Climate and Human Activities

Abstract

The history of the concept of the world for human beings has changed dramatically. However, we still have the implicit idea that the human being is of small significance in the world. Our behavior has been in some sense controlled tacitly by such ideas about the world. There have been several warnings that such an unlimited world no longer exists. The book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962) raised a civilian movement in the 1960s toward the concept of our world as a limited dimension. Report of Conference, Study of Man’s Impact on Climate (SMIC 1971) and Limit to Growth by the Club of Rome (Meadows et al. 1972) were part of the second movement in this context, organized by international organizations involving a large number of scientists. Until recently, however, environmental change was accepted by society as substantially limited to local phenomena such as urban pollution, damage to ecological systems by heavy industrial pollution of air, water, and soil, and so on. In 1969 the city of Los Angeles recorded the worst air pollution, and the word smog was invented to describe such a heavy air pollution aerosol layer. The U.S. Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970. In Japan, the Air Quality Protection Law was established in 1968. Strong protection actions were launched to clean the urban environment up to the 1980s in most countries.