With a colleague, Eugene Stoermer, Dr Crutzen suggested this age be called the Anthropocene—“the recent age of man”.

The strong claim of those announcing the recent dawning of the age of man is that humans are not just spreading over the planet, but are changing the way it works.

The rise in the level of greenhouse gases, which can be demonstrated on the basis of air bubbles trapped in glaciers, has been proposed as evidence of the beginning of the "age of man."