Upcoming geological periods
With climate change ruling the environment discourse, the sudden warming of the Earth in contemporary times prompted an official expert group to present a recommendation to the International Geological Congress to declare the geological period beginning since 1950 as the Anthropocene epoch. Since 2009, the Working Group on the Anthropocene (WHA) has been working to set up a working model for the Anthropocene Epoch. The epoch would be said to mark the impact of modern civilization on the climate and environment of the Earth involving humankind’s impact on global climate.
The beginning of Anthropocene age, marked by the numerous nuclear tests and consequent detonations that had dispersed radioactivity in areas around the world, also would have to take into account for large-scale environmental effects caused by anthropogenic interventions such as plastic pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, environmental contamination, and several other effects. Although the changes have been said to be initiated, statigraphers cannot yet come to a conclusion on bringing changes to the geological time scale.
Talk of the Anthropocene epoch is taking place because the current epoch – the Holocene – is marked by largely stable climate over the last 12,000 years since the previous age – the Ice Age.
The Holocene epoch is the period within which all of human civilization developed, and many experts are calling for its end with large scale changes such as greenhouse gas emissions, sea level rise, development activities, destruction of ecosystems, and the extinction many animal species (Carrington, 2017), which should alter the planet to an extent similar in scale to a change in epoch, and is said to be principally manifested in its genesis as climate change. Human civilization has so far inhabited a planet that has seen no massive planetary shifts in climate, in a period of relative stability.
However, the changes that human intervention have initiated are so aberrant that it is expected that climate change will not be the only defining feature of this epoch, with the introduction of an incredible array of chemicals in the soil, water and atmosphere; and incredible changes to the geomorphology of the planet; that could change the entire biosphere at a pace not witnessed before in the history of life on Earth.
On the other hand, it is argued that new basis of planetary order could arise, such as the electronic medium, which for now is in the realm of popular science. The full effects of anthropogenic changes on the geology of the planet could have rather serious and tragic implications that until now have not been fully charted. However, based on trends in changes in geological periods, we can get a sense of one important aspect of the effects of anthropogenic interventions on transitional aspects of geological periods – climate change.
Climate Change and Geological Periods
The driving aspect of climate change is the rising up of the Earth’s temperatures by the accumulation of greenhouse gases, primarily CO2 in the atmosphere, which act to trap the solar heat that is reflected back from the Earth’s surface, leading to a rise in temperatures.
Although the Earth since its formation is said to be gradually cooling down cumulatively, in the more recent time scale since the Ice Age, temperatures have increased, although in the present Holocene epoch, they have remained quite stable in general. The comparative stability of plate tectonics in the last 50 million years allows geologists to better study geological periods since about this time.
These epochs thus fall within the broader period among geological periods called the Cenozoic Era. Generally the Earth has been cooling, and this follows a fairly warm period about 45 to 55 million years ago called the Eocene Optimum, when much of Antarctica was without an ice cover. The cooling process post the Eocene Optimum is said to have begun 34 million years ago during the Eocene-Oligocene boundary climate transition when due to the cooling of the Earth, an ice sheet had formed over Antarctica.
Atmospheric CO2 during this period is said to have fallen to below 750 ppm. Evidence from sedimentary cycles from the Ross Sea point towards glacial cycles between 34 to 31 million years (Galeotti et al., 2016).
Fig: The Cenozoic Era among Geological Periods, which includes the recent epochs
However, within these epochal transitions, the Earth’s climate, including its temperature, showed wide variations. Going by fossil records, the Eocene Optimum displays evidence of an abundance of forest areas, with most species being species adapted to tropical conditions, although there were arid conditions as well.
In the Ice Age, although most species were those adapted to cold conditions, tropical species thrived in the lower latitudes. With changing climatic conditions over time, certain species adapted while others went extinct.
Climatic variations could be due to conditions on earth itself or due to extra-terrestrial reasons such as due to changes in the amount of heating provided by the Sun. Geological evidence however, makes a strong case for Earth’s own volition rather than in extra-terrestrial reasons. Climatic patterns have largely fluctuated somewhat even though the long term trend has been the cooling down of Earth.
For example, climate during the Ice Age was particularly unstable, with frequent temperature fluctuations ranging more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The fluctuations largely follow changes in the tilt of the Earth’s axis and in the shape formed when the Earth orbits the Sun.
These are defined as Milankovitch Cycles, and are caused by the gravitational forces in the Solar System caused by the Moon and other planets besides the Sun. However, Milankovitch Cycles do not result in as large of fluctuations in temperature as were said to have occurred over geological periods, unless there were factors on Earth, those influencing climatic patterns that would aggravate the warming effect. The Earth exhibits certain intrinsic characteristics that lead to a rise in temperatures and a change in climatic patterns between geological periods and within them, over time.
Due to bubbles containing air from the Ice Age preserved in glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic, it is possible to evaluate the atmospheric composition of the period with certain accuracy. Evaluation of earlier geological periods is more difficult, and the composition of marine sediments as affected by oceanic CO2and studying its effect on fossilized leaves of plants from these geological periods are some examples of methods used to evaluate the atmospheric composition in these geological periods.
Although investigations reveal that the Earth’s overall cooling process has been accompanied by a gradual decrease in CO2 levels along with certain other greenhouse gases, their levels have fluctuated in between that have caused significant changes in the Earth’s climatic patterns.
CO2 levels during the extremely warm Eocene Optimum were said to be between 2,000 and 3,000 ppm while those for the much colder Ice Age are said to be about 200 ppm (Menke, 2014). In pre-industrial times in the current Holocene epoch, CO2 levels had reached to about 280 ppm. By 2016, the CO2 levels reached to over more than 400 ppm (Jones, 2017).
However, atmospheric CO2 is not the only determining factor in raising Earth’s temperatures. Other factors can also be involved such as other greenhouse gases, amounts of ice cover and persistent cloud cover, which reflect sunlight back into space, and other possible concomitants can be the amounts of areas on the Earth covered by forests and oceans, which absorb heat.
Although evidence is altogether unsatisfactory on whether greenhouses gases alone could have caused the high global temperature levels in the Eocene Optimum, rising to about 5 to 6 degrees Celsius above previous levels (De Conto et al., 2017), global climatic models suggest that such high levels of warming could only have occurred due to the proliferation of greenhouse gases.
This rise in temperatures during the Eocene Optimum eventually led to the melting of the polar ice caps, such that sea levels rose to 200 feet above previous levels (Menke, 2014). Data suggests that climate change, although slow to begin, could accelerate over time if left unchecked. A rise in greenhouse gas levels similar to previous warm epochs such as the Eocene Optimum, which was the warmest period in the Earth’s recent history, could be devastating for most living things not adapted to warm climates.
It is said that during the Eocene Optimum, cold-blooded creatures like crocodiles inhabited areas close to the polar regions such as present-day Greenland. Though there is uncertainty as regards the exact levels of CO2 during the geological period when the polar ice caps had largely melted, the rate of increase in CO2 levels can be determined based on cumulative estimates.
Modern levels of atmospheric CO2 are accelerating at a pace unprecedented in the history of previous geological periods. The annual rate of increase for atmospheric carbon di oxide levels in the late 1950’s was 0.7 ppm/ year, while between the years 2005 to 2014 this had increased to 2.1 ppm/ year.
Although the effects are slow to be realized, with the IPCC predicting the possibility of a rise in global temperatures by 3 degrees Celsius by 2080 (Jones, 2017), the longer term effects with an increasing rate of acceleration in global atmospheric CO2 levels could have devastating effects on the Earth’s climatic patterns.
A full estimate of the effects of this process cannot be definitively ascertained due to the vastness of the scope, but there is no doubt that this uncertainty adds to the need to form better estimates of the effects, which are extremely difficult to define and attribute. Although we know that global CO2 levels annually are accelerating, there cannot be any estimates over how the trends are going to play out in the coming years. Without a global concerted effort towards checking carbon emissions, humankind is exploring uncharted territory. The in depth study of geological periods although should help us better understand the effects of climate change.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.