4 journals

Qishun Mao

Ryan Lee

CLN1-13

13 Nov 2019

Journal 11

Reading: W. Steffen, et. al., 'The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’

Summary: This article mainly talks about the ecosystem which may not friendly with human in our world. We take it for granted that nature and man were cooperative many years ago, but they weren't. Many years ago, man was able to change the laws of nature with their life pattens. In the decades that followed, these technologies were even more overwhelming. Furthermore, the world is going to take its first big challenge in the incoming decades.

Quotation: “Preindustrial human societies indeed influenced their environment in many ways, from local to continental scales. Most of the changes they wrought were based on knowledge, probably gained from observation and trial-and-error, of natural ecosystem dynamics and its modification to ease the tasks of hunting, gathering, and eventually of farming. Preindustrial societies could and did modify coastal and terrestrial ecosystems but they did not have the numbers, social and economic organization, or technologies needed to equal or dominate the great forces of Nature in magnitude or rate. Their impacts remained largely local and transitory, well within the bounds of the natural variability of the environment.”

Analysis:It has been taken for granted that the ancestors who first exploited the natural resources are at friendly with nature, but modern archaeologists tell people that since the ancestors began to exploit the natural resources, human beings have destroyed the ecological chain. Cutting down trees and using trees for fire can cause damage to nature in large and small ways.Over the past few decades, as the climate has warmed, poorer countries have seen strong and significant declines in economic output relative to a world without man-made warming. While many cooler, richer countries have seen big increases. Thus, global warming caused by the use of fossil fuels may exacerbate economic inequalities associated with historical disparities in energy consumption.

Quotation: “Humankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years, to come. To develop a universally accepted strategy to ensure the sustainability of Earth’s life support system against human-induced stresses is one of the greatest research and policy challenges ever to confront humanity. Can humanity meet this challenge?”

Analysis:The rate of warming caused by human activity exceeds the rate of many warming periods in geological history, and we enter uncharted territory with no examples to count on. If you think about global warming, first you have to establish the global carbon cycle, and then you can find more problems: problems with the oceans, problems with the frozen soil, problems with the tundra, etc. Global warming is not just dependent on rising sea levels.The human race is highly concerned about global warming, and many people specialize in it in universities. I think in the future, the global climate problem may be a problem that human beings will never be able to solve or a problem that can be solved with accumulated knowledge.