2023年经济学人 人类世开始的标志(1)（在线收听）

    One way to view the history of science is as a repeated puncturing of humanity’s claims to be special.

    看待科学史的一种方式是把它看作是对人类声称自我特殊性的一再戳穿。

    In scientific terms Homo sapiens is an oddly hairless species of ape that has existed for 200,000 years—an eyeblink in Earth’s 4.5bn-year history.

    用科学术语来说，智人是一种奇怪的无毛猿类，已经存在了20万年——不过在地球45亿年的历史中只是一眨眼的功夫。

    For the past couple of decades, though, some scientists have been arguing that perhaps humans do deserve a bit of special recognition after all.

    然而，在过去的几十年里，一些科学家一直在争论，也许人类的确应该得到一些特殊的认可。

    In 2000 Paul Crutzen, a Dutch meteorologist and chemist, suggested that human influence over Earth was sufficiently profound that its effects would remain visible in the geological record for millions of years.

    2000年，荷兰气象学家和化学家保罗·克鲁岑提出，人类对地球的影响非常深远，其影响将在数百万年的地质记录中保持可见。

    For that reason, he argued, it was time to bring down the curtain on the Holocene—the current geological epoch, which has lasted for the past 12,000 years or so—and ring in a new one: the Anthropocene.

    基于这个原因，他认为，是时候为持续了大约12000年的全新世——目前的地质时代划上句号，并且开启一个新的时代:人类世。

    The idea quickly caught on.

    这个想法很快就流行起来。

    In 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group (awg), an appendage of the International Union of Geological Sciences (iugs), voted in favour of adopting it in principle.

    2016年，国际地质科学联合会的附属机构，人类世工作组投票赞成在原则上采用这一标准。

    And on July 11th it suggested a precise geological feature, dating back to the 1950s, that could mark the Anthropocene’s beginning.

    7月11日，它提出了一个精确的地质特征，可以追溯到20世纪50年代，这可能标志着人类世的开始。

    The committee recommended bestowing the honour upon sediments laid down at the bottom of Crawford Lake, a flooded sinkhole about 20 miles from Toronto.

    委员会建议将这一荣誉授予克劳福德湖底的沉积物，克劳福德湖底是一个被洪水淹没的天坑，距离多伦多约20英里。

    The beginning of the Holocene was marked by a natural warming of the climate and the retreat of the world’s ice sheets.

    全新世开始的标志是气候的自然变暖和世界冰盖的缩减。

    The idea behind the Anthropocene is that human activity has disturbed the planet on a similarly grand scale.

    人类世背后的观点是，人类活动对地球造成了类宏大规模的干扰。

    Humans have boosted the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by about half in the past 250 years, to its highest level in around 3m years.

    在过去的250年里，人类使大气中的二氧化碳浓度增加了大约一半，达到了300万年来的最高水平。

    That spike will be clearly visible to geologists 100,000 years from now, assuming any exist, and may have delayed the start of the next ice age by tens of thousands of years.

    假设它在10万年后仍然存在的话，那时的地质学家将清晰地发现这个尖峰，它可能将下一个冰河时代的开始推迟数万年。