It is likely due to natural
selection having formed our present-day species overwhelmingly in the
hunter-gatherer very, very long period of our species 1.8 million years of
existence (agriculture just having begun around 7000 BCE!) that we tend to take
notice of a foreground and leave the background along because any threats it
holds are immediate. Tigers, for example, become particularly dangerous when
they are up close rather than several fields away. During the (Northern
hemisphere’s) summer of 2026, as the E.U. was sweltering in successive
heatwaves, the El Nino current event in which warm equatorial water in the Pacific
Ocean moves eastward readily became a target as the culprit producing the heat far
away in Europe. In actuality, according to scientists (but what do they know?),
the gradual (i.e., background) warming of the planet’s atmosphere, especially
in the Artic as well as in Europe, was behind the heat breaking records in the
E.U. as well as in bordering sovereign states like Britain, where on 25 June, presumably
in London, an all-time-high temperature for the month of June was recorded. Global
warming, once safely in the background, was coming home to roust in the
foreground.
Earlier in June, NOAA in the
U.S. had declared “that El Nino conditions are officially underway in the
tropical Pacific.”[1]
Even though “Super El Nino” was not a scientific category, this did not stop
the media coverage of “a so-called ‘Super El Nino.’”[2]
At the time, Ioanna Vergini, founder of
the global weather-forecasting platform, WFY24, stated, “The Pacific isn’t in a
strong El Nino state now, and even when it is, its direct influence on European
summer heat is weak and poorly constrained.”[3]
Referring to the successive heatwaves, she added, “This is a classic jet-stream
blocking event acting on a record-warm background. The dome is the mechanism;
long-term warming is the amplifier; El Nino is a distraction.”[4]
Disruption from El Nino is largely in the tropics. Moreover, El Nino tends to
temporarily increase global average temperatures by just 0.2C. According to
Euronews, “this impact “is not as significant as human-made climate change,
which” by the summer of 2026 had “pushed the global surface temperature up by
approximately 1.3 – 1.5C compared to pre-industrial levels.”[5]
The human-made impact was warming the E.U. “more than twice as fast as the
global average, with temperatures up by around 2.5C compared to pre-industrial
levels.” In fact, the northern reaches of Europe “extend into the Arctic, the
fastest-warming region on Earth, where temperatures [were] rising at
three-to-four times the global rate. As snow and ice melt, less sunlight is
reflected by the Earth’s surface [back into space], while the darker surfaces
that are exposed absorb more heat, amplifying the melting.”[6]
In short, Europe, in its successive heatwaves breaking temperature records, was
demonstrating for the rest of the world why an increase of 1.5C was selected in
2016 at a climate-change global conference in Paris as the threshold not to
surpass. It is not as if delegates had stood by at that conference as someone
flipped a coin.
Running up against a threshold
that has been reasonably thought out and thus determined effectively moves
climate change from the background to the foreground. To be sure, scientists
working to ferret out the impact of climate change on a current weather-event
face difficulties, but this does not mean that human-made warming of the
atmosphere has not become a major factor. The shifting of climate change from a
“back burner” to the front of the proverbial stove can be taken as a negative
verdict on how governments around the world did in implementing the Paris
Accords to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5C above pre-industrial
levels. So, part of the motivation to blame El Nino could be to avoid self-blame,
which includes not only government officials, but also voters, at least in the
world’s republics. In other words, recognizing that climate change has moved to
the foreground does not come cost-free. Indeed, quite a verdict goes along with
the species risking its own survival.
Even so, perhaps we should not
be too hard on our species, for the vast majority of natural selection occurred
when a focus on the foreground at the expense of background was necessary for
immediate survival. That so much of our species’ natural selection in evolution
took place in such a different environment than our own today, together with
the glacial pace of evolution, may be why our species goes extinct sooner
rather than later if the planet establishes an atmospheric equilibrium that is
uninhabitable for humans.
To be sure, we are homo sapiens,
the wise species of homo (man), and as of the summer of 2026, the jury was
still out on whether technological invention would save the day in reducing carbon
and methane from the atmosphere (and the warming oceans). Already, technology
was in operation, albeit at too small a scale, to remove carbon from the
atmosphere. Additionally, energy from renewable resources was increasing,
though not as fast as the increasing global demand for energy so as a
consequence the use of fossil fuels was still increasing, at least as of 2025
according to a consultant to BP whose talk I attended at Yale. Our species hope
lies not with government officials standing up to the fossil-fuel industry and
profit, and not even in evolving to be more attentive to what is in the
background; rather, our savior would have to be technology, as per the already
extant technological society. The question even in 2026 as the E.U. sweltered
as never before was whether the massive scale of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans
could be impacted (fast) enough by technology that, at best, was only in the beginning
stages of development. This is not to say that human rationality could not have
been applied, with sufficient political power, to reduce carbon emissions more
since the Paris Accords were adopted.
Resisting slavish attachment
to instant gratification is, according to Nietzsche, possible for our species
and can even be viewed as the completion of mankind. Whereas a person who is
slavishly devoted to momentary pleasure cannot be trusted as a promise-keeper,
“the man who has his own independent protracted will and the right to make
promises” has “a consciousness of his own power and freedom, a sensation of
mankind come to completion. Is emancipated individual, with the actual right
to make promises, this master of a free will, this sovereign man—how
should he not be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the right to
make promises and stand as their own guarantors, of how much trust, how much
fear, how much reverence he arouses—he deserves all three . . .”[7]
We are capable of promise-making and
promise-keeping—the human will is strong enough for that, at least in principle,
and not by relying on a supporting lattice-work of moral constraints issuing
out in “Thou shalt not!” We have seen
how shallow mere political protest has been as up against the power that
governments have nonetheless had to protect fossil-fuel industries under the
subterfuge of saving jobs.
Rather than looking to moral
pressure, humanity can look for its fulfillment at the human will as sovereign
and thus as capable of self-confident assertion as a dominating instinctual
urge (i.e., pride in being able to take oneself, and by others, as a
promise-keeper rather than a weakling enslaved to momentary pleasure). Hence
the negative verdict; as a species, we have not looked to the strength of the
human will to make up for the glacial pace of natural selection. Perhaps the
question is whether mankind will reach completion, or be completed as in being made
extinct.
Even with respect to people being
dreadfully uncomfortable in the European heat and humidity in June, 2026, humanity
itself could be seen as having blood on its hands, and yet news of its
self-inflicted wound will not have reached the culprit, like light from the
farthest star that has not yet reached Earth. Nietzsche uses this imagery on
the self-inflicted discrediting of the Abrahamic concept of God, so I adapt the
language to apply to the discrediting of our species as yet another
self-inflicted wound committed as if the human will had been deactivated and put
on auto-pilot.
