This is the latest book written by 15 years older than me, and this is my 57th book. I've been indebted to you for a long time since I first became a member of society. The unforgettable event of the past two years was, after all, the “COVID-19,” and I finally caught COVID-19 in October this year. In terms of timing, it was when the 7th wave calmed down, so I went to the fever outpatient clinic on the same day, and the PCR results were found positive within the same day.
I've gotten used to it for the past 2 years, so I haven't been able to go to work for 10 days, but I've been working from home normally. There was an email about this book to be published when the coronavirus was cured, and I made a reservation, and it was sent recently, so I read it right away.
I learned on the news the other day that the population has exceeded 8 billion people; when I was a kid, the world population was around 3.5 billion people, so it just doubled in less than 50 years. Until now, we have been able to cover food thanks to improved breeding and chemical fertilizers, but will we be able to produce food until the population is saturated?
It is in this book that the plan that is advancing against it is written. The content was shocking, but I thought I would spend the rest of my life prepared.
Below are the points I was concerned about.
・As a trend that became well established in the 90s, most of the development efforts in agriculture-related research and development are spent on strengthening resistance to herbicides, and growing species that do not die even if herbicides that kill plants are present, development efforts have been twisted in a very unnatural direction (p17)
・In addition to nitrogen, all three elements of chemical fertilizer, including phosphoric acid and potash, are abolished, and there are also people who argue that agriculture should be maintained with only organic fertilizers such as manure, compost, fish dregs, ash, and corroded plants, but it was only after chemical fertilizers could be mass-produced (p32) that Sri Lanka became unhappy by advocating the complete abolition of chemical fertilizers. (p33)
・The Dutch, who took over the Spice Islands from Portugal, tried to gain great wealth by being directly involved in the cultivation of plants used as perfumes locally, and the change from plunder to seizing production sites had great significance for the subsequent development of capitalism. (p51)
・It is said that the number of wildlife species that disappeared from the Earth as humans prospered reached 83% for land mammals, 80% for aquatic mammals, 50% for plants, and 15% for fish (p67)
・The American CIA and the Embassy in Ukraine expelled the pro-Russian president using far-right forces including Ukrainian neo-Nazis in 2014, and since then the Ukrainian government has consistently suppressed Russian and Ukrainian citizens whose native language is Russian in the Donbas region, and they have been killed and injured by regular forces and militias. Without this fact, the Russian military would not have invaded Ukraine (p78)
・Due to the outbreak of the Omicron variant, which has a strong trend of increasing the number of infected people due to the vaccine, the number of infected people per population is second only to New Zealand (p92) The probability that people who have been vaccinated 1-2 times will lose their lives due to COVID 19 seems lower than those who have not taken it (p100) The infection rate and fatality rate were overwhelmingly high in high-income countries (p115)
・It was quite a while ago that Asian men had higher weekly wages than white men among regular employed workers, but in 2019, Asian women finally got higher (p153)
・Among greenhouse gases, “water vapor” is responsible for the overwhelming part of the global warming effect, the contribution of carbon dioxide and methane is estimated to be about 2-5%, and it is estimated that the average body temperature should be -18 degrees Celsius if the earth is not enveloped as an atmosphere; in fact, it is maintained at 15 degrees Celsius thanks to greenhouse gases. (p162)
・What was feared in the 1950s and 60s was cooling, not global warming, because sunspot activity was sluggish during that period (p168)
・Even though global warming during the period 1000-1200 AD developed rather than collapsed civilization, there is still no answer as to why global warming of almost the same degree as that time would be a catastrophic impact now, where science and technology have developed much more than that time (p176)
・Anyone who specializes in dating a specific event called chronology using carbon isotopes in archaeology and history knows that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions reached their highest from 1950-63. The carbon content in the bodies of all animals and plants increased during this period, but no similar situation has occurred since then. Therefore, they know that the assertion that “carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase and are unmanageable in modern times” is unfounded (p212)
Read on 2022/11/21
