Algemeen

It is increasingly apparent that superficially separate global crises are synchronizing—occurring at the same time or in quick succession. Their combined impacts are both greater than and different from the sum of the harms they would create in isolation, were they not so deeply interconnected. Yet the causal mechanisms that produce this synchronization remain opaque and underexplored. A confluence of ecological, social, technological, financial-economic, natural and other forces are interacting These unpredictable interactions are causing future shocks of ever greater frequency and amplitude. Today’s crises simultaneously span ecological, natural, political, economic and technological systems, with ever increasing unpredictability, rapidity and…

Novel entities are defined as new substances, new forms of existing substances and modified life forms, including chemicals and other new types of engineered materials or organisms not previously known to the Earth system as well as naturally occurring elements (for example, heavy metals) mobilized by anthropogenic activities. Novel means new in the geological sense, that is, created, introduced, or recirculated by humans. The entities are intentionally and unintentionally manufactured chemicals, engineered materials, and their transformation products, that have the potential to cause effects on vital Earth System processes as well as naturally occurring elements and materials mobilized in new…

Oceans are a crucial regulator of the climate, absorbing large amounts of the additional planet-warming carbon that humans have pumped into the atmosphere since the mid-1800s, as well as more than 90 percent of the increased heat. Sea surface temperatures have risen significantly—hitting new records earlier this year—while warming is also melting ice sheets in polar regions, spilling huge quantities of freshwater into the ocean. The ocean covers 71 percent of the planet and holds 97 percent of its water, making the ocean a key factor in the storage and transfer of heat energy across the globe. The movement of…

“NOT ABOUT WHAT IS TO COME BUT WHAT IS ALREADY HAPPENING”. “THE CATASTROPHE IS THAT IT CONTINUE TO GO ON”. The Club of Rome commissioned the report The Limits to Growth in 1972 that shifted how we see what humans are doing to the planet. Looking back five decades later, what did we do and not do, what did we learn -if we did-, and what happens now? Humanity is not dealing with only a single-incident, non-interconnected local or regional crisis. Humanity is heading into a deteriorating and undeclared globalized emergency involving the collapse of its critical global survival and stability systems (such as the trespassing geobiophysical boundaries of…

Most life-sustaining resources are supplied by Earth’s critical zone—the thin outer terrestrial layer of the planet that extends from the surface of unaltered bedrock to the top of vegetation and the atmospheric boundary layer. The critical zone addresses the critical dependence of humans on the terrestrial surface layer, which is under critical pressure from human activity and is a critical interface of Earth planetary systems. The critical zone exhibits dominant material, information and energy fluxes governed by land-atmosphere, soil-vegetation, shallow geosphere-lithosphere, and land-ocean interactions. The role of soil in the processing of energy, material, and biodiversity is essential to the…

Multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly and irreversibly degrade humanity’s prospects. These interacting crises produce greater harm than they would have individually, if their host systems were not so profoundly interconnected. Humanity is in the midst of this interdependent, complex, dynamic world in a constant flux of change. The Earth System crisis is particularly pressing. The present excess of economic hubris in plundering and colonizing the earth, an anthropocentric colonization, is leading to a very different state of the Earth System, one that is likely to be much less hospitable to the development of human societies….

Life is an astonishingly emergent property of matter, full-blown in its complexity today, some billions of years after it started out in presumably some very simple form. The fundamental question is whether life as we know it – it’s astonishing chemical complexity – is a very improbable occurrence or a nearly inevitable evolution of dynamic off-equilibrium chemical matter. A question of almost miracles or the inevitability of laws of physics and chemistry. In spite of recent rapid development of biology, chemistry, Earth science and astronomy, the origin of life (abiogenesis) is still a mystery. The sources of Earth’s evolving chemical…

THE BIOSPHERIC EMERGENCY, ANTHROPOCENE SYNDROME Gone is the relative stability and predictability of the past 12,000 years as the established patterns and regularity of Holocene phenology begin to fall into chaos. While some cosmic constants remain such as the cycles of day and night, the moon’s influence on the tides, the date of the solstices and the length of time the Earth takes to go around the sun, many other patterns and rhythms of Earth phenology are undergoing major change. Culturally, the Anthropocene is generally recognized to be an era in which human activity has grossly disturbed the natural environment. …

I have always been led by a desire to understand life; I went from ecosystems to biophysics to quantum physics and on my way life slipped through my fingers. What’s the point? If the universe is just machinery, a set of differential equations acting on initial conditions, and we are but blips of complexity in an uncaring universe, temporarily self-aware conglomerates of particles that will soon be washed away by entropy increase, then why spend time figuring out just exactly how insignificant our existence is? What’s the meaning of life if there’s no purpose to it? We all have to…

Humanity is making tremendous progress. It is the best time ever to be alive. Why does no one know it? Cities are a dense network of interconnected systems of increasing complexity, all of which use feedback information to exist in dynamic equilibrium. A new era of innovation for our urban future. A moment of recognition/realization The city as the general form of human settlement, as the ecological niche of our species, belongs to the world of antifragility. The city as a system has proven through history to be capable to adapt, self-organize, improve and take advantage of the unpredictable, in…