Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

“There are times when the future seems somewhat bleak. There are times when I am doubtful that humanity can get its act together before it’s too late and images of Dystopia start creeping into my dreams.” These words are part of what the former US President Barack Obama said during the speech he gave at the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow on November 8. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama is not alone when it comes to having doubts about whether humanity can get its act together about climate change, for we are bombarded every day with images of Dystopia displayed vividly on television screens in the form of droughts, fires, floods, and storms around the world. It is clear that climate change has gone beyond a mere wake-up call for humanity; it is now an alarm bell that warns us that our house, namely, Earth, is on fire with global warming going out of control.

If our house is on fire, what we need to do is obvious: Get out of the house immediately. But are we ready to abandon Earth, our only home in the universe, to start living in spaceships or to migrate en masse to another planet? As serious as climate change is, it behooves us to examine what it means for humanity in the context of human history. One vision of human history that comes to our mind is the Five Ages of Man the Greek poet Hesiod (c. 700BCE) expounded in his Works and Days: the Gold Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age, and the Iron Age. What Hesiod depicted with the Five Ages of Man was his vision of human history that goes from the height of the Gold Age, when a golden race of humans lived in harmony with the gods and “the fruitful earth poured forth her fruits in boundless plenty,” down to the Iron Age, when humans, driven by self-interest, fight with each other wielding iron weapons and the gods eventually abandon them, for “right shall depend on might and piety shall cease to be.”

Hesiod’s description of the Iron Age actually looks frighteningly familiar to us—as if he was describing the evolution of human history since the Industrial Revolution. While individuals with narrow-minded and selfish motivation in their dealings with others can be found in earlier ages, the Industrial Revolution ushered in the world of individuals who fight with each other for their economic gain driven by their self-interest and nations that are continually engaged in armed conflicts with ever-more sophisticated weapons. Earth is no longer rich with nourishing food with the desertification of farmlands and the extinction of many species of animals and plants. It is no wonder that the gods, or spiritual leaders, call our attention to the climate crisis as the spiritual crisis that humanity now finds itself in.

What would Hesiod say about the world that is unfolding around us? He might be tempted to add another Age of Man, the Carbon Age, as the sixth stage of human history, which is far more depressing and threatening than the Iron Age. The Iron Age did give us a civilization with all those fanciful consumer products from radios to televisions, and from computers to cell phones, that we consider as the fruits of modern science and engineering. That civilization has also given us the glorious sights of the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Skytree. However, humanity’s ever-expanding thirst for energy has turned Earth into an inhospitable habitat for humans and other biological species, as we keep emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, depending as we do on automobiles and airplanes for going to places for work and leisure. With climate change turning into a serious climate crisis, it comes as no surprise if some historians and scientists start wondering if humanity could be one of those species that disappear from Earth during the Holocene extinction, also known as the sixth mass extinction. What has happened to us humans since the eighteenth century when Enlightenment thinkers such as Turgot (1727-1781) and Condorcet (1743-1794) predicted that human history was headed towards progress, with humans fully showing our potential as animals endowed with reason?

Eking out our precarious existence in the midst of the Carbon Age, the Gold Age for humanity certainly appears to be “far away and long ago”—like Plato’s Atlantis where a great and noble civilization once flourished. But Earth must be reclaimed “here and now” before it gets uninhabitable, for it is our only home for now. Can humanity get its act together? All of us, as individuals and nations, must face up to the realities of climate change and do whatever we can now to reclaim Earth as the habitable planet, for, as Hesiod reminds us, “Observe due measures, for right timing is in all things the most important factor.”

Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

According to the press release issued on 5 October 2021, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 to three scientists “for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems.” Of the three awardees, Shukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann have been recognized “for physical modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”, while Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.” By explicitly referring to “Earth’s climate” and “global warming” in describing the contributions by Shukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences confirms that the Earth’s climate has been warming influenced by human activities, and thus adds support for environmentalists around the world who have been calling for changes in the mode of conducting our lives if we are to avert the climate crisis that threatens the future of human civilization.

Actually, this is not the first time that the Nobel Prize is awarded to someone whose work has to do with climate change. The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an international organization established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). The IPCC has been issuing reports to inform the world about the connection between human activities and global warning, providing solid evidence to dispel the claim made by some people in the 1980s that global warning is not merely an interesting hypothesis. As a matter of fact, the latest report of the IPCC issued in August of this year, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis, contains a strong warning to all of us, saying that climate change is now widespread, rapid, and intensifying.

Al Gore, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 with the IPCC, is known for his 2006 book titled: An Inconvenient Truth. As for the reason why he chose this title, Al Gore explained that he just wanted to write about the reality of climate change as “a way of highlighting the reasons why some people, including the president, don’t seem to accept the truth.” As one who served sixteen years in the US Congress and eight years as Vice President, he ought to know very well about politicians who were reluctant to accept the truth about climate change. Climate change was also an inconvenient truth for those business executives who were associated with automobile companies, utility companies, and oil production. In fact, Gore spent six years traveling around the world with a slide show, presenting a compelling evidence of global warming caused by the emission of greenhouse gases by industrial activities and warning about the dire consequences for the Earth unless decisive measures are taken to reverse it.

What is significant about the Nobel Prize 2021 is that, while the 2007 award was for “peace”, this year’s award is for “physics”, with two of the three awardees being climate scientists. The modeling of the Earth’s climate by Shuruko Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann that made possible to predict global warming, combined with the latest IPCC report released in August prepared by IPCC scientists, leaves no doubt that climate change is not an inconvenient truth but an undeniable fact backed by solid scientific evidence. Climate change is, to borrow an expression from Jane Austen, “a truth universally acknowledged”. What this means is that whether we are in possession of wealth or not, “business as usual” is no longer an acceptable way to conduct our lives. We must all live up to our responsibilities as global citizens to do what we can to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere if we are to avert the crisis of global civilization.