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Global Warming and the Fate of Global Civilization

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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

“Climate change is widespread, rapid, and intensifying,” says the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released on August 9, 2021. Prepared by the IPCC Working Group I, Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis is a sequel to a special report of the IPCC released back in 2018, Global Warming of 1.5°C. While the 2018 report had already warned us of the threat of global warming, the latest report contains a far more serious message for all of us, for every region of the world is being affected by “widespread, rapid, and intensifying” climate change.

As its subtitle, the Physical Science Basis, suggests, the latest IPCC report incorporates observations made by scientists about changes in the Earth’s climate in every region and the whole climate system. As for the phenomenon of global warming, the latest report says that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for approximately 1.1°C of warming since 1850-1900. Based on improved observational datasets, the report finds that global temperature, averaged over the next 20 years, is expected to reach or exceed 1.5 °C of warming, which will bring about increased heat waves, longer warm seasons, and shorter cold seasons. The report contains a serious warning that human activities have the potential to determine the future course of climate, carbon dioxide (CO2) being the main driver of climate change.

As a biological species, we humans live in the natural environment called the Earth, which is the space of our interaction with climate. Our existence as a species had long been under the influence of climate change until the Industrial Revolution. What is revolutionary about the Industrial Revolution is that it ushered in a new phase of human history in which we humans have acquired power to influence climate with the kind of activities that relies heavily on the use of energy and technology.

To the extent that human activities are behind climate change that is “widespread, rapid, and intensifying,” the climate crisis that the IPCC report points to is the crisis of civilization that guides our activities as citizens of the world. The crisis of civilization can escalate itself into its destruction and death, for, as Will Durant points out, “Civilization, like life, is a perpetual struggle with death.” (Our Oriental Heritage, Fine Communications, 1997, p.218) Destruction and death come to civilizations, Arnold Toynbee tells us, when they fail to meet changes confronting them: “Civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet.” (Civilization on Trial, Oxford University Press, 1948, p. 56). In fact, it was Arnold Toynbee who predicted as early as 1948 that industrial civilization, or secular Western civilization, which has come to engulf the whole world since the Industrial Revolution, was headed for destruction.

What historians such as Will Durant and Arnold Toynbee are telling us is that civilizations come and go. In fact, the crisis of civilization we face today is far more serious than other crises we have seen in history in that the secular Western civilization Toynbee talks about is global civilization that engulfs every region of the world. The climate crisis in the world today is therefore a global crisis as it is a manifestation of the crisis of global civilization. This is the reason why we will have to address ourselves in earnest to the question of what measures need to be taken by individuals, social groups, nations, and international organizations if we are to avert the crisis of global civilization headed for destruction and death, and start building a new civilization that will maintain a sustainable relationship with the natural environment.

What is civilization in the first place? A simple yet suggestive definition given by Will Durant is: “Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation.” (Our Oriental Heritage, p.1) Durant’s definition suggests that civilization is a social system in which human activities of cultural creation are promoted through maintenance of social order. Note, however, that the pursuit of cultural creation is not possible without proper provision of the basic necessities of life, which comes from economic activities in the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Thus, civilization can best be considered as a social system defined in the space of interaction among the three subsystems of culture, economy, and polity, where culture may be defined as the set of all human activities related to the creation and dissemination of ideas and symbols, economy as the set of all human activities related to the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and service, and polity as the set of all human activities related to the creation and maintenance of laws and regulations for social order. Civilization is an open social system in that it exists in the space of interaction with other social systems and the natural environment.

As an open social system consisting of the three subsystems of culture, economy, and polity, the crisis of civilization comes about when the crisis developed in one subsystem is transmitted to other subsystems, which is bound to happen sooner or later. As for the crisis of global civilization that confronts us today, we can trace it back to the Industrial Revolution when human activities started to be guided by a worldview that treats nature as an instrument that could be exploited for the benefits of humans. That exploitative worldview was transmitted to economy where increasing the material standards of living has become almost the sole purpose of economic activities, and to polity as well where increasing the material standards of living, translated into GDP growth, has been adopted as the mail goal of political activities.

If the climate crisis is the crisis of civilization reflected on all three subsystems, what can we do if we are to avert the crisis from escalating itself into destruction and death of global civilization? It is comforting to see an increasing number of scientists and thinkers, business leaders and policymakers, and concerned citizens around the world who are waking up to, and making suggestions to avert, the climate crisis. Some suggestions are technical like the “carbon dioxide removal” by the IPCC, which removes CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it in geological, terrestrial, or ocean reservoirs. Some business leaders and policymakers express their support for this IPCC suggestion, as it will expand economic activities—and profit opportunities—for those firms related to the carbon dioxide removal.

The IPCC suggestion actually embodies the engineer’s mentality that sees the possibility of a technical solution to every problem in the world around us. However, the climate crisis has already gone beyond any technical solution, and requires a fundamental change in the worldview that guides human activities in all subsystems of global civilization. It is clear that the worldview that has guided human activities in industrial societies for the last couple of centuries can no longer save global civilization. The kind of worldview we need now is one that will treat the natural environment not as an instrument to be exploited but as a space of constructive and cooperative interaction among all living and non-living systems, including humans. What is needed, in other words, is for all of us to wake up again to the oneness of all things in the universe.

The Climate Crisis as the Call for Spiritual Awakening

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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

Grumbling about the weather is something that we humans have been doing for a long time as many human activities depend on weather conditions, including farming, fishing and logging. We know very well how farmers pray for rain as the source of water for their crops. On the other hand, there are people who become impatient about rainy weather lasting for three days, as Benjamin Franklin noted in his Poor Richard’s Almanac in June 1733: “After three days men grow weary, of a wench, a guest, and weather rainy.”

In the geographical areas where there is the rainy season lasting more than three days—for weeks, even for months in some places—people have learned to adjust their living to take advantage of it—like farmers who plant their rice ahead of the monsoon season and Buddhist practitioners who go into the rains retreat. While people expect the rainy weather to last for a long time during the rainy season, they certainly would not want to see rain becoming too heavy or lasting too long. People also would not want to see the rainy weather occurring outside of the normal rainy season.

What is worrisome about the weather these days is that it has become too erratic and too extreme, depriving people of the opportunity to conduct their normal activities, whether farming, fishing or any sort of outdoor events. While meteorologists around the world provide us a reliable and timely weather forecast every day and at all times, knowing about the weather condition does not prevent us from becoming victims of extreme weather such as hurricanes, floods, and wild fires.

As a matter of fact, incidents of extreme weather seem to be happening more often and becoming severer in recent years. The heat wave, a yearly event in American states like California and Nevada, expanded this year to Canada from late-June through mid-July, with the highest temperature reaching 49.6℃ in British Columbia. In August, the rain clouds that are normally observed during the rainy season of June covered the western region of Japan for more than a week, producing the weather phenomenon known as “training” that is known to cause heavy rains, thunder storms, and flash floods. Prefectures in the Kyushu region were hit especially hard by this late rainy season, with people losing their homes to floods and landslides, not to mention loved ones.

“Everybody talks about weather, but nobody does anything about it” is a statement attributed to Mark Twain. It is certainly incumbent on us to disprove Mark Twain, who made this statement back in the nineteenth century. What can we do about these extreme weathers, then? Daily news about the casualties of extreme weather around the world should be a wake-up call for all of us to start doing something about the weather, not just grumbling about it.

International organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are calling us to action, for extreme weather events happening in the world today are symptoms of the climate crisis, which we humans have a lot to do with. Scientists working for other research and academic institutions are also telling us that the climate crisis today is mostly man-made in that the way we have been conducting our living with little regard for the environment is responsible for such climate changes as air pollution, fresh water depletion, rising sea levels, and top soil erosion.

What is behind the climate crisis that we face in the world today if we humans have a lot to do with it, if it is mostly man-made? It is the view of the world that has guided our thoughts and actions for the last couple of centuries. As Fernand Braudel, a French historian known for his work on civilization and capitalism, points out in his A History of Civilizations (1993), “In every period, a certain view of the world, a collective mentality, dominates the whole mass of society. Dictating a society’s attitudes, guiding its choice, confirming its prejudices and directing its actions, this is very much a fact of civilization.” What has been behind our collective mentality, dictating our attitudes, guiding our choices, confirming our prejudices and directing our actions for the last couple of centuries is the view of the world that sees the natural environment as the storehouse of resources that can be exploited for the production of goods and services to increase our material standard of living.

To the extent that the view of the world that has guided industrial civilization is behind it, the climate crisis is the spiritual crisis as well. The climate crisis is the spiritual crisis because there is inner weather as well as the outer weather. Recall what John Burroughs, an American naturalist, said about the weather in his 1877 essay titled Is it going to rain?: “I was born with a chronic anxiety about the weather.” John Burroughs craved for rain sometimes because, for an essayist like him, “rain is necessary to the mind as to vegetation”, as he put it, and his thoughts became thirsty without moisture. Recall also what Robert Frost, an American poet, said about the weather in his 1928 poem, “Tree at My Window”: That day she puts out our heads together, / Fate had her imagination about her, / Your head so much concerned with outer, / Mine with inner, weather.

What is needed today is for all of us to re-examine what the world around us is like and what our relationship to that world ought to be. This is the reason why we need to listen to what spiritual leaders such as Thich Nhat Hanh (in his 2008 book The World We Have) and the Dalai Lama (in his 2020 book Our Only Home) have to say on the climate crisis. What they have to say, as is to be expected, is the need to embrace the Buddhist view of the world. What they are advocating can also be called the ecological, or systems, view of the world, which sees the natural environment not as something separate from us, but as the evolving web of interdependence among all the living and non-living systems. Only when we wake to the reality of delicate balance among causes and conditions that link these systems to one another can our thoughts and actions be directed towards preventing the climate crisis from escalating into a real catastrophe for human civilization.