Sir David Frederick Attenborough is a British broadcaster, biologist, natural historian, and writer. He is best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Studios Natural History Unit, the nine nature documentary series forming the Life collection, a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on Earth.
The Anthropocene ( ) is the name for a proposed geological epoch, dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth up to the present day. This impact affects Earth's geology, landscape, limnology, ecosystems and climate. The effects of human activities on Earth can be seen for example in biodiversity loss and climate change. Various start dates for the Anthropocene have been proposed, ranging from the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, to as recently as the 1960s. The biologist Eugene F. Stoermer is credited with first coining and using the term "anthropocene" informally in the 1980s; Paul J. Crutzen re-invented and popularized the term. However, in 2024 the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) rejected the Anthropocene Epoch proposal for inclusion in the Geologic Time Scale.
Roger A. Pielke Jr. is an American political scientist and professor, and was the director of the Sports Governance Center within the Department of Athletics at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Mark Lynas is a British author and journalist whose work is focused on environmentalism and climate change. He has written for the New Statesman, The Ecologist, Granta and Geographical magazines, and The Guardian and The Observer newspapers in the UK, as well as the New York Times and Washington Post in the United States; he also worked on and appeared in the film The Age of Stupid. He was born in Fiji, grew up in Peru, Spain and the United Kingdom and holds a degree in history and politics from the University of Edinburgh. He has published several books including Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (2007) and The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans (2011). Lynas is research and climate lead for the Alliance for Science and is co-founder of the pro-science environmental network RePlanet. Since 2009 he has been climate advisor to former president of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed, and he currently works to assist Nasheed with the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a group of the world's most climate-vulnerable 58 developing countries. He is a strategic advisor for the international ecomodernist NGO WePlanet. He has co-authored a number of peer-reviewed scientific publications, including a 2021 paper which found that the consensus on anthropogenic climate change in the scholarly literature now exceeds 99%.
William J. McGuire is a volcanologist and Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London. His main interests include volcano instability and lateral collapse, the nature and impact of global geophysical events and the effect of climate change on geological hazards.
Guy Stewart Callendar was an English steam engineer and inventor. His main contribution to human knowledge was developing the theory that linked rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere to global temperature. In 1938, he was the first to show that the land temperature of Earth had risen over the previous 50 years. This theory, earlier proposed by Svante Arrhenius, has been called the Callendar effect. Callendar thought this warming would be beneficial, delaying a "return of the deadly glaciers."
The Early Anthropocene Hypothesis is a stance concerning the beginning of the Anthropocene first proposed by William Ruddiman in 2003. It posits that the Anthropocene, a proposed geological epoch coinciding with the most recent period in Earth's history when the activities of the human race first began to have a significant global impact on Earth's climate and ecosystems, did not begin during European colonization of the Americas, as numerous scholars posit, nor the eighteenth century with advent of coal-burning factories and power plants of the industrial era, as originally argued by Paul Crutzen, nor in the 1950s as claimed by the Anthropocene Working Group, but dates back to 8,000 years ago, triggered by intense farming activities after agriculture became widespread. It was at that time that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations stopped following the periodic pattern of rises and falls that had accurately characterized their past long-term behavior, a pattern that is explained by natural variations in Earth's orbit known as Milankovitch cycles.
Andrew Shaw Goudie is a geographer at the University of Oxford specialising in desert geomorphology, dust storms, weathering, and climatic change in the tropics. He is also known for his teaching and best-selling textbooks on human impacts on the environment. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of forty-one books and more than two hundred papers published in learned journals. He combines research and some teaching with administrative roles.
Frozen Planet is a 2011 British nature documentary series, co-produced by the BBC ZDF and The Open University. It was filmed by the BBC Natural History Unit. The production team, which includes executive producer Alastair Fothergill and series producer Vanessa Berlowitz, were previously responsible for the award-winning series The Blue Planet (2001) and Planet Earth (2006), and Frozen Planet is billed as a sequel of sorts. David Attenborough returns as narrator. It is distributed under licence by the BBC in other countries, Discovery Channel for North America, ZDF for Germany, Antena 3 for Spain and Skai TV for Greece.
Maja and Reuben Fowkes are London-based curators, critics and art historians who investigate engagements in contemporary art with ecology, climate change and the Anthropocene. Their work also addresses the art history of the former socialist territories of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union.
The following is a chronological list of television series and individual programmes in which Sir David Attenborough is credited as a writer, presenter, narrator, producer, interviewee, etc. In a career spanning eight decades, Attenborough's name has become synonymous with the natural history programmes produced by the BBC Natural History Unit.
Christopher Graham Rapley is a British scientist and scientific administrator. He is Professor of Climate Science at University College London, a member of the Academia Europaea, Chair of the European Science Foundation's European Space Sciences Committee, Patron of the Surrey Climate Commission, a member of the scientific advisory board of Scientists Warning, a member of the UK Clean Growth Fund Advisory Board, and a member of the UK Parliamentary and Scientific Committee. His previous posts include Director of the Science Museum, London, Director of the British Antarctic Survey, Chairman of the London Climate Change Partnership, President of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, Vice President of the European Science Foundation's European Polar Board, Executive Director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, and founder and leader of UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory's (MSSL) Remote Sensing Group.
Andrew C. Revkin is an American science and environmental journalist, webcaster, author and educator. He has written on a wide range of subjects including destruction of the Amazon rain forest, the 2004 Asian tsunami, sustainable development, climate change, and the changing environment around the North Pole. From 2019 to 2023 he directed fthe Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at The Earth Institute of Columbia University. While at Columbia, he launched a video webcast, Sustain What, that seeks solutions to tangled environmental and societal challenges through dialogue. In 2023, the webcast integrated with his Substack dispatch of the same name.
Cambridge Jones is a British celebrity portrait photographer from Wales. His subjects, in a series of books and exhibitions, include hundreds of well-known actors and musicians.
The UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences is one of the 11 constituent faculties of University College London (UCL). The current Executive Dean of the Faculty is Professor Jennifer Hudson, having been appointed from September 2022.
William Lee Steffen was an American-born Australian chemist. He was the executive director of the Australian National University (ANU) Climate Change Institute and a member of the Australian Climate Commission until its dissolution in September 2013. From 1998 to 2004, he was the executive director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, a coordinating body of national environmental change organisations based in Stockholm. Steffen was one of the founding climate councillors of the Climate Council, with whom he frequently co-authored reports, and spoke in the media on issues relating to climate change and renewable energy.
Pat Thomas is an author, journalist and campaigner specialising in the field of environment and health. She qualified as a transpersonal psychotherapist in 1991 at the Centre for Psychotherapy and Counselling Education in London. She lives in London, England.
Dale Jamieson is Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at New York University, a scholar of environmental ethics and animal rights, and an analyst of climate change discourse. He also serves as a faculty affiliate for the NYU School of Law and as director of NYU's Animal Studies Initiative, which was funded by Brad Goldberg with a $1 million donation in 2010. In addition to his affiliation with the NYU Departments of Environmental Studies and Philosophy, Jamieson also holds positions at The Dickson Poon School of Law and at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia.
Ecomodernism is an environmental philosophy which argues that technological development can protect nature and improve human wellbeing through eco-economic decoupling, i.e., by separating economic growth from environmental impacts.
The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) is an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to the study of the Anthropocene as a geological time unit. It was established in 2009 as part of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), a constituent body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). As of 2021, the research group features 37 members, with the physical geographer Simon Turner as Secretary and the geologist Colin Neil Waters as chair of the group. The late Nobel Prize-winning Paul Crutzen, who popularized the word 'Anthropocene' in 2000, had also been a member of the group until he died on January 28, 2021. The main goal of the AWG is providing scientific evidence robust enough for the Anthropocene to be formally ratified by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) as an epoch within the Geologic time scale.
