“Stop using the word Holocene. We’re not in the Holocene any more. We’re in the Anthropocene!” With these words atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen interrupted a conference in 2000. But what was the Nobel prize laureate and discoverer of the hole in the ozone layer making such a fuss about?

Holocene is the name of the epoch in the Earth’s history that started 11,700 years ago with the end of the last Ice Age. The climate in this period was unusually stable. Many scientists think that’s a key requirement for the development of human civilisations. But that seems to be where it ended: since the beginning of industrialisation the global average temperature has risen significantly. The vast majority of scientists are convinced that the reasons for this lie in human action, including intensive agriculture, the global growth economy and increasing traffic.

The Great Acceleration
Humans have been engaging with their local environment for thousands of years. Large-scale use of fossil fuels began with the Industrial Revolution in around 1800. But it’s only since the 1950s that the influence of humans has been developing much faster than ever before all over the world. That’s why many Anthropocene researchers consider the beginning of the “Age of Humans” to be the mid-20th century: the world population is growing as fast as the use of fossil energy. And along with that the amount of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. This development is referred to as the “Great Acceleration”.

Further information on the “Great Acceleration” is available from the interactive dossier “Anthropocene” from the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education; bpb).

Did you know?

1 in a thousand | Bananas pixabay.com
There are many different varieties of banana, but not all are edible. In total cultivated forms of bananas and plantains account for more than 1000 hybrids and variants. But in Europa and the USA you often find just one particular variety: “Cavendish”. This banana tastes very mild. It’s harvested green and can therefore be transported easily – so it’s practical for the export trade.

- 57 per cent | Songbirds In Germany as well as in Europe there’s an ever-decreasing number of birds. Bird species that live in agricultural environments are particularly under threat. The number of breeding pairs in agricultural regions in the European Union dropped by 300 million between 1980 and 2010.

40 million | Krill © Helmut Corneli/ Alamy stock photo
Creatures with a calcium carbonate skeleton suffer most from ocean acidification. When this happens, for example krill larvae cannot form their chitinous outer shell anymore and therefore significantly fewer eggs mature into shrimps. But krill are on the menu for many marine dwellers. A great blue whale eats up to 40 million of these little shrimps each day.

4300 football pitches | Destruction of the countryside © pixabay
Lignite or brown coal is mined in open-cast pits. The amount of land destroyed by this is immense. The Garzweiler lignite surface mine in Germany is almost 40 square kilometres in area, which is equal to 4300 football pitches. Up to 40 million tonnes of coal a year are mined there. So far more than 7000 people have had to leave their homes because of it.

98 per cent | Plastic nest © fotogaby / iStock
Birds build their nests out of twigs, plant fibres or algae. But increasingly also from rubbish. On the island of Helgoland, Germany,  98 per cent of gannets’ nests contain plastic. This can put their lives at risk. The birds can become tangled and then starve to death because they can’t bite through the plastic.

29 degrees | Corals © Mina Ryad / Adobe Stock
Corals are simple, multicellular cnidarians. They live in close companionship with single-celled organisms, which provide the corals with nutrients. These tiny creatures are also responsible for the bright colours of the corals. But when the ocean becomes too warm, the corals evict their “tenants” – and then they turn completely white, they become bleached. But in the long term the corals cannot survive without the single-celled organisms, they die off and all that remains is their calcium carbonate skeleton. For some species this “bleaching” occurs at temperatures of just 29 degrees Celsius.

532 billion | Ice © Jean-Christophe Andre / Pixabay
Greenland lost a considerable amount of ice in summer 2019 due to global warming: 532 billion tonnes. As a result the global sea level has risen by 1.5 millimetres. And there is no end in sight.

80 per cent | Mobile phone “junk”
Around 200 million old mobile phones are lying around unused – in German households alone. Each one contains around 60 different substances that are far too valuable to waste: copper, aluminium and gold, scarce metals such as cobalt and tungsten, and around 17 of the “rare earths” that are so important to technology. Around 80 per cent of the components of old telephones could be reused.

40 per cent | Insect hotel © pixabay
More than 40 per cent of all insect species on the Earth are threatened by extinction. They are losing their habitats because more and more land is being used for agriculture and also for new housing and roads. Likewise,  the number of insects in Germany is dropping dramatically. To try and combat this, many people are setting up “insect hotels”, providing nest and over-wintering sites.

35 per cent | Microplastics
Microplastics are everywhere. Plastic particles are for instance released from clothing during washing. 35 per cent of the microplastics in the oceans come from that source. Discarded plastic packaging breaks up into increasingly tiny particles, but only disappears completely after centuries. There are even microplastics in the air – the wind spreads it all around the world.
  300 years | Phosphate fertiliser
Without phosphorus, nothing can live – no people, no animals and no plants. That’s why phosphate fertilisers are very important in agriculture. According to current estimates, global reserves will last for at least another 300 years. However, we should be considering right now how to handle this finite resource.

2007 | Tiger mosquito © gordzam / Adobe Stock
The Asian tiger mosquito feels at home in a warm, humid climate. As a result of global warming it has been able to spread out into new habitats. In Europe it made a new home in Italy at first. Since 2007 it has also been found in Germany. The tropical mosquito can transmit more than 20 types of virus, including the pathogen that causes dengue fever.

0.04 per cent | CO2
Carbon dioxide only accounts for 0.04 per cent of the air volume. But it has a special property: it allows short-wave solar radiation to pass through the Earth’s atmosphere and at the same time it prevents the long-wave heat rays from escaping into space. As a result the Earth is heating up. That’s why they call it a “greenhouse gas”. CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas, but it’s a very important one.
Composition of the air: nitrogen around 78 %, oxygen around 21 %, argon 0.93 %, carbon dioxide 0.04 %, other gases at trace level.

1.5 degrees | Meat
What can we do to slow down global warming? Eating significantly  less meat would be a start. The biggest problem for the climate in this context is cattle farming. The animals need a lot of feed, which has to be cultivated on large areas of land using fertiliser and water. And: when cows chew the cud, they belch out methane, a greenhouse gas.