Environment Normalization of Extreme Phenomena and Humanity's Unstable Future Early 21st Century

Environment Normalization of Extreme Phenomena and Humanity's Unstable Future Early 21st Century

At the beginning of the 21st century, humanity is facing a new phase of crisis caused by global warming. This is not just a rise in temperature, but extreme weather events will become the norm rather than the exception. Extreme heat waves and floods, once said to occur only once every hundred years, now occur every few years somewhere in the world, threatening social infrastructure and human lives. Even areas of the Northern Hemisphere that have been considered relatively safe are no exception. In fact, the risk of natural disasters is actually increasing because the rise in high latitudes is greater than at the equator due to accelerating global warming.

As an actual example, in the Canadian province of British Columbia, just after temperatures reached 50°C, hotter than the Sahara Desert, large-scale flooding and landslides occurred, forcing the evacuation of thousands of people. The simultaneous occurrence of such a heat wave and floods shocked the world as a complex disaster that had never been anticipated before. Similarly, in Siberia, widespread fires in the tundra and the thawing of permafrost are progressing, causing land subsidence and infrastructure collapse, and at the same time, there are concerns that the release of frozen methane will further accelerate global warming, creating a vicious cycle.

The normalization of such extreme events has been warned by the IPCC and research institutes in various countries since the beginning of the 2000s. Reports at the time repeatedly emphasized the destabilization of the climate system, and the impact of extreme weather events on economic activity, food production, and public infrastructure became the focus of discussion. In particular, developed countries such as Europe, the U.S., and Japan invested in disaster prevention infrastructure to cope with floods and heat waves, but even so, the reality that they could not cope with the magnitude of the events became clearer one after another.

Considering the historical background, these events can be positioned not as mere natural phenomena but as human-historical phenomena resulting from changes in industrial structures and lifestyles. As globalization progressed and energy demand surged, the failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently led to the normalization of this extreme phenomenon. It is a historical irony that the activities of industrial society, once a symbol of affluence, have turned out to be a factor in shaping an unstable future.

The fact that even the relatively safe regions of the Northern Hemisphere are now suffering from heat waves, floods, wildfires, and droughts shows that climate change is no longer a problem of a few regions, but a threat that affects the conditions of human existence on a global scale.