Force of nature. Photo: Ville Miettinen/Flickr CC

Scientists are wielding a nonscientific term in an effort to modify human behavior. — MB

Humans have wrecked the planet so badly in the past two hundred years — on an order of magnitude equivalent to meteor strikes, or tectonic plate shifts — that we’ve earned a place in the geologic record, a group of scientists say.

Led by the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, they write in the latest issue of Environmental Science and Technology (excerpt and link, below) that we are living the “Anthropocene Epoch,” in which humans are cracking ice sheets and wiping out vulnerable critters with their CO2 emissions and settlement habits.

Shockingly enough, Crutzen, who first came up with “Anthropocene” (New Human) ten years ago, admits the term is “informal and not precisely defined.”

In other words, Anthropocene is not a scientific term at all.

But that doesn’t mean that scientists can’t use the term to push an agenda:

“The concept of the Anthropocene might, therefore, become exploited, to a variety of ends. Some of these may be beneficial, some less so. The Anthropocene might be used as encouragement to slow carbon emissions and biodiversity loss, for instance; perhaps as evidence in legislation on conservation measures 31; or, in the assessment of compensation claims for environmental damage. It has the capacity to become the most politicized unit, by far, of the Geological Time Scale—and therefore to take formal geological classification into uncharted waters.”

via The New World of the Anthropocene1 – Environmental Science & Technology ACS Publications.