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Volume 9
Climate Change Summit 2018
Journal of Earth Science & Climate Change | ISSN : 2157-7617
November 19-20, 2018 Paris, France
6
th
Global summit on
Climate Change
Remembering the Anthropocene: a future human’s long view of climate change
Daniel McMurray
The Climate Reality Project, USA
W
e live in a new epoch in which the impact of human behavior, industry, agriculture and civilization is having a profound and far
reaching impact on the atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes. Whilst geologists differ
over the precise dating of the epoch, whether it be from the presence of radioactive isotopes from the creation and detonation of nuclear
weapons, or the mountains of plastic waste created in our linear take-make-waste economic system, or the hyper-acceleration of human
generated atmospheric greenhouse gases, or even the proliferation of domesticated chicken bones in the geological record – what is clear
is that humanity has already altered the world in fundamental and likely irreversible ways. We stand now at an inflection point in human
history. With atmospheric CO
2
levels, around 410 ppm and rising fast, rapid thawing at the poles and mountain glaciers, rising sea-levels
and acidification, growing intensity of storms, droughts and floods, and with significantly more warming already locked into the system,
the trajectory we are on now must change and it must change fast. This talk will project forward 200 years, told from the perspective of
a future human, reflecting on the Anthropocene and where it all went wrong or right? Will the Anthropocene end up as little more than a
thin, radioactive, plastic-choked, oily smear in the geological record, littered with the bones of countless dead species? Or will humanity
finds a way to stem global warming, move from a linear destructive and extractive economic model to a more circular, sustainable and
regenerative model?
J Earth Sci Clim Change 2018, Volume:9
DOI: 10.4172/2157-7617-C5-052