In the Anthropocene, historians might chronicle the end of their species
... Recently the environmental activist Bill McKibben wrote an article in The New Republic in which he proposed declaring war on global warming. He suggests tackling the problem the way America fought World War II, through extensive mobilization and government investment. It’s a bold proposal. But not once in his account does McKibben mention another crucial part of that war mobilization on the home front: rationing. Where is the political will for that?
So here’s a prediction — or, because I’m not sure historians should make predictions — a worry. We’ll burn every available thing there is to burn. It’ll take 200 years, or 400, or 600, but eventually all easily available sources of fossil fuels will be used up. The earth will get very hot, and there will be little we can do about it.
Historians can weigh data from the past or make predictions about the future, but there is not much they can do in the face of entrenched systems of consumption. Our extinction will have its chroniclers, but no one will be left to read them.
But even in a worst-case scenario, the longue durée can offer a reason for optimism. After all, the atmosphere has a history of its own, and over the scale of hundreds of millions of years, it’s been quite a turbulent one. Fifty-six million years ago, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, global temperatures rose 5 degrees Celsius Roughly six hundred million years ago, the whole earth — or at least most of it — froze. Then, at the end of the Permian period, volcanic eruptions heated coal beds, releasing enormous amounts of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and causing temperatures to soar upwards of 10 degrees Celsius. That led to the most severe mass extinction in history. But even so, life survived.
We’re in the process of causing something similar, in a more compressed time frame. Maybe we’ll go extinct. Maybe all the mammals will go extinct. Maybe we’ll screw up so much that even our phylum, the Chordates, will go extinct. But no matter how much we screw up the earth, life will very likely endure. In the longue durée, that is a good thing. ...