One of the newest and most-rapidly spreading memes in popular science is what’s being dubbed the “Anthropocene.” According to this meme, human beings are having such an impact on the environment, especially the climate, that we’ve entered a new geological age.

That’s exactly the point a recent article that British geologist Colin Waters and his colleagues recently made in the journal Science. They argue that the combination of the “rapid global spread of novel materials including aluminum, concrete and plastics” and “fossil-fuel combustion,” and the “atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons” has produced “rapid environmental change” sufficient to call our times a new geological age.

Now to put this in perspective, the last shift in geological ages from the Pleistocene to the current Holocene, saw the end of the Ice Age. Average global temperatures rose 20 degrees in a century, drastically more than the worst-case scenario 3.5 degrees spike that climate change activists talk about today. Sea levels rose 400 feet, as compared to the one-to-two feet being worried about today. And when was the last time anyone saw a mammoth or sabre-tooth cat strolling down Sunset Boulevard?

Talk about the Anthropocene combines disdain for our species with an almost comically-inflated view of our power over the rest of creation.

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