SPOTLIGHT: The most reputable publishers imaginable are misinforming the public about basic geology.
BIG PICTURE: Last September, a book titled The Paris Agreement on Climate Change: Analysis and Commentary
These people aren’t lightweights. You’d expect them to be in possession of elemental facts.
Nevertheless, not one of these editors objected to a blatant falsehood in the Foreword to this book. It’s hard to find a more distinguished publisher than Oxford University Press, but none of its editorial team caught it, either.
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The Foreword is written by Christiana Figueres, the former head of the UN’s climate treaty. In paragraph three she declares:
In fact, the human impact on the planet has been so profound that geologists recognize the end of the Holocene era and the beginning of the Anthropocene era.
This is nonsense. As I mentioned last week, the International Commission on Stratigraphy is responsible for delineating geological periods. There is an official, established process by which such matters get decided.
In recent years, activists external to that process have argued that a new geological epoch should be declared in recognition of the effect human beings are having on the planet. So far, that hasn’t happened. Lobbying is one thing. A definitive change-of-course is something else.
The Commission’s website contains a full-colour, official chart. The latest version of that chart is dated 2018/07 – this month. Its top left corner makes it clear we remain in the Holocene. The word ‘anthropocene’ does not appear.
There’s nothing complicated about this. Figueres doesn’t say that ‘some geologists argue’ the Holocene has ended. She falsely states that geologists per se “recognize” its termination.
TOP TAKEAWAY: When high-ranking UN climate personnel, esteemed publishing houses, and coteries of lawyers play fast and loose with the truth, the public stops trusting these elite voices.
LINKS:
- Hat tip to Robin Guenier, who alerted me to this book. See his comments at the bottom of this 2105 article, at the bottom of this 2018 article, and his review of the above-discussed book on Amazon.uk.
- My previous post: Anthropocene: The Media’s Fake Geological Epoch
- Figueres has an unsavoury history of using the good name of science to advance her political arguments. On another occasion, as an unelected UN bureaucrat, she had the temerity to loudly criticize the newly elected Australian federal government for keeping its election promise to scrap that country’s hated carbon tax.
- Breakthrough Journal, Welcome to the Narcisscene: Returning Humans to the Center of the Cosmos
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