It's Official: The Anthropocene Is As Dead As Monty Python's Parrot

In other words, for the benefit of those who might even now still harbour some hope of having the Anthropocene officially recognised as a new geological epoch to end the Holocene, it is dead beyond all doubt, in fact it is this dead:

“This parrot is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late parrot! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies! It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot!”

They tried, bless them, even up until the very last moment, to have their beloved parrot officially declared to be live, but it was not to be:

Earlier this month we heard that the International Union of Geological Sciences commission on the Anthropocene voted not to declare that the Earth  had entered a new epoch of geological time: neither now or in 1950.

The reporting at that time included that the chair and the vice-chair of the commission both objected to the vote. “Even so, it was unclear Tuesday morning [March 5^th] whether the results stood as a conclusive rejection or whether they might still be challenged or appealed. In an email to The Times, the committee’s chair, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, said there were “some procedural issues to consider” but declined to discuss them further. Dr. Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester, has expressed support for canonizing the Anthropocene.”

The NY Times has an update on the issue:

“March 20, 2024Updated 11:22 a.m. ET

The highest governing body in geology has upheld a contested vote by scientists against adding the Anthropocene, or human age, to the official timeline of Earth’s history.

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.”

Despite the continued objections of Dr. Zalasiewicz and his vice-chair, Martin J. Head:

 “…the committee’s parent body, the International Union of Geological Sciences, has decided the results will stand, the union’s executive committee said in a statement on Wednesday.

That means it’s official. Our planet, at least for the time being, is still in the Holocene epoch, which began 11,700 years ago with the most recent melting of the ice sheets.”

This is quite significant; it means science and hard data have triumphed over ideology and it means that a central plank of the Climate Catastrophism theological doctrine has failed.

The Anthropoceenies were losing it back in 2018, as I reported on at the time. You can see how absurd, irrational, unscientific and lacking in evidence their arguments were for declaring a new geological epoch in the first place:

The climate change convinced dared to dream a dream: that human beings, single-handedly, uniquely, in the 4.2 billion year geological history of planet Earth, had, some time within the last few hundred years, initiated a new geological epoch they dubbed the Anthropocene. They have lovingly nurtured their dream for nearly two decades now, eagerly anticipating the day when it would finally be officially accepted as the most recent geological epoch, the one which ended the (natural) Holocene, replacing it with the decidedly unnatural, man-made Anthropocene.

It already wasn’t looking that good for the Anthropocene to be honest. It had many critics among geologists especially, then along came this excoriating article recently by Mark Sagoff of George Mason University who renamed it, rather aptly and somewhat amusingly, the Narcisscene. As Sagoff points out pertinently in his article:

Geologic epochs typically last around three million years. In establishing them, the ICS has historically proceeded by first identifying a stratum or “chronostratigraphic unit,” which is usually categorized in terms of the fossils it contains. By figuring out how long fossil layers took to accumulate, geologists date them and derive the geologic time scale, which is used to estimate the age of the Earth.

By contrast, in convening the AWG to determine the onset of the Anthropocene, the ICS apparently abandoned this practice, instead presuming that the new epoch had already begun and then casting about for a fossil record or other stratigraphic evidence of the existence of the Anthropocene and of when exactly it began.

This has been the main bone of contention among opponents of the Anthropocene; the fact that it cannot be defined conventionally according to evidence dug up from the past, i.e. a clearly defined stratigraphic layer of fossilised remains and mineral deposits combined with the palaeo-climatological evidence of the changing climate and the abrupt increase in CO2 from ice cores. Anthropoceenies have countered with various arguments re. the onset of farming, mass tree felling/land clearance, nuclear tests and most recently the widespread problem of plastic rubbish floating around in our oceans. These things, they contest, will demarcate the beginning of the Anthropocene once they’ve been squished down into a thin layer by Mother Nature and buried beneath more recent deposits. But Anthropoceenies can’t wait that long so they ask us to suspend our scepticism and basically imagine that in several millennia from now, the incontrovertible evidence for a new geological epoch will be there, in the hard geological record; a globally identifiable, well-defined, stratigraphic layer. Meanwhile, they can flaunt their new epoch to politicians and policy-makers as ‘evidence’ that humans are indeed profoundly affecting the planet and that we must do something about it.

It’s over now. The Anthropocene is dead. Long live the Holocene - because the alternative has limited appeal (a new ice age).

Pray for Professor Mark Maslin - he must surely have run out of toys to throw out of his pram by now:

Holocene working group screw over Anthropocene Working Group by defining today as the Meghalayan Stage the lower boundary defined at a specific level in a stalagmite from northeast India representing the worldwide collapse of civilizations @SimonLLewis https://t.co/RUuUoGV1vr pic.twitter.com/DFbotowOFr

— Professor Mark Maslin (@ProfMarkMaslin) July 17, 2018