{"id":617,"date":"2009-10-01T03:46:22","date_gmt":"2009-10-01T10:46:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/?p=617"},"modified":"2017-06-04T12:14:09","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T19:14:09","slug":"post-human-earth-how-the-planet-will-recover-from-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/post-human-earth-how-the-planet-will-recover-from-us","title":{"rendered":"Post-human Earth: How the planet will recover from us"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"center\"><BR><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Paul_J._Crutzen\">Paul J. Crutzen<\/a><\/P><\/p>\n<p>Although this is the scenario we all hope (and work hard) to avoid \u2014 the consequences should be of interest to all who are interested in mitigation of the risk of mass extinction:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Anthropocene\">Anthropocene<\/a> around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch.<\/p>\n<p>The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest \u2014 and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s suppose that happens. Humanity\u2019s ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. \u201cA lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people,\u201d says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.<\/p>\n<p>Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about \u201csaving the planet\u201d we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?<\/p>\n<p>The only way to know is to look back into our planet\u2019s past. Neither abrupt global warming nor mass extinction are unique to the present day. The Earth has been here before. So what can we expect this time?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg20427281.300-posthuman-earth-how-the-planet-will-recover-from-us.html?full=true\">New Scientist<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Also read \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/environment\/2009\/sep\/06\/global-warming-natural-disasters-conference\">Climate change: melting ice will trigger wave of natural disasters<\/a>\u201d in the Guardian about the potential devastating effects of methane hydrates released from melting permafrost in Siberia and from the ocean floor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paul J. Crutzen Although this is the scenario we all hope (and work hard) to avoid \u2014 the consequences should be of interest to all who are interested in mitigation of the risk of mass extinction: \u201cWHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,20,37,31,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-existential-risks","category-futurism","category-human-trajectories","category-policy","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65143,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions\/65143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}