By Frank Biermann, 2012.
Numerous science assessments indicate that the environmental crisis has reached a new stage, progressing from local ecological degradation to Earth system transformation. The four global change research programs warned in 2001 that the entire Earth system "has moved well outside the range of the natural variability exhibited over the last half million years at least. The nature of changes now occurring simultaneously in the Earth System, their magnitudes and rates of change are unprecedented."
