Science in the making?

One of the (many) advantages of being a student again is that you have the opportunity to attend lectures on all manner of stuff. I was at one in UCL the other week (hosted by the STS department) which was presented by Professor Mark Maslin and Professor Simon Lewis. They discussed their recent paper (Defining the Anthropocene, published in Nature 11 March 2015) to support their assertion that the world is now entering a new geological epoch.

The main inference of the lecture  was that mankind has done so much to change the world (moving specifies from continent to continent, wiping out species that either weren’t convenient and others that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, moving more material around that is normally achieved by erosion, not to mention increasing concentrations of Carbon Dioxide and Methane in the atmosphere) that the world is a very different place compared with a few years ago and there is no way to turn it back to how it was. Even if we (humankind) removed the excess Carbon Dioxide and Methane (and changed our ways not to make it again) replacing the moved and extinct lifeforms is not possible.

We were shown several slides of graphs of atmosphere (mostly undecipherable from anything further back than row 2 in the lecture theatre) emphasising the point and, on the face of it, there was a pretty good case for the assertion and it didn’t appear that there was any serious argument amongst scientists to the contrary.

But, there is apparently an almighty row about when this event is deemed to have occurred. More evidence of Science in the Making for, despite previous changes of geological epochs being dated to within a few million years, attempts are being made to date this one to a year! This all stems from the criteria that have been agreed for these “state” changes to have deemed to occur. As one of the audience remarked the debate seems to be similar to the attempts made in previous centuries to ascertain the number of angels on a pin head.

I leave that debate to scientists and philosophers of far higher academic clout except to observe that this is more evidence to demonstrate that the making of science is a social thing – Science in the Making.

To end this piece, there was one interesting speculation (or was it a fact?) that I noticed from the talk. Carbon dioxide levels appear to have been rising in the atmosphere for more than a couple of thousand years. But, it seems as if there was a dip in in the 1600’s. It was suggested that this was due to the impact of Europeans on the South American indigenous population – or rather the impact of their diseases. The dip was thought to be due to a rapid increase in re-afforestation of South America caused by a large reduction in the indigenous human population due to imported small pox running riot through it. I think I heard the estimate that some 50M* people were wiped out in a very short space of time: this gave the equatorial forests time to recover from the deforestation caused by mankind within about 50 years, taking up the carbon as they did so. This reduced carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and contributed to the reduction of global temperatures in the early 17^th C - perhaps also enabling those winter ice fairs on the River Thames.

We all adjourned to a bar in UCL afterwards – one that I had never discovered before!

Notes

* Any errors in the above are all mine! Wikipedia has various estimates for the population of South America before Columbus "discovered" the place and of the death toll from the diseases brought by the Europeans (South American Population estimate). I hope the meeting at Paris at the moment don't get any ideas from this.........