it's an enormously challenging thing to do and if there is should the base of the anthropocene that is the starting date
• 18:30 - 19:00 be placed around the mid 20th century around the night uh 1950 and the answer to that when we did our survey was yes by an overwhelming vote 29 to 4. that's about as close as you get to unanimous decision in anything in science so it was uh i we we think the evidence is absolutely overwhelming it's astoundingly so when you started looking the geologists were amazed when they started looking around they could see evidence of the anthropocene everywhere in cores in the bottom of the
• 19:00 - 19:30 ocean they could see it already starting to form in ice cores they could see it in soils all around the planet so the evidence is exceptionally strong that we are no longer in the holocene both from an earth system science point of view but also from a geological point of view so let me go a little bit more that into the earth system perspective because that fits in very well with the with the global theme uh that's our it's our global system we're worried about it's our global future we're worried about so
• 19:30 - 20:00 what i want to do now is put in perspective what this increase first of all in global temperature looks like that's similar to the 2000 year graph i showed earlier it's a different reconstruction again very steady temperature over 2000 years there's the human spike at the end of this but what i want to do now is look forward in time rather than back in time and look at what the ipcc are projecting and what that actually means so many of you may have seen the uh
• 20:00 - 20:30 sixth assessment report working group one which came out last year uh and they have several scenarios for possible temperature change up to 2100 and it depends on two things it depends on how much more we humans emit and it depends on the response of the earth system to the amount of additional greenhouse gas we emit so there's a huge range all the way from one degree to 5.7 degrees now you look at this and you look at a graph that's only one century from 2000 to
• 20:30 - 21:00 2100 it doesn't look very impressive to be honest when you look at these numbers they're pretty small but when you put it on a geological time frame a holocene anthropocene time frame it's quite dramatic so there's the graph we have there's two thousand years of holocene stability here's that spike it's going up to about here now now this is the year 2000 there's 1800 so 2100 is about here so when we put those ipcc projections on it looks like this this is where we're headed
• 21:00 - 21:30 and this is why a lot of earth system scientists we are really frightened about what's coming our way we haven't seen anything like this in earth history so here's the one degree and the 5.7 is up there so that's the range that we're headed for well do we have any good idea of where we actually might be going along that range well if we can meet the paris targets that's between 1.5 which is here and well below 2. so it's in here that's a huge challenge most of us who work in this space don't think we're
• 21:30 - 22:00 going to get there we don't we didn't have good enough pledges coming out of glasgow and countries are not living up to their pledges so what's the most likely temperature rise we think given the conditions now probably around three degrees if you took all the current policy settings of countries around the world and averaged out what the emissions would be it'll be somewhere around 2.7 to 3.1 degrees and of course if you hit four or five this is an existential challenge uh we
• 22:00 - 22:30 think it's probably not only possible but probable that the human civilizations that we enjoy today would collapse under that rate and magnitude of change in the climate system so what i want to talk about now is delving further into earth system science is that there is a risk that our emissions are not the only thing that are going to drive temperature rise there are aspects of the earth's system they're often called tipping points which could accelerate what the human
• 22:30 - 23:00 pressure is already doing and in the worst case scenario take the system out of our control we think at the lower paris target of 1.5 we're pretty sell safe from tipping points but the risk increases as we go forward and if we hit three which we're on track to now we think there's a very high probability that we will lose control of where the ear system is going and that would take us to higher temperatures of maybe four degrees or maybe even a little bit higher so what do these tipping points look
• 23:00 - 23:30 like they come in three different types they are the big ice sheets at both poles the west antarctic and east antarctic ice sheets greenland and the floating ice on the arctic ocean and there is some ice also frozen in the soil in northern siberia which has a tipping point they also are big biomes like the amazon forest or coral reefs or the great boreal forests of north america and eurasia and also they are circulation systems like the
• 23:30 - 24:00 north atlantic thermal halon circulation which is so important for northern europe but as shown here we can estimate where the risks of these are in terms of tipping them but most importantly these are linked like a row of dominoes when we start tipping one or two or three we may get the whole row going we think there's a moderate risk of large scale singular events or tipping points this comes from the ipcc special report of 1.5 already at one degree and a moderate high risk as we go uh to 24 2.5 degrees
• 24:00 - 24:30 or higher those of us who analyze this global tipping cascade i came to the conclusion that you know as we transgress to and go toward three degrees the it risks really go up that will start this we made an important comment if damaging tipping cascades can occur in a global tipping point cannot be ruled out this really is an existential threat to our civilization no amount of economic cost benefit analysis is going to help us
• 24:30 - 25:00 pulling out all the stops to stabilize the climate is the only thing that could help us we did a little cartoon in the 28 2018 paper that showed what this looks like so here's the ice age and here's the holocene a little warm period that sits in a valley in the so-called stability landscape it's a nice spot for humanity but we have already pushed the earth system out of the policy and we're now wandering away on a trajectory this is what the anthropocene really is toward
• 25:00 - 25:30 an uncertain future if we can really limit warming to between 1.5 and 2 and start restoring the biosphere we can generate what we call a state called stabilized earth it doesn't exist is it exists naturally in their system it's one created by humans and it's it's one in which we have to become stewards of the earth system and manage ourselves and the system properly but right now unfortunately we're on a different trajectory one that leads toward a cliff for a waterfall that's the tipping cascade that i talked about
• 25:30 - 26:00 and that would lead us to the four degree world that i mentioned before that we've nicknamed hot house earth so the point i want to make now is we are at a critical point this decade we're just starting now i think is going to be the difference between getting onto this trajectory or getting onto this one and by 2030 or 2035 it may be too late to turn back we'll be headed over the cliff no matter what so now from an engineering approach we can analyze what this climate
• 26:00 - 26:30 emergency really looks like and why we need to act really fast so when we look at what is our reaction time to get climate change or the earth system under control we can see that it's commonly 2050. a lot of countries have signed up to net zero by 2050. so that's when we're going to stabilize the climate a little bit thereafter but then we have to look at the reaction time for some of these tipping points when are we going to tip them arctic sea ice i've put zero years i
• 26:30 - 27:00 think we're sitting right at the tipping point now loss of that's accelerating in the northern hemisphere summer time we could be very pro very close to the time at which it's and it will inevitably go down to zero ice during the summer west antarctica maybe 10 years from now under present scenarios amazon forest maybe 15. and the big one the greenland ice sheet seven meters of sea level rise we could activate that in 20 or 25 years to a point of no return
• 27:00 - 27:30 all of these time frames are earlier than the net zero by 2030 when you start here at the year 2000 or actually no they're when you started 2020 by 2050 they're all within 30 years so the point is once you initiate three or four of those the tipping cascade could be underway so this is the real climate emergency this is why the students are right we are facing an emergency 2050 is too late we need to get to net zero uh by 2035 or 2040. uh
• 27:30 - 28:00 which really is an emergency situation and it raises the question are we already losing control of the system if we cannot stop these tipping points from tipping in time and here's our dilemma to get to net zero by 2040 or 2035 or even by 2050 look at the curve we have to bend these are observed emissions in tons of co2 per year starting at 1850 to the present they follow a curve that's mathematically very astute it's an
• 28:00 - 28:30 exponential growth curve at one point six five percent growth every year everything we've tried to do from ipcc assessments to kyoto pro protocol paris agreement has had no effect up till now that's the sobering truth now we have to drop this curve down say there's 20 40 20 50 or i have to drop it down to basically here in two or three decades one of the biggest challenges that humanity has faced but we're going to have to meet that one
• 28:30 - 29:00 okay i've talked a lot about the climate system i've talked a lot about the biosphere in the last 15 minutes or so of my talk i would actually like to talk about us humans and our systems because what happens to the climate system what happens to the biosphere now depends less on the natural dynamics of the earth system and more on us our systems and the decisions that we make so this is what the earth system looks like in 2020 a group of us published
• 29:00 - 29:30 this paper in nature to say we need to rethink actually how the earth system works for most of the time we thought the earth system conv consisted of a geosphere and a biosphere that interacted you can see all these boxes and lines i don't have to go through them and humans were a little part of the biosphere we were embedded here but now we've become so numerous and so powerful we have now given ourselves a sphere of our own the anthroposphere and so we are inter intricately connected with the
• 29:30 - 30:00 rest of the earth system directly through our production and consumption and energy systems but really importantly sitting behind this our knowledge our science our technology our political institutions our governance systems and sitting behind this is what i think is the ultimate challenge our cultures our values our beliefs so i think the future of of us humans and indeed the future of the earth system doesn't sit with scientists like myself it doesn't sit with the natural dynamics
• 30:00 - 30:30 of the earth system it sits with a really deep analysis of who we are what's important to us and how we can go forward in the future and that's something that all humans need to think about and all humans need to contribute to the solution so let's look a little bit more about this first thing i want to talk about are equity issues we've lumped all of humanity humanity together in the anthropocene and we've been heavily criticized by social sciences and rightly so from missing a
• 30:30 - 31:00 very big import which is the important issue which is the equity issue so what i've done here is taken these original 12 or actually 10 of them and split them into three groups of countries oecd wealthy countries the emerging economies russia china south africa and so on and the poorer ones and they're color-coded in darker medium and lighter shades look at the population from 1950 not much rise in oecd big rise in the emerging economies and the poor countries but look at the gdp out to 2010
• 31:00 - 31:30 three quarters of the global gdp was commandeered by twenty percent of the human population enormous inequalities and you can see it right throughout these other indicators so we have a big issue big issue here in how we deal with it but it gets really more interesting when you split the oecd countries to europe and japan so those of you sitting in barcelona and other places around europe and japan would fit in this graph i sit here in australia and here are my
• 31:30 - 32:00 colleagues in the english-speaking world what this graph is is from about 1900 and it's showing income inequality so if you take the top one percent of income earners in your country and say how much of the total income of the country do they actually command you see that in the beginning of the 20th century it was very unequal 18 to 20 percent and even higher in europe and japan sometimes 25 percent one percent of the population common during an entire quarter of the economy but notice how two world wars in the
• 32:00 - 32:30 great depression even things out in the english-speaking world and in europe but what has happened post-1950 is really interesting europe and japan have managed to keep a very high level of income equality where the top people are only commandeering six to eight maybe ten percent but look at the english-speaking world and look at the usa uh it's going to really strong income inequality in those countries and you say why is that important it's important
• 32:30 - 33:00 because of the social outcomes there's some extraordinarily interesting work by kate pickett and richard wilkinson in the uk it's looking at social problems that affect wealthy countries so these aren't related to poverty homicides imprisonment teenage births obesity which is a big one now mental illness alcohol addiction they afflict afflict wealthy countries then when you look at income inequality and the index of these social issues you
• 33:00 - 33:30 find an extraordinarily tight correlation to be honest i was stunned when i saw this i couldn't believe that it went right across cultures went right across language groups went right across continents but it showed quite clearly the english-speaking countries clustered here portugal was the only european country up there not surprisingly the best countries were japan and the scandinavian countries and the other european countries were down here so inequality leads to huge problems
• 33:30 - 34:00 socially they actually lead to huge problems in terms of energy use as well but notice the usa is so bad that it's the only country that's actually off the map so they have some very big issues that they need to deal with this gets on to a deeper issue and that's the system's view of life the fact that we are part of this earth system just as i showed you in that box and arrow diagram we are an integral part of the system our well-being is linked to the well-being of the planet and now in the anthropocene the well-being of the planet is linked to
• 34:00 - 34:30 our well-being and so these two uh philosophers uh and so and system scientists looked at a systems view of life starting from the first life four billion years ago all the way up to our present uh situation where humanity is dominating and look from assistant's point of view how life operates how it's evolved how it interacts with the rest of the earth system and then it looked at our present system our present socio-economic system up from the mid-20th century onwards and
• 34:30 - 35:00 they came up with a pretty damning conclusion our world today is dominated by a global economic system with disastrous social and environmental impacts and they called it predatory capitalism and they noted we are the only species on earth that destroys its own habitat threatening countless other species with extinction in the process and they're not alone there's a growing literature in the social sciences and humanities that are really questioning not only the nuts and bolts of our economic system but the values that
• 35:00 - 35:30 stand behind it and more and more analysts are calling for fundamental shifts in our systems all the way back to our core beliefs core values and so on there's some more practical solutions too that bring in the planetary boundaries which were mentioned in the introduction and the most innovative one i think comes from kate rayworth from oxford university who's an economist and and she's developed a thing called donut economics a safe and just space for humanity it's
• 35:30 - 36:00 incredibly simple and robust but i think incredibly profound at the same time she says what we need to do is there's a social floor foundation that we all aim for we want to have good food good health we're going now for better gender social equality jobs resilience income all the things that make for a healthy well-functioning society but what we forget or what our economic system totally misses completely misses and our
• 36:00 - 36:30 government system too is that the earth system prov actually enforces an environmental ceiling ornis it is a finite planet that's what we earth system scientists are now saying that's what we're saying through the anthropocene we have breached this environmental ceiling and we're just destabilizing the entire planet but we need to define the environmental ceiling and that's where the planetary boundaries come in so a group of us have developed this this framework where we look at the earth system in terms of nine big components which
• 36:30 - 37:00 together interacting can define the earth's system in fact we go a little bit simpler than that we say three of them are really the big core boundaries and they are climate change biosphere integrity or biosphere loss here and what we call novel entities which are pollutants chemical pollution and so on why do we say those three because each one of those on their own could push the earth system into an entirely different state the other ones feed into
• 37:00 - 37:30 those three but it's a very powerful and i think very robust framework that gives us some guidelines for how far we can push the earth system and how far we can well to make a long story short we are transgressing seven out of nine boundaries all three of the core boundaries so the question isn't staying within our environmental ceiling the question is getting back to within our environmental ceiling which means we need to become an economy a society that not only stops the degradation but
• 37:30 - 38:00 starts restoring the biosphere and so on we need to completely turn around our economic system now she put okay put up seven principles i think three of them are really important systems thinking we need to get away from cause effect simplistic system that simplistic systems which dominates our thinking particular economic thinking it's dynamic complexity that we need but these two are important our societies need to be we need to become much more
• 38:00 - 38:30 equal by design not by governments having to redistribute incomes after the fact the whole economic system should deliver equity more equity by design and this is the one i think is really important we don't need we shouldn't be having to set aside special areas or national parks we should be regenerating the whole biosphere by design our economy should do it naturally not exploit it if i had my way i'd get get rid of the word resource or natural resource it's a disaster our planet is not a natural
• 38:30 - 39:00 resource it's a life support system and unless we get that through our heads and get that embedded in our value system and in our governance and economic systems we aren't going to solve this problem and that's what kate's doing saying we'd have to completely revamp our economic system along the lines that she's recommending there and to do that we need a different value system and that's where philosophers come in there's a lot of good information out there from that community but i want to quote one here from a
• 39:00 - 39:30 colleague that oftentimes works with us down here in canberra uh depe de pasch chakrabarti and he's saying our problem now is that we're a homocentric society we're centered around humans it's all about us how wealthy can we get can we go over in my case can we go over to europe for a holiday or you know can we uh like some wealthy americans shoot ourselves out into space and see what the earth system really looks like unfortunately it hasn't sunk into them i think what they're actually doing but he's saying contemporary society is
• 39:30 - 40:00 based on a homocentric approach but the anthropocene now demands a zoo-centric approach it's not about us it's about life it should be life-centric and we should value all of life on the planet there should not be a premium put on human life we're part of this system uh and dipash puts it really well he says look we are we are really plagued by departmental thinking when you look at it the whole economic system is departmental thinking the whole governance system of the planet is
• 40:00 - 40:30 departmental thinking that's what nation states are they're departments now they're we're learning how to work together but we have a long way to go but what we need is the apocalypse consciousness i just want to throw in here a really interesting idea from one of my colleagues in portugal named paolo maguelas who's a legal scholar and he thinks the whole problem boils down to this our view of the earth is one in which we split it up all right
• 40:30 - 41:00 you're sitting in spain you've got portugal nearby you've got france nearby europe has split up into countries and we fight over that russia and ukraine are now having a bit of a spot about what those two provinces should be in ukraine ukraine should they be independent should there be russian and this happens around the world so it's the physical earth we're splitting up and now we're starting to do it with the oceans yeah ocean zones that are uh belonging to countries they can fish there and so on but paulo says this is
• 41:00 - 41:30 totally wrong what we need to do is legalize and recognize the earth system the intangible system the flow of energy materials and so on that makes the light this planet habitable that's why we can live on it we don't even recognize it legally we exploit it is something we can make money off of rather than our whole life support system that we need to protect but i think his idea is simple but it's also it's also a genius he really really is saying if we don't start legally recognize our own life
• 41:30 - 42:00 support system will never solve this problem so that's what dipash is saying we need to get epochal consciousness which completely changes how we think about governance how we think about national borders how we think about us as a species and if we don't do that we're not going to have a very good chance of stabilizing the planet and if we get the the tipping cascade going it's pretty much game over uh we'd be pretty lucky to keep one billion people one billion people alive uh if we go through a tipping cascade that's an existential
• 42:00 - 42:30 threat i'm going to conclude my talk and hopefully leave some time for discussion because um i think we were an extraordinarily interesting situation in australia we have the longest living culture on earth indigenous australians came here at least 65 000 years ago maybe earlier the european invasion actually has now sputtered to a halt 35 percent of australia now has gone back into indigenous hands they are actually controlling it and managing it uh and us
• 42:30 - 43:00 white fellas are actually trying to learn from them to help manage the rest of it but they have an extraordinarily different and very robust view about the role of humans on the earth and they say one of the one of their elders from western australia says we're only here for a short amount of time to do what we've been put to do which isn't to make up a bucket load of money and travel around the world and so on it's to look after country country is the aboriginal word for the whole
• 43:00 - 43:30 complex environment in which we live they simply call it country we're only a tool in the cycle of things notice they understood systems even back then we're only a tool in the cycle of things we go out into the world and help keep the balance of nature it's a big cycle of living with the land and then eventually going back to it so for the for the view of indigenous australians this is what humanity ought to be doing and this is what our goal is we need to hit that sweet spot of having very good lifestyles
• 43:30 - 44:00 lifestyles which we have healthy lives good interaction with our fellow humans but really importantly reconnecting with the biosphere reconnecting with the rest of life on on this planet that's really what the anthropocene is saying now i'm throwing you saying going back to paul pritz and he's saying well i recall i'll just close on a little vignette i worked a lot with paul after he put the term out uh and um we were we had adjacent offices in when i was working in stockholm sweden and he came in and he sort of threw his hands up when he saw the latest data come in and he sort of
• 44:00 - 44:30 looked at me says what are you going to do here he said we've got at that time i think it was 6 billion we got 6 billion hyperactive monkeys running around this planet wreaking havoc how we're going to get them under control so that was his sort of humorous view of where we were but it was sort of a pretty brutal view too of um really who we are so ultimately that's what we have to do and that's why our planet our future is so really important we have to do a complete rethink of our future on this planet so thank
• 44:30 - 45:00 you very much for allowing me so much time it's obviously one of my favorite topics and i hope it gives you some ideas that you can talk about over the next three or four days