target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_0891bb0e-cc22-521e-b6f6-e3063dd1767b">64. Global Carbon Project, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, November 19, 2013, http://www.igbp.net/news/news/news/annualglobalcarbonemissionssettoreach-record36billiontonnesin2013.5.30566fc6142425d6c91195a.html.
65. Dr. Thomas Dittmar, Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, personal communication, August 2011.
66. Jeremy Jackson, “Ecological extinction and evolution in the brave new ocean,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 105, suppl. 1, August 12 2008: 11458–465.
67. Andreas J. Andersson et al., “Partial offsets in ocean acidification from changing coral reef biogeochemistry,” Nature Climate Change, published online, November 17, 2013, http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2050.html.
68. The Seattle Times together with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting published an excellent yet alarming report on ocean acidification entitled “Sea Change”, September 12, 2013, http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2013/sep/11/pacific-ocean-peri-lous-turn-overview/.
69. Timothy Lenton, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber et al., “Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 105, no. 6, (February 12, 2008): 1786–1793.
70. For an overview of the ocean in the Anthropocene see Davor Vidas, “The Anthropocene and the International Law of the Sea,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society –A, vol. 369 (2011): 909–925.
71. For continual measured data, see http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/.
72. IPCC, Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, Geneva, Switzerland, 2013.
73. Kevon Cowtan and Robert G. Way, “Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, October, 2013, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2297/abstract.
74. Terry Gerlach, “Volcanic versus anthropogenic carbon dioxide,” EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, vol. 92, no. 24, (14 June 2011): 201–208.
75. A. Kleidon, “How does the earth system generate and maintain thermodynamic disequilibrium and what does it imply for the future of the planet?,” contribution to Theme Issue “Influence of Nonlinearity and Randomness in Climate Prediction,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.2014v2.pdf.
76. Anthony D. Barnosky et al., “Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?” Nature, (March 3, 2011) vol. 471, no. 51–57.
77. See also the outstanding books by Edward O. Wilson and Jean-Christophe Vié et al., Wildlife in a Changing World—An Analysis of the 2008 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Gland: IUCN 2009 and Arthur D. Chapman, Numbers of living species in Australia and the world, Canberra: Australian Biodiversity Information Service, 2009.
78. Vaclav Smil, The Earth‘s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change, Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, quoted in Gaia Vince, “A Global Perspective on the Anthropocene,” Science, (7 October 2011) 32-37.
79. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, New York: Penguin, 2011.
80. Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea, Washington DC: Shearwater, 2009.
81. See www.climatenamechange.org.
82. Charles H. Langmuir and Wally Broecker, How to Build a Habitable Planet: The Story of Earth from the Big Bang to Humankind, Princeton University Press, 2012.
83. Andrew Revkin has compared the developmental stage of our species with puberty: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/maturing-teens-maturing-species/.
84. See “NASA’s Hubble Shows Milky Way is Destined for Head-On Collision,” May 31, 2012, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/milky-way-collide.html.
FOUR Signals of Earth Time
AS YOU READ THESE LINES, various time scales are at work. It takes just milliseconds for your brain to interpret these letters by means of synapses and neurons, and mere seconds for you to put what I am writing into context. It has taken months, years and even decades for your brain to mature to its current state. Your brain has a history going back hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. The molecules in your brain that perform these feats are billions of years old.
Thanks to the work of brain researchers, molecular biologists, evolutionary scientists and geologists, we have become familiar with the different time scales in which our lives exist—from the femtoseconds of the quantum world to billions of years of cosmic history.
Contemporary science makes it astonishingly easy to go on a mental time journey, taking enormous leaps through long periods. But it wasn’t that long ago that the intellectual elites of Europe or America had a completely repressed relationship with such timeframes. A mere two to three hundred years ago it was considered heretical, and a sure path to damnation, to believe that the earth was any older than 6,000 years. The French natural scientist Georges-Louis Leclerc (later Comte de Buffon), was one of the first, in the late 18th century, who dared
