scholarly journals Glacial Deaths, Geologic Extinction

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Jeremy J. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Biological Species ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Anthropogenic Forcing ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Original Argument ◽  
The Right

Abstract In 2019 several funerals were held for glaciers. If enough glaciers die, could they go extinct? Is there geologic extinction? Yes. This article develops three arguments to support this claim. The first revisits Georges Cuvier’s original argument for extinction and its reliance on geology, especially glaciers. Retracing connections to glaciers and the narrowing of extinction to biological species in the nineteenth century, the author argues that anthropogenic forcing on how the Earth system functions—the Anthropocene—warrants rethinking extinction geologically. The second argument examines the specificity of ice loss and multiple practices responding to this loss: from art exhibits at United Nations climate change meetings to anticolonial claims for the right to be cold. The third argument consolidates a theme built across the article regarding how Isabelle Stengers’s notion of ecologies of practices provides an approach to geologic extinction that recognizes both relational and nonrelational loss.

scholarly journals Politics of Strata

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 211-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Clark
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Earth Science ◽  
Power Source ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
The Third ◽  
Earth System Governance ◽  
The Earth

Modern western political thought revolves around globality, focusing on the partitioning and the connecting up of the earth’s surface. But climate change and the Anthropocene thesis raise pressing questions about human interchange with the geological and temporal depths of the earth. Drawing on contemporary earth science and the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this article explores how geological strata are emerging as provocations for political issue formation. The first section reviews the emergence – and eventual turn away from – concern with ‘revolutions of the earth’ during the 18th- and 19th-century discovery of ‘geohistory’. The second section looks at the subterranean world both as an object of ‘downward’ looking territorial imperatives and as the ultimate power source of all socio-political life. The third section weighs up the prospects of ‘earth system governance’. The paper concludes with some general thoughts about the possibilities of ‘negotiating strata’ in more generative and judicious ways.

scholarly journals A Thought Experiment on Sustainable Management of the Earth System

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jobst Heitzig ◽  
Wolfram Barfuss ◽  
Jonathan F. Donges
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Game Theory ◽  
Optimal Control ◽  
Sustainable Management ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Earth System ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Right ◽  
Safe Operating ◽  
Qualitative Decision

We introduce and analyse a simple formal thought experiment designed to reflect a qualitative decision dilemma humanity might currently face in view of climate change. In it, each generation can choose between just two options, either setting humanity on a pathway to certain high wellbeing after one generation of suffering, or leaving the next generation in the same state as this one with the same options, but facing a continuous risk of permanent collapse. We analyse this abstract setup regarding the question of what the right choice would be both in a rationality-based framework including optimal control, welfare economics and game theory, and by means of other approaches based on the notions of responsibility, safe operating spaces, and sustainability paradigms. Despite the simplicity of the setup, we find a large diversity and disagreement of assessments both between and within these different approaches.

Dryland Degradation and Expansion: Implications for Mexican Policies from the Earth System Perspective

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Gabriel Lopez Porras
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Land Degradation ◽  
Water Scarcity ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Sustainable Land Management ◽  
System Perspective ◽  
The Earth

Despite international efforts to stop dryland degradation and expansion, current dryland pathways are predicted to result in large-scale migration, growing poverty and famine, and increasing climate change, land degradation, conflicts and water scarcity. Earth system science has played a key role in analysing dryland problems, and has been even incorporated in global assessments such as the ones made by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. However, policies addressing dryland degradation, like the ‘Mexican programme for the promotion of sustainable land management’, do not embrace an Earth system perspective, so they do not consider the complexity and non-linearity that underlie dryland problems. By exploring how this Mexican programme could integrate the Earth system perspective, this paper discusses how ’Earth system’ policies could better address dryland degradation and expansion in the Anthropocene.

scholarly journals Organizing in the Anthropocene

Organization ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wright ◽  
Daniel Nyberg ◽  
Lauren Rickards ◽  
James Freund
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Exponential Growth ◽  
Life Support ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Crucial Issue ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Introductory Article

The functioning of the biosphere and the Earth as a whole is being radically disrupted due to human activities, evident in climate change, toxic pollution and mass species extinction. Financialization and exponential growth in production, consumption and population now threaten our planet’s life-support systems. These profound changes have led Earth System scientists to argue we have now entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. In this introductory article to the Special Issue, we first set out the origins of the Anthropocene and some of the key debates around this concept within the physical and social sciences. We then explore five key organizing narratives that inform current economic, technological, political and cultural understandings of the Anthropocene and link these to the contributions in this Special Issue. We argue that the Anthropocene is the crucial issue for organizational scholars to engage with in order to not only understand on-going anthropogenic problems but also help create alternative forms of organizing based on realistic Earth–human relations.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Scientific “Consensus” on Global Warming

1996 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 333-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Michaels ◽  
Paul C. Knappenberger
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Sulfate Aerosols ◽  
Climate Data ◽  
Consensus Process ◽  
Intergovernmental Panel ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Extreme Scenario

Climate data support the “moderate” prediction of climate change (l-1.5°C) rather than the more extreme scenario (4°C or more). The moderate point of view was originally marginalized in the IPCC “consensus” process in both the 1990 First Assessment on Climate Change and in the 1992 Update prepared specifically for the Earth Summit and to provide backing for the Rio Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is now accepted, based on ground-based data, that the errors in those models are currently between 160% and 360%. If one compares them to the satellite data combined with the land record, the error rises to a maximum of 720%. In some recognition of this massive error, the 1995 IPCC “consensus” is that warming has been mitigated by sulfate aerosols. However, when that hypothesis is specifically tested, it fails. Further, data required to test the validity of the sulfate enhanced greenhouse models was withheld by the IPCC. despite repeated requests.

1. Making Sense of Earth’s Politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-24
Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Biodiversity Loss ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Environmental Discourse ◽  
Wilderness Preservation ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Environmental Discourses ◽  
Nature Preservation

This chapter introduces the politics of the Earth, which has featured a large and ever-growing range of concerns, such as pollution, wilderness preservation, population growth, depletion of natural resources, climate change, biodiversity loss, and destabilization of the Earth system. It explains how the issues of Earth’s politics are interlaced with a range of questions about human livelihood, social justice, public attitudes, and proper relation to one other and other entities on the planet. It also discusses the consequences of discourses for politics and policies. The chapter clarifies how environmental issues like ecological limits, nature preservation, climate change, biodiversity, rainforest protection, environmental justice, and pollution are interconnected in all kinds of ways. It develops an environmental discourse analysis approach and shows how this approach will be applied in subsequent chapters, beginning with the positioning of environmental discourses in relation to the long dominant of discourse of industrialism.

scholarly journals “The Great End of All Government…”: Working People's Construction of Citizenship Claims in Early Nineteenth-Century England and the Matter of Class

1995 ◽  
Vol 40 (S3) ◽  
pp. 19-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc W. Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Manual Labour ◽  
Working People ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
The Right ◽  
William Cobbett ◽  
A Share

In the heat of the battle for parliamentary reform William Cobbett preached to the working people of England in his inimitable blustery dictums. “[I]f you labour honestly,” he counselled, “you have a right to have, in exchange for your labour, a sufficiency out of the produce of the earth, to maintain yourself and your family as well; and, if you are unable to labour, or if you cannot obtain labour, you have a right to maintenance out of the produce of the land […]”. For honest working men this was part of the legacy of constitutional Britain, which bequeathed to them not only sustenance but, “The greatest right […] of every man, the right of rights, […] the right of having a share in the making of the laws, to which the good of the whole makes it his duty to submit”. Nonetheless, he warned, such rights could not legitimately negate the toiling lot that was the laborer's fate: “Remember that poverty is decreed by the very nature of man […]. It is necessary to the existence of mankind, that a very large proportion of every people should live by manual labour […]”.

Environmental Security and Climate Change

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Dalby
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Growth Failure ◽  
Environmental Security ◽  
Peace Building ◽  
Future Climate Change ◽  
Fragile States ◽  
Earth System ◽  
The Earth

Environmental security focuses on the ecological conditions necessary for sustainable development. It encompasses discussions of the relationships between environmental change and conflict as well as the larger global policy issues linking resources and international relations to the necessity for doing both development and security differently. Climate change has become an increasingly important part of the discussion as its consequences have become increasingly clear. What is not at all clear is in what circumstances climate change may turn out to be threat multiplier leading to conflict. Earth system science findings and the recognition of the scale of human transformations of nature in what is understood in the 21st century to be a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, now require environmental security to be thought of in terms of preventing the worst dangers of fragile states being unable to cope with the stresses caused by rapid environmental change or perhaps the economic disruptions caused by necessary transitions to a post fossil fueled economic system. But so far, at least, this focus on avoiding the worst consequences of future climate change has not displaced traditional policies of energy security that primarily ensure supplies of fossil fuels to power economic growth. Failure to make this transition will lead to further rapid disruptions of climate and add impetus to proposals to artificially intervene in the earth system using geoengineering techniques, which might in turn generate further conflicts from states with different interests in how the earth system is shaped in future. While the Paris Agreement on Climate Change recognized the urgency of tackling climate change, the topic has not become security policy priority for most states, nor yet for the United Nations, despite numerous policy efforts to securitize climate change and instigate emergency responses to deal with the issue. More optimistic interpretations of the future suggest possibilities of using environmental actions to facilitate peace building and a more constructive approach to shaping earth’s future.

scholarly journals Past climates inform our future

Science ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 370 (6517) ◽  
pp. eaay3701
Author(s):  
Jessica E. Tierney ◽  
Christopher J. Poulsen ◽  
Isabel P. Montañez ◽  
Tripti Bhattacharya ◽  
Ran Feng ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Carbon Dioxide ◽  
Model Evaluation ◽  
Future Climate Change ◽  
Earth System ◽  
High Carbon ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Earth System Models ◽  
High Carbon Dioxide

As the world warms, there is a profound need to improve projections of climate change. Although the latest Earth system models offer an unprecedented number of features, fundamental uncertainties continue to cloud our view of the future. Past climates provide the only opportunity to observe how the Earth system responds to high carbon dioxide, underlining a fundamental role for paleoclimatology in constraining future climate change. Here, we review the relevancy of paleoclimate information for climate prediction and discuss the prospects for emerging methodologies to further insights gained from past climates. Advances in proxy methods and interpretations pave the way for the use of past climates for model evaluation—a practice that we argue should be widely adopted.

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