How to use this Page

Legendary director and provocateur Werner Herzog has some thoughts on the future of entertainment.

The post Werner Herzog Believes Animation is More Convincing in Virtual Reality Than Live-Action appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

We rarely see "Peace On Earth" alongside more traditionally revered holiday standards like "A Charlie Brown Christmas" or "How the Grinch Stole Christmas"�but we really should.

Michelle Rafferty, Publicity Assistant

Jan Zalasiewicz is a field geologist, paleontologist and stratigrapher, as well as lecturer of geology and Earth history at the University of Leicester in Leicester, England.  He researches fossil ecosystems and environments across over half a billion years of geological time, and has published over a hundred papers in scientific journals. His latest book The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in Rock? published this fall in paperback. In his Countdown to Copenhagen post, he talks about Anthropocene, the new human dominated epoch we live in, and whether our future legacy will look more like an apocalyptic science fiction novel or a modest geological footprint.

For the rest of the Countdown to Copenhagen posts, click here.

It seems like science-fiction. The Earth will, in a few short centuries – perhaps even decades – go back to the kind of world in which the dinosaurs lived. Ice caps will collapse, oceans will acidify, coral reefs will perish, coastlines will drown. Millions of species will go extinct. And we humans – who set all these events in train – will be in big, big trouble. As science-fiction, indeed, it may be no easier to accept such an idea. Imagine if  Terry Pratchett trashed the Discworld, drowned Ankh-Morpork – for ever? His readers wouldn’t stand for it.

Yet this scenario on our one and only Earth seems, on the evidence to hand, more likely than not. Such changes are not certain (perhaps, out there, there is the ecological equivalent of the cavalry over the hill, riding down to rescue us all). But these global changes are not just possible – they are probable. And their scale is not diminished by comparison with the great upheavals of the Earth’s multi-billion-year geological history. Rather, they are made to seem more stark by that comparison.

The enormous canvas of the Earth’s past shows drama, to be sure – the crazy climate switchbacks of the last million years, for instance. But it also shows long episodes of calm and stability. The most recent of these has been the last ten thousand years – our current epoch, the Holocene – since the most recent of the Earth’s glaciations receded. With both temperature and sea level holding remarkably steady, it’s no coincidence that human civilization has flowered over this time. But now, our civilisation has, over two centuries, poured hundreds of billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, taking CO2 levels higher than for millions of years. We are near – or perhaps already past – a tipping point, into a new climate regime.

But it is not just climate change, as immense and far-reaching a change as that is. As cities and farmland replace what was once forest and savannah, the Earth’s animals and plants are under siege as rarely before. Extinction rates are now likely somewhere between a hundred and a thousand times higher than is usual. Since we’ve discovered only a tenth or so of the species on Earth so far, it’s certain that many species will become