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.
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.
