On the Startling Pace of Global Warming: Calculus Applied

I went to Yale to study for four years (and then to Wisconsin for four years for post-doc study under a Harvard scholar), after having completed a Ph.D. program elsewhere (and decades later I went to Harvard (including auditing coursework at Yale for one term) for 1.5 years of continued study in comparative theology and ethics, and independent research) because my education at my first university, that of Kansas, was so bad; that university, run by sophomoric Jayhawks, did not heed the value of retaining faculty financially once promoted from the assistant level, and the graduate students who were teaching undergraduates were not trained in pedagogy. Significant to my unsatisfactory education at the University of Kansas was my decision to switch to business administration and accounting “mid-stream” without any regard to the opportunity cost of foregone coursework in the humanities in the liberal arts. When I was teaching accounting on the side while studying at Yale a decade later, I finally received confirmation that I had indeed made a significant educational mistake at KU, for when some Yale College students petitioned Dean Brodhead to create a major in business, he replied in the Yale Daily News, “Let us educate you first; then go out and get trained.” This priority and sequence are both severely eclipsed at “state” or public, universities in virtually every U.S. state, whereas the E.U. does a better job of distinguishing institutionally knowledge from vocational skill. Even the teaching in the liberal arts at the University of Kansas was lackluster, though I probably would have still made the move to business had the teaching been good. In calculus, for example, the graduate-student instructor did not think it necessary to explain that a derivative refers to the changing rate of acceleration rather than to acceleration itself; his exclusive orientation was to calculating so as to get us to arrive at correct answers. We were like trained seals. The graduate-student instructor of Physics, who could barely speak English (but that didn’t matter to the department’s receptionist), also did not feel obliged to explain what the formulae mean. Why does force equal mass times acceleration? Missing from E=MC² was the point that energy can become mass (Higgs would not be discovered for decades though). Whereas questions of physics have remained less than pressing through my adult life, climate change has turbo-charged the significance of the derivative, for the rate of acceleration of climate change, as evinced in the heatwaves in the E.U. during the summer of 2026, had already been positive and was increasing both as a number and in value qua significance. The melting glaciers in the Alps indicated then that the pace of human-caused climate change was much faster than previously expected. My inability to “see the forest” instead of individual “trees” at Kansas regarding my own college education can be likened to our species’ inability (and refusal) to grasp the true significance of climate change as a threat to our species’ very survival, and certainly comfort.

Regarding the impact of human-caused carbon (and methane) emissions on the heat-waves gripping Europe in the early summer (at least) of 2026, Dr. Theodore Keeping of Imperial College London said at the time, “The science of how climate change is worsening heatwaves is settled. Continued fossil-fuel emissions are directly responsible for the disruption people are experiencing this week in their homes, schools and workplaces. The speed of change is startling. Every few years we are seeing heat records shattered in Europe. This year it has been in consecutive months.”[1] That the speed was startling can be taken as a red flag, or very significant warning, that, as an old proverb states, the chickens are coming home to roust. In other words, humanity could no longer pretend that climate change is only an abstraction without “real world” consequences.

Science from World Weather Attribution (WWA) “found that both the daytime highs and overnight temperatures seen during the heatwave in late June, 2026] would have been ‘virtually impossible to occur at [that same] time of year’ as recently as 1976—just 50 years ago. A similar heatwave occurring in that historic climate would [have been] 3.5C cooler.”[2] In that year, in early July, I was a mere boy using tacks to pin an American flag I had made to the wood-front of my parent’s house for the bicentennial, and I don’t recall the heat (other than that which was released by my parents) being all that unbearable then in Illinois, which admittedly is a U.S. rather than an E.U. member-state. Even though the expression, virtually impossible, is itself startling, so too is an increase rate of acceleration, as was evinced in the melting of glaciers in central Europe in June, 2026.

Due to the heatwave that was holding on in Europe, the snow and ice accumulated over the previous winter on existing glaciers in the Alps was expected to have completely melted away by 29 June, 2026. In other words, from that day on, “every additional day of melting” would “shirk the size of the glacier[s].”[3] Since 2000, that point, known as glacier loss day, has usually not been until mid-August. Matthias Huss, the director of GLAMOS in Europe, warned that the glaciers were “shrinking at an unprecedented rate, accelerated by the ongoing heatwave.”[4] Huss stated, “We are three months too early compared to a healthy state” of the glaciers.[5] This all points to, or suggests, that the rate of acceleration of climate change was increasing; the derivative was positive as of 2026. Indeed, the melting of the glaciers had been “relatively modest until recent decades,” and the melting during the first month of summer in 2026 in turn made the rate in those recent decades look relatively modest.[6]

Among the many implications of an increasing rate of acceleration is the likelihood that the climate-change models being used to forecast warming going forward were in need of being adjusted, with dire impacts being predicted as coming sooner than had been expected even in the early 2020s. Another implication is that the continuing increase in carbon (ppm) in the atmosphere really needed to be stopped sooner rather than later. As of 5 June, 2026, the atmospheric carbon dioxide level was at 432.34 ppm, according to the NOAA (measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory), whereas the corresponding figure had been 429.61 ppm a year earlier. Besides the increasing global population, part of the reason for why reductions in overall fossil-fuel usage continued to be so difficult was that not every continent was facing extreme heat, and thus the dire consequences already, so sufficiently broad-based political will was still lacking even though virtually every European in June of 2026 was doubtlessly convinced that global warming is real and that carbon dioxide and methane levels in the atmosphere had already reached unacceptable levels. Similarly, not every place on the planet was at risk of increased flooding from sea-level rise. Italy, California, Greece, Florida, the Netherlands, and New York, for example, can easily be distinguished from Czechia, Illinois, Poland, Colorado, Luxemburg, and Arizona with regard to probable impacts from higher oceans. Fundamentally, both democracies and autocracies are vulnerable to not acting sufficiently in anticipation of yet-unfelt dire consequences; our species is not as rational as we may suppose, and this weakness “comes home to roust” especially amid increasing rates of acceleration.

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1. Liam Gilliver, “Climate Change is Running Rampant: Europe’s Heatwave ‘Virtually Impossible’ 50 Years Ago,” Euronews.com, 26 June 2026, italics added for emphasis.
2. Ibid.
3. Evelyn Dom, “Swiss Glaciers Melting at Alarming Rate in June as Europe Faces Extreme Heat,” Euronews.com, 28 June, 2026.
4. Ibid, italics added for emphasis.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

October 12th: Happy Vikings Day!

I contend that the ideological war being waged in the United States by the 2010s over whether October 12^th should be “Indigenous People’s” Day or Columbus Day became real in 2021 when President Biden issued a proclamation commemorating “Indigenous People’s” Day not coincidentally to fall on the same day as Columbus Day. Similarly, though only unofficially, the United American Indians of New England have labeled Thanksgiving Day as “The National Day of Mourning” since 1970. The de facto hegemony of ideology in changing official U.S. holidays, including in the refusal of some people and even businesses to say “Christmas” even on Christmas Eve Day, has proceeded without the premise that ideology should play such a role being debated in public discourse. Instead, the onslaught has been enabled by the vehemence of the conquerors in insisting that their decisions be recognized and not contradicted. Once I went to a Unitarian “church” on a Thanksgiving expecting a spirit of gratefulness, as per President Lincoln’s proclamation establishing the date of the holiday after two years of brutal war between the CSA and USA. The sermon was instead on the need for sorrow instead. I walked out, shaking my head in utter disbelief. Perhaps some Americans might one day insist that a similar mood be preached in churches on Christmas Day. Both the need and insistence come with a tone of passive aggression, and are indeed power-grabs based in resentment, which Nietzsche argued is a major indication of weakness rather than strength, and thus self-confidence. Perhaps the manufactured dialectics, such as the one centered on October 12^th, can be transcended in a Hegelian rather than religious sense at a higher level.

According to Britannica, Helge and Anne Ingstad discovered “the remains of a Viking encampment that they were able to date to the year 1000,” almost 500 years before Columbus’ landing on islands in the Bahamas (rather than on the mainland of North America).[1] The Graenlendinga Saga (Saga of the Greenlanders) has Bjarni Herjólfsson as the first European to see mainland North America in 985. At around the year 1000 CE, Leif Eriksonn, son of Erik the Red, “is reported to have led an expedition in search of the land sighted by Herjólfsson,” according to Eiríks Saga Rauda.[2] This is consistent with the empirical evidence found in Newfoundland.  Leif Eriksonn “found an icy barren land he called Helluland (“Land of Flat Rocks”) before eventually travelling south and finding Vinland (“Land of Wine”).[3] Later, Leif’s brothers travelled to Vinland, where their expedition stayed for three years. This is certainly sufficient to refer to the holiday on October 12^th as “Vikings’ Day,” or “Eriksonn Day,” which would cover the brothers too. Columbus Day has been antiquated by the discovery of Viking artifacts on the mainland of North America, in Newfoundland, which is a lot closer to where the Puritans settled than is the Caribbean islands, which of course are not on the mainland of North America.

To be sure, the peoples who came to be known as American Indians by the Europeans had come to North America thousands of years earlier, and thus were not indigenous either, could be said to have been the first people to discover America, from the vantage point of Asia rather than Europe. But those people emigrated gradually from east Asia over a land-bridge that extended back then westward from Alaska, rather than coming over after an expedition of discovery. In any case, the word “Indigenous” can be struck from “Indigenous Peoples” Day for greater accuracy.

In short, Vikings Day can safely, from the perspective of the hyperactive ideologies, be used for the holiday, as there is no evidence that the Vikings in the eleventh century mistreated any of the earlier arrivals from Asia. The dialectic of Columbus Day and American Indians Day can thus be done away with at a higher level of historical accuracy.

The role of ideology in making and remaking holidays in the U.S. can be seen as it has played out at universities located in different member states. At Harvard, which is located in Massachusetts, classes and offices were closed on “Indigenous Peoples Day” on October 12, 2024, without any mention of “Columbus Day” in the academic calendar. The ideological preference is clear not only in which name the university used for the holiday (rather than using both names), but also in the fact that the university did not cancel classes for Veterans Day. Universities in the militaristic member-state of Arizona had classes on Columbus Day but not on Veterans Day.  Whereas Harvard kept its libraries open on “Indigenous Peoples Day,” public universities in Arizona did not even do that for Veterans Day, in spite of the fact that students would obviously be studying on a one-day break from classes. Harvard is typically compared with Yale. Not even Yale cancelled classes on October 12^th (or on Veterans Day); instead, Yale, unlike Harvard, had a fall break of one week in October, which did not include Columbus Day.

In short, the respective university administrations, reflecting the political ideology that was most powerful locally, were making ideological statements in deciding whether and when to not hold classes on particular holidays. Harvard’s administration used the excuse that Cambridge, Mass recognized “Indigenous Peoples Day” as the reason why the university was recognizing that holiday and not Columbus Day, even though it too was a national (and state) holiday. I would not be surprised if Americans of Italian ancestry felt a slap. Part of the problem with ideology-fueled resentment is that such collateral damage is ignored or even, in a twisted way, believed to be justified.  Allowing an ideology to turn holidays into a battlefield is in dire need of being debated in the public square in the United States, rather than being tacitly allowed due to the efforts to intimidate. “Thanksgiving IS a day of sorrow! You better not disagree!” Such has been the tone intended to thwart even debate on the matter.

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1. Jeff Wallenfeldt, “Did the Vikings Discover America?” Britannica.com (accessed October 14, 2024).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Exposing Yale’s Sordid Side: “The Inner Ring” by C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis aptly describes in one published lecture the nature of a very human game, which is really about how soft power, which is often buttressed by institutional position, works in any human organization. To use Nietzsche’s expression (which Lewis would have hardly appreciated), the dynamics of an inner ring is human, all too human, and thus hardly an extractible part of the human condition. Yet it is much more salient, and arguably even dysfunctional, in just some organizations, especially those that have an elite reputation such as Yale, whose essence, we shall investigate here, might be exclusion even within the university community, such that some vulnerable members are told they are not really members (but that their donations are welcome).

In my essay, “Yale’s Original Sin,” I describe Yale’s culture of inner-exclusion operating within the university, wherein some insiders are relegated by inner-insiders as outsiders. During my stay as an alumnus doing research for a book I was writing, I was astonished to read emails from non-academic employees in which they bluntly stated that I was not a “member of the Yale community” because I was an alum. Unfortunately, and quite tellingly, those explicit statements were just the tip of the iceberg. Much more common, in more sense than one ironically, were the intentional subtle hints given by some faculty, faculty-administrators, and even non-academic employees that I was not worth their time whether in replying to an email message or in conversation. This extended to the faculty culture being averse to allowing alumni (and other scholars, as a courtasy) to audit courses and to that of clerical employees not recognizing alumni in residence for a term as members of the Yale community. This self-serving, arrogant, and deeply mistaken attitude and belief applied in a counter-productive way to charging alumni in residence $4 more than students, faculty, and the non-academic employees themselves, for lunch at the university lunch hall known as Commons. A common mentality to be sure. 

In his lecture entitled, “The Inner Ring,” C. S. Lewis describes the ubiquitous phenomenon that he calls the inner ring of an organization. “I can assure you,” he tells his audience, “that in whatever hospital, inn of court, diocese, school, business, or college you arrive . . . , you will find the Rings—what Tolstoy calls the second or unwritten systems.” In War and Peace, Tolstoy alludes to such an informal yet firmly hierarchical or concentric system: “(S)ide by side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there existed a different and more real system—the system which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like Boris.” The general is not royalty, and so he deferred to the prince even though the latter was of a lower rank. The general was thus an outsider in the immediate context of the prince’s conversation even though he is very much an insider among military brass.

We mere humans revile being relegated as outsiders; we very much want to be insiders. This is C. S. Lewis’ main point. “My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action.” Specifically, he means here “the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.” This desire and fear can be distinguished from the desire for personal gain and the fear of going homeless out of financial ruin. “And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected.” In other words, wanting to feel oneself as an insider and to avoid feeling like an outsider are desires that do not necessarily line up with, or reduce to, the desire for political or economic gain.

As with any desire, the desire to be an insider cannot be permanently satiated once achieved. C.S. Lewis wrote, “As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. . . . Once the first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends.” Or perhaps a ring within that ring will emerge, and you will have a new impediment to feeling like an insider. Even if that is achieved, you would still suffer from the fear that you could become an outsider, for the grounds from relegating you are informal in this secondary system and thus secretive and hardly subject to the moral principle of fairness. C. S. Lewis goes so far as to declare, “Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.”

The combination of secrecy and informality in an inner ring, or circle, renders unfairness from personal like and dislike especially likely. An official hierarchy, in contrast, operates ideally on the basic of merit, with avenues for appeals. Money in the form of bribes and political power can less ideally come into play in formal hierarchies. So too can friendships. But these more informal means of promotion and demotion are more the currency of inclusion and exclusion in informal hierarchies, such as C. S. Lewis describes. To be rejected for lack of merit is, I submit, easier to take than by unfair means or reasons. The latter is evinced when the decision-makers are hidden from view and thus appeals to them cannot be made. This passage from C. S. Lewis describes the subtle mechanics of an inner ring very well:

“You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it. . . . It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline. . . . There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name.”

The subtle messages in the rude behavior from Yale faculty, academic administrators, non-academic employees, and even some students that I describe above and in “Yale’s Original Sin” are the means by which ill-favored Yalies gradually discover that they have already been rendered outsiders. That the realization of having been excluded can occur gradually opens up the outsider to embarrassment, for the insiders relish watching as if the person with a blindfold on is stumbling over furniture. The behavior could be regarded superficially as mere rudeness, so it can be difficult if one is on the receiving end to detect that one is being handed one’s hat on the way out. A person may just stand there, holding one’s hat, wondering why a person just felt the need to deliver the hat even if the other person intended to send the message, you are no longer welcome here but I can’t kick you out of the building. This is precisely the message that people in Yale’s inner rings (and there are more than one) want to send. Bottom line: such people refuse to tolerate even the very presence of a person they don’t like. This includes a person who holds a contrary opinion. The motive, in other words, goes beyond wanting to make sophomoric statements of superiority; the intention is also meant to convey to others that they are outsiders. Whereas gorillas establish superiority and push certain individuals out by physical means, our species is not so forthright and honest (or brave).

In the movie Contact (1997), Haddon, a millionaire, says to Ellie, a young astrophysicist who wants to be chosen to go on a space mission, “The powers that be have been very busy lately, falling over themselves to position themselves for the game of the millennium. Maybe I can help deal you back in.” By this he is referring to being dealt cards in a card game. Ellie takes the hint and replies, “I didn’t realize that I was out,” to which Haddon says, “Maybe not out, but certainly being handed your hat.”  Ellie has no idea that even her boss, in jockeying for position to be chosen as the astronaut, has been working to see to it that Ellie is eliminated from consideration by the inner ring of which the boss is an insider but Ellie is not. She has no access to that circle of power-elites, so she doesn’t even know that she needs to promote or defend herself, or even appeal. From outside the inner ring, its workings are shrouded with mystery, for outsiders are not privy to the phone calls and other conversations that take place within. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name.” Ellie’s boss gets pleasure from dealing her out, especially because this is being done without her knowledge. C. S. Lewis wrote, “It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline.”

Interesting, C. S. Lewis must have known that the question of whether the phenomenon of the inner ring, even manifesting in a seminary, is evil was being asked. If, as I strongly suspect, exclusionary comments and actions are deliberately done at least in part to emotionally hurt other people, even just out of dislike, the question of whether such insiders are de facto evil is relevant. C. S Lewis focuses his answer at the level of the ring, but with implications for its inhabitants.  “I am not going to say that the existence of Inner Rings is an Evil. It is certainly unavoidable. There must be confidential discussions: and it is not only a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that personal friendship should grow up between those who work together.” But this is just one side of the coin, or ring. Lewis admits that the “genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.” These last two sentences may aptly describe the dark side of Yale. This is not to say that the essence of Yale is exclusively exclusion, for that would imply that no other source of worth, in this case, academic, exists in the organization. Even so, exclusion is an excessive, or hypertrophic instinctual urge in many people there, especially in those who work there.

Lewis claims that the anguish in being reckoned as an outsider is a strong human motivating force in wanting to be counted as insiders. But if a group, or its inner ring, is filled with rude, petty elitists, wouldn't a normal person feel some solace and even self-esteem in being an outsider? I suppose whether this is one's own choice or that of the "members" of a ring makes a difference here. Nevertheless, Nietzsche wrote that the healthy should not visit the sick in hospital lest the healthy catch something. In Christianity, Paul warns about hanging out with fools. Depending on the group, a person might very well relish being an outsider, even if not by choice. Some rings have bad odors. 

A question posed by C. S. Lewis seems relevant: “I must not ask whether you have derived actual pleasure from the loneliness and humiliation of the outsiders after you, yourself were in: whether you have talked to fellow members of the Ring in the presence of outsiders simply in order that the outsiders might envy; whether the means whereby, in your days of probation, you propitiated the Inner Ring, were always wholly admirable. I will ask only one question—and it is, of course, a rhetorical question which expects no answer. In the whole of your life as you now remember it, has the desire to be on the right side of that invisible line ever prompted you to any act or word on which, in the cold small hours of a wakeful night, you can look back with satisfaction? If so, your case is more fortunate than most.” From this, I surmise that Lewis reckoned that such people are bad, and even malicious, but not evil, because what he was describing was human nature itself.

In Augustine’s theology, we are all subject to original sin. Proverbially, we are all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. Evil, it seems to me, cannot simply be human nature itself, but, rather, an extreme in enjoying human suffering. But even this definition is problematic, for sociopathy is a psychological illness rather than a religious phenomenon. Evil is a distinctly religious term. I think the problem is psychological where exclusion is allowed to fill in a void to become the essence of an organization. Taken to the extreme, exclusion as substance or the raison d’etre of an organization and thus being its very essence snuffs out other possible substances and thus must ultimately collapse. Relatedly, M. Scott Peck writes in People of the Lie that it is a sense of inner emptiness that lies at the core of malignant narcissism. Perhaps that is responsible for the dysfunctional organizational culture of inner-exclusion from within that has plagued Yale.