Forward: What is Global Warming? A Call for A New Paradigm
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The Earth is but one of a countless number of bodies floating in the heavens. It is such a small planet that a one day airplane trip can take you anywhere on its surface. If we cut down too many trees, the land becomes a desert. The air pollution released from factories and automobiles cross national boundaries and pollute the entire Earth's atmosphere. However, this idea of a 'limited Earth' has only come about quite recently. When did people first start to become aware that the place in which they lived and breathed was 'limited'? Although people in the Medieval Age spoke of the ends of the Earth, the frontier spirit of the American pioneers clearly stemmed from the feeling that endless wilderness existed to be tamed and put to use by humans. In the far east, Oda Nobunaga, a 17th century hero of the Japanese unification, is said to have possessed a superb world vision. However, Nobunaga's image of the world, built from the stories brought to him by the western missionaries that were very different from the image of the Earth that we have pictured in our minds today, was almost certainly one of unlimited expansiveness.
We have entered an age where masses of people, materials and information move back and forth across national boundaries. The image of our beautiful blue-green planet has been sent to us from the space shuttle. These realities have started to change our concept of the Earth from a boundless expanse of land, ocean and air to a limited living space that we must share intimately with all living things. In particular, we are now faced with the serious possibility that global environmental problems could have a tremendous influence on civilization. At this very moment, our world vision is entering into a new paradigm.
As our societies and manufacturing industries developed, we have changed nature in a profound way. It is probably reasonable to say that the first time people became conscious of this alteration of nature as a social problem was in England after the industrial revolution. The air and rivers were polluted, the hygiene of the city had deteriorated, epidemics were prevalent, and as a result the lives of many laborers were sacrificed to England's rapid industrialization. In Japan as well, pollution resulting in the Ashio mine incident, the Minamata mercury poisoning, the Itai-itai cadmium induced sickness, and the Yokaichi asthma were all major social problems resulting from industrialization. If we could just take the time to determine the causes of these tragedies that made so many people suffer, we could prevent them from happening. All we need to do is stop the release of harmful substances into the environment.
However, what we are discussing in this book is a type of environmental problem that is of a different nature than these examples of regional pollution. This new kind of global environmental problem spreads throughout the entire world. It includes human induced phenomena such as destruction of the ozone layer, acid rain, desertification, pollution of the oceans, the extinction of various species, the garbage problem, and global warming.
Among these, the most serious is global warming, in the sense that it has the potential to upset the balance of the biosphere from its very foundation and furthermore is caused by CO2 which is the flip side of energy, the basis of our civilization. This problem is not something that has been only discovered by scientists recently. Back in 1860, Tyndall, who was made famous by his discovery of the Tyndall phenomenon of light scattering, pointed out that a change in the composition of the atmosphere could cause a change in climate. It is hard to believe but in the famous Japanese writer Miyazawa Kenji's important work "the biography of Gusuko Budori" written at the turn of the century, the author used the global warming phenomenon caused by CO2 (he called it carbonic gas) as the main theme of his story. However, in his story global warming was not a problem, but rather a means to prevent famine from cold weather by raising the temperature. This story is a beautiful and heroic tale of a boy named Budori who, after losing both parents to a famine caused by cold weather and being exiled from his village, heard the tale told by the great professor Kuboh that "if the volcanic island Karubonado were to explode, CO2 would be strewn into the atmosphere and the world temperature would rise". Budori sacrificed himself in order to save everyone from the famine by causing a huge eruption of the volcano. Kenji, who personally experienced famines caused by the constant cold weather in the north-east part of Japan, must have concluded that the best way to help ensure the survival of his people was through global warming by CO2. Actually, the influence of fine particles of ash that spew out of a volcano together with the CO2 would be larger, and contrary to Kenji's story, the eruption of the volcano would in fact bring about a cooling effect. In this sense Kenji was mistaken, but the acuity of the author who, in a time when the phenomenon drew hardly any attention from either the public or the academic societies, thought of this idea of controlling the weather using CO2 is truly impressive.
As these two examples show, even many years ago some scholars understood the effect of CO2 on global warming. But they saw it just as a curious phenomenon. Why is it that, while in the past this phenomenon drew very little interest, recently it has suddenly come into the spotlight? The key to finding the true nature of the global warming problem lies in the consideration of this problem.
Various Views on Global WarmingWe would like to point out here that 'global warming' is a political problem in one sense. The first time that global warming attracted concern on a global scale was during the testimony of a single scientist at the Senate of the United States in 1988. During that year, the American grain belt was hit by a drought caused by an intense heat wave. Dr. Hanson from NASA pointed out that it was possible that the cause of this drought was a warming of the Earth, and suddenly everyone started to get worried. However, heat waves and droughts have occurred regularly here and there in the world from far before 1988. They are normal phenomena in some parts of the world. For example, it seems that we hear news of famines in Africa almost every year. Is it not strange that while no fuss was made about 'global warming' concerning these famines, when a drought occurred in America people clamored, "it is global warming"? At the very least, it is certain that without considering the political dimensions of this problem, we cannot grasp the full picture of global warming.
As another example, in 1992 at the 'Global Environment Summit' held in Rio, Brazil the whole world watched in anticipation to see if the then President of the United States, Mr. George Bush, would attend. If the President of the United States were to attend, the summit would gain a considerable amount of authority. However, the US was the number one energy consuming country in the world, and that means it was the country with the largest CO2 emissions. At the summit, the possibility was high that control of energy use would be discussed. How would the American people react? Mr. Bush, in the midst of a tight election contest, was reluctant to attend. This too is clearly a political problem.
Global warming can also be said to be an energy problem. The main cause of global warming is CO2, and this is produced when people use fossil fuels as a source of energy. If we agree that global warming is a problem that must be solved, then it means that we must either cut down on our use of energy or develop energy sources other than fossil fuels.
There is the view that global warming is a problem between North and South as well. The production of CO2 is expected to become very serious in the developing countries of the southern hemisphere. These countries are currently undergoing rapid economic development and as a result, their energy use is expected to increase dramatically. Considering the large populations of these nations, if the CO2 production per person in developing countries were to reach the same level as that of developed countries, the situation will become serious. However, is controlling the development of these countries a right that developed nations have? Certainly, this kind of dilemma is grounds for claiming that global warming is a problem between the developed countries of the northern hemisphere and the largely developing countries of the south. The fundamental principle in capitalism of the free market has brought about mass production and mass consumption. A huge release of CO2 is the inevitable result. Thus, we could also say that the CO2 problem is a problem of economic systems.
Global warming is fundamentally a problem driven by population the exploding world population. From the origin of Homo Sapiens some five million years ago, until only recently, human population grew slowly. At the time of the industrial revolution the population of the world was still only about 700 million. However, over the last two hundred years the world population has grown to over 5.6 billion people. It is predicted that human population will reach 10 billion in the not to distant future. We cannot simply reduce living standards to control CO2 emissions. In the end, the only way to ensure that growing human pressures on the world are stopped completely is to control population.
Global warming is also an education problem. If each of us were taught to think of our modern society as a mass consumption civilization that has gone too far, and each of us were to try his or her best to reduce wasteful consumption, that would constitute a good start. Another more direct example is the much quoted relationship shown by past data that increases in the educational level of women cause decreases in birth rate.
Finally, global warming is a problem of ethics. Do we really have the right to use up all of our limited resources in a single generation? Do we not have a moral responsibility to leave behind fossil fuel reserves for the future generations? These ethical issues must also be addressed in our consideration of global warming.
All of these views have some degree of persuasiveness. This is because each of them speak of one of the many aspects of the problem of global warming. However, speaking only of one aspect means that they are not addressing of the essence of the problem.
Why Now?In the past, throwing away garbage was not necessarily a bad thing. If you threw it away on the land, insects and microbes would eat it, soil bacteria would decompose it and the garbage would end up increasing the organic material content, in other words the fertility, of the soil. Even if you threw your garbage away into the sea, the same sort of thing would happen: it would become food for fish or oxidized by photochemical processes so that the garbage would be absorbed without waste into the ocean ecosystem. All the effects of human activities were absorbed by the Earth, and in that sense the Earth really was limitless. However, as population grew and the amount of material consumed per person increased, the amount of garbage associated with this consumption increased tremendously. Eventually the amount of garbage thrown away became so large that the Earth's decomposition processes could not keep up, and that garbage began to accumulate here and there on the Earth's surface.
The most symbolic of these examples of waste accumulation is the sudden rise of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. CO2 concentration, one of the basic parameters that affect all living things, is increasing at a rate that has never before been experienced on the Earth. The cause for this increase is the combustion of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests. The amount of CO2 released as "waste" each year from burning fossil fuels and cutting down tropical rain forests is increasing so rapidly that currently the CO2 released in a single year has exceeded 1% of the total amount of CO2 contained in the atmosphere. Just fifty years ago, the rate of release was only 0.2%, so the last half century has seen a five-fold increase in the rate of CO2 release! You may think that 1% is nothing to worry about. However, 1% per year means that, even if the rate of release remains the same from now on, in one hundred years the amount of CO2 released would be equivalent to the total amount in the atmosphere now. And if, as has happened over the last fifty years, the rate of CO2 release increases five fold in half a century then before we realize it the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will have doubled.
This catastrophic event, in which human activity has first exerted an effect on the Earth of the order of 1% per year making it clear once and for all that the Earth can limited no longer be thought of as limitless, is a very recent one. This is all the more reason that we must discuss the global warming problem now.
Until just recently, the international paradigm was dominated by the cold war between the East and the West. On the domestic level, countries aimed for high levels of production and economic growth. However, in 1972 the Club of Rome, responding to the resultant rapid increase in consumption, pointed out the limited nature of the Earth's resources. And now, in response to this limited nature of an Earth faced with a whole barrage of various forms of waste being discharged by our material civilization, a warning bell is being sounded. The need to include the Earth as a whole in our field of vision as we think and act has emerged.
Recently we have seen much discussion on questions such as "why does global warming occur?" and "what do we need to worry about from global warming?". In response to these questions, many books have been published on such topics as the atmosphere, the ocean, living organisms, the history of the Earth, and the solar system. However, how can humanity respond to the global warming problem? What can we do to solve the problem? This issue has not been discussed sufficiently. By making it clear in logical terms what constitutes an effective countermeasure, we can reveal the meaning of the many sided problem of global warming towards humanity for the very first time. The goal of this book is to show clearly what must be done to counteract human induced global warming.
We cannot deny the possibility that unrestrained scientific technology could endanger the very foundations of our existence. However, we believe that human beings have the wisdom to direct the scientific technology we have developed ourselves towards the creation of a more harmonious global environment. This will be our basic stance in this book.