The Plutocene: Portents for the Post- Anthropocene Geological Era

Given time, a possibility may evolve into a probability, and a probability may become a certainty. By the late decades of the 20th century AD and the initial decades of the 21st century AD, as a shift takes place in the state of the atmosphere-ocean-ice sheets system, toward climate tipping points, a mass extinction of species occurs before our eyes, at a rate of 1000 to 10,000 times the natural background extinction rate. It is becoming clear that, instead of channeling its efforts to protect its planetary biosphere – including its own civilisation – Homo sapiens continues to sink its remaining resources into genocidal wars and the proliferation of hair-trigger nuclear missile fleets, which threaten dissemination of radioactive nuclides on land, oceans and atmosphere – a blueprint for a 7th mass extinction of species succeeded by a geological period defined here as the Plutocene, a radioactive biosphere persistent for tens of thousands of years and represented by a plutonium-rich layer in ocean sediments.

The Late Anthropocene

The concept of the Anthropocene, a geological period during which human beings have gained control over a large part of the biosphere, including the composition of the atmosphere and the water, has become a subject of divergent views. From its inception, Steffen et al. (2007) define the Anthropocene in the following terms:

The Anthropocene, the current epoch in which humans and our societies have become a global geophysical force, began around 1800 with the onset of industrialization, the central feature of which concentration has risen from 310 to 380 ppm [and 406.4 ppm in February 2017] since 1950, with about half of the total rise since the preindustrial era occurring in just the last 30 years. The Great Acceleration is reaching criticality. Whatever unfolds, the next few decades will surely be a tipping point in the evolution of the Anthropocene.