Great Acceleration

The sharp post-1950 rise in human population, production, consumption, and resource use, accompanied by rapidly intensifying effects on Earth's climate, ecosystems, and biogeochemical cycles.

Anthropocene: A proposed geological epoch marked by substantial human influence on Earth's systems. The Great Acceleration is a central pattern used to describe the Anthropocene's planetary-scale human influence.
Great Acceleration graphs: Paired charts showing post-1950 trends in human activity and Earth-system indicators. These graphs give the concept its characteristic visual account of synchronized growth.
World War II: A global war fought from 1939 to 1945 between the Allied and Axis powers. Wartime industrial capacity, technologies, and institutions helped shape postwar expansion.
Climate change: Long-term shifts in climate patterns, including recent warming driven primarily by human greenhouse-gas emissions. The acceleration in fossil-fuel use is a major driver of modern human-caused warming.
Industrial Revolution: The transition to mechanized production and fossil-fuel-powered industry that began in Britain in the eighteenth century. It marks an earlier acceleration in human environmental influence, long before the post-1950 surge.
Fossil fuel: Coal, petroleum, and natural gas formed from ancient organic matter and burned for energy. Their expanding use powered postwar industrial growth while increasing greenhouse-gas emissions.
Keeling Curve: A continuous record of atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements begun at Mauna Loa in 1958. Its steepening rise records the atmospheric signature of postwar fossil-fuel use.
Postwar economic boom: A period of rapid economic growth in many countries after World War II. Rising production and household consumption formed a major social basis for the acceleration.
Land-use change: The conversion or alteration of land for uses such as farming, settlement, and industry. Expanding agriculture and infrastructure transformed habitats and carbon storage at accelerating rates.
Orbis spike: A proposed mid-seventeenth-century decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide linked to land-use changes after Indigenous population collapse in the Americas. It offers an earlier candidate marker for human influence on the global atmosphere.

Linked from 6 pages