Anthropocene.pdf - 0 views
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the first significant human use of fossil fuels—coal— arose during the Song dynasty (960–1279) in China [36,37]. Drawn from mines in the north, the Chinese coal industry, developed primarily to support its iron industry, grew in size through the eleventh century to become equal to the production of the entire European (excluding Russia) coal industry in 1700.
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the European coal industry, primarily in England, was beginning its ascent in the thirteenth century. The use of coal grew as did the size of London, and became the fuel of choice in the city because of its high energy density.
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energy constraints provided a strong bottleneck for the growth of human numbers and activity. The discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels shattered that bottleneck. Fossil fuels represented a vast energy store of solar energy from the past that had accumulated from tens or hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis. They were the perfect fuel source—energy-rich, dense, easily transportable and relatively straightforward to access. Human energy use rose sharply. In general, those industrial societies used four or five times as much energy as their agrarian predecessors, who in turn used three or four times as much as our hunting and gathering forebears [52].
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So when did the Anthropocene actually start? It is difficult to put a precise date on a transition that occurred at different times and rates in different places, but it is clear that in 1750, the Industrial Revolution had barely begun but by 1850 it had almost completely transformed England and had spread to many other countries in Europe and across the Atlantic to North America. We thus suggest that the year AD 1800 could reasonably be chosen as the beginning of the Anthropocene
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The fraction of the land surface devoted to intensive human activity rose from about 10 to about 25–30% [56]
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Only by 1850 did the CO 2 concentration (285 ppm) reach the upper limit of natural Holocene variability and by 1900 it had climbed to 296 ppm [58], just high enough to show a discernible human influence beyond natural variability. Since the mid-twentieth century, the rising concentration and isotopic composition of CO 2 in the atmosphere have been measured directly with great accuracy [60], and has shown an unmistakable human imprint.
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The result of these and other energy-dependent processes and activities was a significant increase in the human enterprise and its imprint on the environment. Between 1800 and 2000, the human population grew from about one billion to six billion, while energy use grew by about 40-fold and economic production by 50-fold [55].
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The human enterprise switched gears after World War II. Although the imprint of human activity on the global environment was, by the mid-twentieth century, clearly discernible beyond the pattern of Holocene variability in several important ways, the rate at which that imprint was growing increased sharply at midcentury. The change was so dramatic that the 1945 to 2000+ period has been called the Great Acceleration
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What finally triggered the Great Acceleration after the end of World War II? This war undoubtedly drove the final collapse of the remaining pre-industrial European institutions that contributed to the depression and, indeed, to the Great War itself. But many other factors also played an important role [55,61]. New international institutions—the so-called Bretton Woods institutions—were formed to aid economic recovery and fuel renewed economic growth. Led by the USA, the world moved towards a system built around neo-liberal economic principles, characterized by more open trade and capital flows. The post-World War II economy integrated rapidly, with growth rates reaching their highest values ever in the 1950–1973 period.
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