＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:https://skawa68.com/
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
<Added 10/7/2021> Negative impact of Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Manabe Shukuro, creator of global warming prediction model
This year’s (2021) Nobel Prize in Physics winners include Manabe Shukuro (90), a senior researcher at Princeton University and American citizen who proposed a material circulation model that couples the atmosphere and oceans and was the first in the world to publish a predictive model that shows that rising CO2 concentrations affect global warming, along with researchers from Germany and Italy.
Manabe’s award is likely to be a boost for proponents of “measures to combat global warming,” but there are concerns that it will have a negative impact that leads Japan further in the wrong direction.
It has been a long time since the term “global warming” first came to mind, but I have long had questions about why “countermeasures against global warming” are being used as a political tool to demand excessive burdens from developed Western countries, while China, Russia, African and Middle Eastern countries, and South Korea are exempt from such burdens because they are treated as “developing countries.”
I previously wrote an article about the “ocean plastic waste problem,” and I have a similar question.
I also felt something was off about the Swedish high school student Greta Thunberg, who hysterically called for “measures to combat global warming” and criticized President Trump for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.
However, I recently learned that two books had been published: “Global Warming Rhapsody: A Society-Destroying Much Ado About Nothing” by Professor Emeritus Watanabe Tadashi of the University of Tokyo, and “The Inconvenient Truth about Global Warming” by Mark Morano, and I felt like I had found what I was looking for.
This time I would like to introduce this to you.
1. The problem with the “global warming problem”
(1) The origin
The “global warming problem” seems to have originally been an uproar sparked by an organization called the United Nations’ “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (IPCC). The IPCC was established in 1988 by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to “compile the research results on climate change from over 2,500 scientists and present the policies necessary to solve the problem.”
It is the IPCC’s decision to make the “global warming problem” an “urgent issue for humanity” that has led to the current “global warming frenzy.”
(2) The view of Professor Emeritus Watanabe Tadashi of the University of Tokyo
If Japan unconditionally accepts what the UN says without a shred of doubt, and continues on this path, it will end up spending a huge amount of money on “global warming countermeasures,” but the effect will be negligible.
Japan’s continued waste of money on ineffective global warming countermeasures is like a “cult-like situation.”
(3) Response of national governments and the media
Governments, government agencies, and major media outlets around the world have succumbed to the “authority” of the UN, and have taken up the “global warming issue” without questioning it, leading to huge amounts of money being poured into it.
(4) Overseas scientists who question the “CO2-induced global warming theory”
Although there are only a few in Japan, there are many people overseas who loudly criticize the “CO2-induced global warming theory.”
These include American weather forecaster Anthony Watts, Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg, and Hungarian chemist Professor István Marko.
Dr. Freeman Dyson, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, told the website The Register in 2015:
There are ways to deal with environmental pollution. Global warming, on the other hand, is a completely different matter. Researchers say they have figured out what CO2 does, but we are nowhere near that stage yet. In the first place, it is not sensible to try to reduce CO2, which helps plants grow, promotes the greening of the earth, and enriches human society.
Climate scientists are arrogant about understanding the climate, since they rely on computer simulations that can tweak variables to produce any outcome…. I generally follow the majority opinion on most science topics, except for one thing: climate change, which is pure nonsense from a scientific point of view.
As an aside, in 2015, Professor Valentina Zharkova, an astronomer at Northumbrian University in the UK, announced the shocking results of her research, stating that “Solar activity will decline by 60% over the next 15 years. By 2030, the Earth will enter a mini ice age.”
It was reported that “The Earth will enter a mini ice age in 2030,” but the truth seems to be that what he actually said was “We will enter a period of climate change from around 2030.”
However, in 2016, the number of papers published in scientific journals (132) argued that recent climate changes such as global warming are not caused by human-induced CO2 emissions but are the result of solar activity.
When we hear the term “Ice Age,” many people probably imagine a tundra region like the one that existed around the time when mammoths became extinct, spreading across the entire Earth.
However, there are still vast ice sheets (some of which have begun to melt) in Antarctica, the Arctic, and Greenland, so the present day is also an ice age (called the Cenozoic ice age). This ice age began 2.6 million years ago, and during that time, cold “glacial periods” and warm “interglacial periods” have alternated.
Currently, the whole world is talking about how “global warming is a problem” and is trying desperately to prevent it, but some scholars are of the opinion that “global warming” has a positive effect in delaying the time when the Earth enters from an interglacial period to a glacial period.”
Therefore, I think it is safe to assume that what Professor Valentina Zharkova said above means that “due to the expected significant decrease in solar activity, the Earth will soon enter a cold glacial period from the current warm interglacial period.”
In addition, the following story was told by Nikkei Business’s Yoshio Hotta about the Inuit (indigenous people) of Alaska.
The Inuit believe that the ice age cycle is 50,000 years. More than 10,000 years have passed since the last ice age (cold glacial period), so we are currently in a (warm) interglacial period. There is talk of global warming, but since we are in an interglacial period, it is only natural that the temperature of the earth will rise. Another ice age will come in another tens of thousands of years.
Of course, I am a complete amateur, so I cannot say for sure, but I think the stories of Dr. Freeman Dyson, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Inuit are worth listening to.
2. Problems with “global warming countermeasures”
Politicians, government officials, business leaders, and academics flocked to this “good deal” that was generated by such huge expenditures, and the media also stirred up a sense of crisis, turning it into a “cult-like global warming frenzy” that was like “mass hysteria.”
(1) Japan’s Global Warming Countermeasures
Based on a cabinet decision made in May 2016, in anticipation of the Paris Agreement coming into force in the fall of that year, Japan has set a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions (mostly CO2) by 26% by 2030 compared to 2013 levels. The breakdown of this is 21.9% for “CO2 emissions,” 1.5% for “other greenhouse gases,” and 2.6% for “sink measures.”
(2) Global CO2 emissions (data released by the European Community in 2015)
China: 29.4%, USA: 14.3%, European Economic Area: 9.8%, India: 6.8%, Russia: 4.9%, Japan: 3.5%, Others: 31.5%
(3) Temperature rise until 2030 and the effect of Japan’s countermeasures
If the temperature rise over the 18 years from 2013 to 2030 is at the same pace as the “global annual average temperature trend (land + sea level)” according to the 2014 IPCC, it will be 0.27°C.
Over the past 100 years, the Earth’s temperature has risen by about 1 degree Celsius, but only about half of this is due to “anthropogenic CO2”, with the other half being due to natural fluctuations that have been occurring for hundreds of years and the effects of urbanization that has progressed since the latter half of the 20th century.
It is thought that almost half of the 0.27°C is due to “anthropogenic CO2,” but if we take a generous estimate of 0.15°C, even if Japan, which emits only 3.5% of the world’s CO2, were to reduce its emissions by just 21.9%, the effect of cooling the Earth would be 0.15°C x 0.035 x 0.219, or just 0.001°C.
If we continue to spend the current amount on climate change countermeasures until 2030, the total will be 50 trillion yen. In addition, the “renewable energy generation surcharge” introduced by the Democratic Party government in 2012 will cost 40 to 50 trillion yen, so the total will approach 100 trillion yen.
(4) Global warming measures used as a political tool
The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in February 1997 and put into effect in February 2005, stipulated that developed countries would reduce their CO2 emissions by a set percentage compared to the base year (1990) for the five-year period from 2008 to 2012 (first commitment body). The EU reduced its emissions by 8%, the US by 7%, and Japan and Canada by 6%.
Considering the year of adoption, it would have been reasonable to set the date as the following year (1998) or the convenient round number 2000, but the EU (especially Germany and the UK, which accounted for nearly 40% of the EU’s total emissions) strongly insisted on the “1990 standard.”
Since 1990, Germany has significantly reduced its CO2 emissions by updating old factories and power plants in the former East Germany, and as of 1997, emissions were 14% lower than in 1990.
Meanwhile, during the same period, the UK promoted fuel switching (from coal to natural gas) and reduced its CO2 emissions by 10%.
In other words, if the “1990 standard” is used, both countries will be able to “increase CO2 emissions.” This is a clever ploy and political strategy by both countries.
At that time, it was nearly impossible for Japan or the United States to reduce CO2 emissions by 6% or 7%, so Japan initially considered a 2.5% reduction. However, under pressure from Vice President Gore of the Clinton administration, who was promoting measures to combat global warming, Japan was forced to accept the 6% reduction.
From the time of the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement that came into force in 2016, the “developed countries that should reduce CO2 emissions” were limited to some EU countries, the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, Norway, and Switzerland.
China, Russia, India, Brazil, South Korea, Singapore, Middle Eastern countries, and African countries are all considered “developing countries” and are not forced to reduce emissions.
This is an extremely unreasonable situation considering that China is the largest CO2 emitter, accounting for nearly 30% of the world’s emissions, and is also the world’s second largest economy.
If measures to combat global warming are necessary, they cannot be expected to be effective unless China, India, and Russia first reduce their emissions.
I believe that this will only force developed countries, with the exception of the UK and Germany, to “waste money” and strengthen the power of countries that are considered “developing countries” in comparison, such as China and Russia.
This unreasonable situation is likely the result of illogical international political dynamics and diplomatic maneuvering, as well as the incomprehensible dogma that “global warming is an urgent issue for all of humanity.”
The United States did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol during the Clinton administration, and the Bush (son) administration withdrew from the protocol in March 2001. Canada also announced in April 2007 that it had “given up on the 6% reduction target,” and formally announced its withdrawal in December 2011. It is not surprising that President Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement during the Obama administration.
I think Japan should also consider changing its policy as soon as possible. I previously wrote an article about the “problem of excessive UN contributions,” but I hope that Japan will soon shift to a “diplomacy that prioritizes national interests.”
3. Problems with “wild animal protection” (an unnecessary remark)
This is off topic from the issue of global warming, but I previously wrote an article on the “problem of coexistence between animals and humans.” I am concerned that no fundamental measures have been taken to address the damage to crops caused by wild birds and animals, or the damage caused by droppings from crows, pigeons, starlings, stray cats, weasels, etc. in urban areas.
Regarding damage to agricultural crops, farmers are installing nets and providing compensation, but the government does nothing to prevent damage caused by bird and animal droppings in urban areas. It is problematic to continue to waste tax money in the name of compensation when there is no natural disaster, and the cost is not insignificant. The damage caused by droppings not only damages the beauty of the city, but is also a major problem in terms of hygiene.
This is nothing but a case of people being trapped by the dogma of “animal protection.” If it were someone else’s problem, we could sneer and call them “ridiculous and stupid people,” but when it comes to our own problem, it’s no laughing matter.
I hope that the government will quickly move away from erroneous dogmas and stereotypes and pursue correct diplomacy and administration that cuts to the root of the problem.
