Reacción a "Reactions to the 'New York Times' report that a commission of experts has rejected that the Anthropocene has begun"

Although official confirmation is still awaited, it has been leaked that the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) has voted against the inclusion of the Anthropocene as a subdivision of the international chronostratigraphic table. This means that the term Anthropocene will not be part of the geological time table as it does not meet the requirements of the IUGS to represent a formal chronological boundary. 

However, it does not mean that the geological community denies the human influence on the natural environment, amply demonstrated by multiple scientific evidences. These are different issues. The Anthropocene, as a concept, was defined to draw human attention to the effect of our actions on the natural balance of our planet and, as such, has not lost its validity. Possibly, this term will become a geological event like the hundreds of other events throughout the history of our planet, widely studied, known and used by the scientific community (for example, the Oceanic Anoxic Events of the Cretaceous or the Heinrich Events of the Quaternary), but whose name is not included in the table of geological times because they do not have enough entity to define any temporal subdivision.  

Humanity has not ceased to know in which geological time it lives: the Upper Holocene. And this, for the time being, does not seem likely to change in the coming years, as the Anthropocene Working Group will probably be disbanded after this decision.