Energy transition will have an impact on Earth, says scientist – 09/05/2023 – Environment

The quest for cleaner energy, one of the main challenges to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and tackling climate change, will also cost the planet resources. Eight billion human beings together hold an impact power that will leave the marks of that decision — whether it is taken or not.

That’s what geologist Colin Waters, secretary of the AWG, says for the Anthropocene Working Group. Formed by 40 scientists, the collective is preparing to present, in June, a proposal for the “golden spike”, a point somewhere on Earth that will serve as the basis for defining the Anthropocene, the so-called “time of humans”.

For the AWG scientists, the new geological epoch on Earth is marked by human activity, with the expansion of industrial production and the rise of global chain consumption. Its starting point has been debated since 2009 by the group’s researchers.

Waters, a professor at the University of Leicester in the UK, has been the spokesperson for the AWG to translate the implications of a new epoch on the planet and why this is important. This week, he visits Brazil for the first time, to participate in the 2023 magna meeting of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, in Rio de Janeiro.

The event takes place at the Museum of Tomorrow, with free admission. Waters will speak at 11:30 am this Wednesday (10).

“Our small working group knows that there is scientific evidence [do Antropoceno]. All we can do is use it to guide our decisions. How this is going to be used by people is up to politicians”, says Waters, in an exclusive interview with Sheet. “But you start to wonder, how do we deal with this changing planet?”

Popularized in the early 2000s by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, the Anthropocene would be a new geological epoch, which would replace the current Holocene, which began after the last ice age, 11,700 years ago.

The 1950s were firmly established in discussions as the starting point of the Anthropocene due to the widespread increase in the burning of fossil fuels, the carrying out of open-air nuclear tests, spreading quantities of plutonium around the world, in addition to the detonations of hydrogen bombs. .

Crutzen’s initial idea of ​​the beginning of the Anthropocene pointed to the industrial revolution in England in the 18th century. But, at that stage, says Waters, the revolution was happening in Europe, and for it to spread it would take the better part of a century.

“The more we investigate, the closer we get to the 1950s. Everyone was going through major changes in the economy and in the degree of industrialization. We have China taking off between the 1950s and 1960s”, he explains. “And even the Amazon would be within reach of atmospheric contamination by particles from the burning of fossil fuels.”

And why not in 1949? “Because there is a gradation”, says the geologist. “The evidence points to a drastic change in the middle of the 20th century.”

In addition to researching the time frame, it is necessary to find a place on the planet —the so-called “golden spike”—that can be compared to other places to identify the pollution sediments left by human activity.

The proposal for the definition of this marker, which should be made in June, will choose one of 12 locations, which include lakes, ice in the Arctic or corals. The latter, according to the researcher, are good candidates because they allow the annual visualization of particle change.

After the group’s decision, the theme will be voted on in three other instances. The last one, which will ratify the decision, is the International Union of Geological Sciences.

The current challenge consists in the fact that defining a geological epoch has always been a task of looking to the past —and it continues to be, as geologists analyze sediments and fossils—, but now there is another time scale in question.

“One of the nice things is that today’s science allows you to monitor these effects in near real time,” says Waters.

And those effects concern how the planet calibrates itself after geological events like a large-scale thaw. “Massive volcanic eruptions, for example, release an enormous amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, with a rapid increase, in geological time, in temperature.”

From there, the planet goes through a period of adaptation, with the balance of temperature and ocean level. “These levels are recovered, but biology is not. The species, in this dramatic change, are lost, while the planet can go back to looking like what it was 100,000 years before”, he points out.

To exemplify the risks we are experiencing today, Waters recalls that the change since the last glaciation, which defined the passage of the Pleistocene (started around 1.8 million years ago), was gradual until it became intense to the point of extinguishing species and redesign the world.

However, in the geologist’s view, humanity today has technological capabilities that can be used to reduce the emission of gases that lead to climate change.

“The problem is knowing how to handle the fate of this trajectory, because we have the powers to do that. We know what the problems are.”

The researcher also warns of the cost of these decisions. “We have eight billion people who live and seek a certain standard of living. Even if we do this with more sustainable resources, we are going to need materials whose extraction, such as mining, will have a verifiable effect on the planet.”

_{The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.}