It would be incorrect to claim
that the planet’s atmosphere and oceans are both getting warmer in a linear,
across-the-board way. The existence of exceptions, such as the slightly cooler
average summers in some places in the interior of North America, no longer
allows for credible claims of climate-change denial, an agenda that was
financed and promoted in part by fossil-fuel companies in the U.S. and E.U.
before being totally repudiated by science. Indeed, the credibility of natural
science vastly exceeds that of corporations with vested financial interests.
Comparing summers of the past
30 years as of 2025 with the 1901-1960 average, the 48 contiguous American
States showed “large changes I some regions, especially the West, and very muted
ones in the central and southeast” States.[1]
The “limited warming and even slight cooling in some locations” was “strikingly
apparent.”[2]
For example, Tuscaloosa County in Alabama cooled 0.6F since the first half of
the twentieth century.[3]
Lest this fact be taken as a rebuttal or counter-fact to “global warming,”
Joseph Barsugli, a climate researcher at the University of Colorado cautions, “There
are not too many places on the planet that are showing this, honestly.”[4]
In fact locations in the interior of North America that have shown slight
cooling are “an oddity amid a warming climate, as the general pattern is that
the world’s land areas are warming up more quickly than the oceans. Europe, for
instance, is one of the fastest warming land areas on the planet.”[5]
“According to the ERA5 dataset
of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S)” in 2025, Europe, rather than
North America, had achieved the honor of being the fastest-warming continent;
in fact, it had been warming by “approximately 0.53C per decade since the
mid-1990s,” and the Arctic was “warming even faster—around 0.69C per decade.”[6]
Even the linearity in “0.53C per decade” is an over-simplification and thus it
should not be projected out from 2025 to even 2035. Although not directly impacting the summer
heating, the Gulf Stream, an ocean current that brings relatively warm water from
Florida to northern Europe, was still active, albeit slowing down, during the
winter of 2024-2025. Should that conveyor-belt cease to function due to the
influx of cold fresh-water from melting ice in the Arctic, European winters
would be much colder, and that would lower the overall warmth of Europe
annually and could even have an impact on the summer heat—which way, I do not
know; the complexity easily surpasses my ken as I am not a climatologist.
My point is precisely that the
complexity, including feedback loops that have already been set in motion by
warming that had already occurred before the mid-2020s and are entirely natural
and thus cannot be stopped, still eludes even the grasp of the scientists who
study the phenomenon of climate change. The E.U.’s southern States in
particular were extraordinarily hot during the summer of 2025, and no one could
then predict if or when the Gulf Stream might shut down in the Atlantic Ocean.
The human impact on Earth’s atmosphere and oceans had already gone beyond what
human minds or computers could project in terms of the future. The negligence on
population growth and pollution by business around the world during the 20th
century came with the convenient implicit assumption that the impact would not
compromise or even extinguish our species, including homo sapiens being
able to think its way to counter such wide-scale effects. In fact, the inherent
or innate underlying human problem goes beyond cognition being limited
relative to human prowess.
The preeminence of the self, in a narrow self-love according to Augustine, is pride, “the beginning of all sin.”[7] In other words, “’the love of personal pre-eminence’ (amor excellentiae propriae) . . . means not simply ‘love of money’ but that ‘general avarice’ which makes a [person] seek for ‘something more than is fitting’, ‘for the sake of [one’s] own pre-eminence and through a kind of love of possession (quemdam propriae rei amorem)’.”[8] Whereas Aquinas would contend that greed is the prime sin, Augustine hung his hat on pride as the root of all evil, from which greed, or the desire for more sans limit, as evinced by not only the executives and shareholders of fossil-fuel companies, but also consumers who refused to constrain their use of electricity and gas/petro for driving cars rather than taken buses, trolleys, and subways in the last half of the 20th century and the first quarter of the next century. The impulse preferring instant gratification for the self over the public or common good was continuously given enough rope even to possibly choke the species eventually.
The strategic use of regulation and contributions to political campaigns for influence rendered not only people running corporations culpable, but also elected representatives and appointed regulators in government. The comfortable, mutual back-scratching relations between people in business and government could easily betray even the medium-term general good.
In other words, allowing a lower good to surmount a higher good, which Aristotle called misordered concupiscence, for private and thus narrow immediate gain, is incredibly short-sighted and humanity even in the mid 2020’s was coming to realize that time was catching up and it was already time to begin “paying the piper” for all the accumulated political, economic, and social/cultural lapses that had contributed to excessive CO2 emissions.
To be sure, the extent
of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere relative to a human being could easily
give people the misimpression of not being able to significantly alter the Earth’s
atmosphere and oceans; but humanity should also have been sufficiently concerned
about the exponential increase in the human population through the 20th
century, even with two world-wars to grasp the necessity of constraining that
increase as well as the consumption of energy by individuals and the pollution
of companies geared to supplying the greatly expanded population’s consumption.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. The E.U. Climate Change Service, “Why Are Europe and the Arctic Heating Up Faster than the Rest of the World?” 14 July, 2025.
7. Augustine, De Gen. ad litt. XI. 18ff, as quoted in John Burnaby, Amor Dei: Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938), p. 120.
