Seer of the Anthropocene
Paul Crutzen died on January 28th
His role in these debates provided him with an education in politics to match his earlier ones in engineering and atmospheric science. Again, he proved an adept student. When, in the mid-1970s, his friend Stephen Schneider suggested that climate scientists should brief politicians and the public systematically about the findings which were beginning to worry them, he agreed, but said it would be slow work. He and Schneider did not get their wish until the late 1980s, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up: an innovation built on the success of the Montreal protocol.
For decades he studied and catalogued the ways that humans were making changes on the level that had caused his outburst in Cuernavaca. His research covered swathes of atmospheric chemistry, notably that which occurs in the huge smoky, smoggy clouds created by forest fires and unchecked industry. In the course of that work he wrote the first influential paper[ Twilight At Noon, Ambio, 1981] on the blacked-out sky [Sic], failed harvests and mass starvation of the hongerwinter writ large that would follow nuclear war. He was deeply committed to averting such human and ecological catastrophe. When in 1995, while running the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, he heard of his Nobel prize, he celebrated with Sektrather than champagne: not because of his modest, Dutch, cycling-to-work frugality, but because of France’s blinkered position on nuclear testing.
If, as seems quite likely, the International Commission on Stratigraphy eventually extends formal recognition to the idea of the Anthropocene, the fallout from such testing, now settled into sea-floor sediments, may well be chosen as the geological formation that marks its base. And it also seems likely that, for as long as that epoch lasts, those who study it will be following the lead of Paul Crutzen.■
