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.

Complexity in Global Warming: On the Imprint of Pride

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. Rather than discuss those, which have become better known to the public, I want to describe the sheer complexity of a generally warming planet, which is rarely adequately grasped by non-scientists, and delve into the sordid self-love that I contend is ultimately behind global warming. 

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 20^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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.

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1. Chris Mooney, “The Strange Divide in How Americans Experience Summer Temperatures,” CNN.com, August 19, 2025.
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.

8. John Burnaby, Amor Dei: Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938), p. 120. Burnaby quotes from Augustine, De Gen. ad litt. XI. 18ff.

 

 

Western Banks Lending to Asia's Expanding Middle Class: Profit vs. Planet

In April 2013, debt levels in Asia were reaching record levels as international lenders were extending short-term loans to a growing middle class. Non-mortgage consumer credit in Asia outside of Japan had increased 67% from 2007 to reach $1.66 trillion by the end of 2012. This credit included credit cards and loans for cars, electronic products, and appliances. Outside of Japan, Asian car and motorcycle loans nearly doubled from 2007 to 2012, to reach a record $219.7 billion. Appliance and electronics loans also more than doubled, reaching a high of $10.9 billion. Meanwhile, credit-card loans grew by 90% to reach a record $234.1 billion, according to Euromonitor. The incentive for the banks is not difficult to fathom. At the time, more than half of the world’s middle class was expected to be in Asia by the end of the decade. That translates yearly into more than 100 million additional people per year. For the banks, this was an opportunity since at least the beginning of the decade because growth was not possible in the European Union and the United States on account of the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing European debt-crisis that extended well into 2013. The European Commission of the E.U. was also working on regulatory proposals that would limit the incentives of mortgage servicers to produce too many “bubble-creating” mortgages. 
So Western banks had an incentive to look east for fruitful markets. Interesting, government regulators in China, Malaysia, and Indonesia had began reining in mortgage, credit-card and auto/motorcycle lending, perhaps in fear of an Asian financial crisis. Had Western bankers learned their lesson, or were they unwittingly bringing their reckless mentality to Asia? Two levels of concerns can be extracted from this case. I contend that the more immediate concerns were crowding out attention that ought to have been paid to the larger, but longer-term, problems.
One sort of concern suggests that the international banks may have been providing too much credit to people entering the middle class. Such borrowers, similar to the sub-prime mortgage borrowers in California, Arizona and Florida, may not be able to handle their new debt-loads. At the beginning of 2013, debt levels relative to individual income in many Asian economies, including Malaysia, China, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and India, were already up to 30% higher than in the United States. This would suggest that the Western bankers were again poised to be reckless. Citigroup’s claim that it was expanding its lending to the middle class in Asia in a “disciplined manner” can thus be challenged. More particularly, the financial-growth incentives facing the bank, given the continued weak economies in Europe and North America, can be critically analyzed. Did Citigroup's bankers accurately anticipate whether another debt melt-down might have resulted from the trend in debt-loads, or was this low-probability, high-risk scenario too long-term oriented to be factored in sufficiently? I don't know the answer to this, but I submit that baleful consequences that are larger and presumably further off tend to get pushed aside by the human mind, given the preoccupation with today, hard-wired by natural selection.
Even if we take Citigroup at its word that it was lending in Asia in a “disciplined manner” in spite of the rather unique opportunity for bank profit there, we can ask whether international banks have a responsibility to society, and even the species itself by resisting the temptation to immediately extend the rising middle class higher in spite of "growth pains" that could be anticipated. To a banker, this might have seemed like muzzling the golden goose, particularly given the soft economies in North America and Europe at the time.  What if his or her competitors would have stepped in anyway? Responsibility involves some voluntary restriction on a company’s financial self-interest that may require industry-wide commitment.  What are the chances that no one would cheat? Very low, I submit. Nevertheless, duty, a word mostly lost to today's short-sighted narcissism, is not meant to be convenient; otherwise, it would not operate as a tug on a banker’s conscience.
The upsurge in auto loans in Asia is a case in point. That is, is is responsible to facilitate an expansive auto market especially in China's major cities, which had already been known to be notable polluters. After 2000, the number of cars in use in China was doubling every year. Meanwhile, the Chinese were building an “interstate" highway-system that would dwarf the network of highways in the contiguous United States. Loans enabling an exploding middle class to buy cars increased the global demand for oil, resulting, other things equal, in a higher price at the gas pump. Would the magnitude of the surge in projected fossil-fuel use in China drain the Earth’s oil reserves before alternative sources of energy could pick up the slack, or should the Chinese too be able to enjoy a car economy like those in the West? It would be too easy for the Western bankers to resound with the latter at the expense of the former due to the allure of greater profits over duty to the species.

More people=More cars=More pollution    source: Businessweek

The viability of the species enters the equation of course because of the scientifically-proven link between carbon emissions by humans and climate change in which both the atmosphere and oceans of the planet have been warming since well before 2013. To be sure, it could indeed have been argued that the Asian middle-class deserved the same freedom and ease provided by owning a car in the twenty-first century that the American and European middle-classes enjoyed in the twentieth century. Fair is fair, right? However, the global climatic threat to the species had not been pressing during the industrial revolution and through the ensuing shizogenic (i.e., a maximizing variable) consumerism of the twentieth century. By  analogy, even though a person starting to smoke at 50 can point to a person starting at 20 and say, “I should be able to have my years of smoking too,” the person who smokes at an older age faces more health risks than the person who smokes when young. Is it worth a heart attack to a 50 year-old to insist on having years of smoking too?  Similarly, the question of the additional oil for more cars, as well as more coal-sourced electricity powering electronics and appliances—all being facilitated by the upsurge in loans—can legitimately be answered differently when it is accurately (and thus justly) feared that unless the carbon-use trends reversed themselves everywhere, the species would likely face dramatic negative effects all too soon, with the very survival of the species itself perhaps hanging in the balance further out.

As these diverging patterns demonstrate, the threat of over-population is not uniform across the globe.   source: fashionzombie.net

In terms of public policy, if corporate social responsibility is not strong enough given the addictive allure of profit-seeking to ward off even current use that could result in a very different climate, perhaps resulting in a new equilibrium beyond the bounds of human habitation, then government regulation may be humanity's only option to pick up the slack. Because the problem is global in nature, this option is also problematic. 
Because the interests of the government of China and other countries do not take kindly to economic costs inflicted on their respective peoples for fear of political unrest and economic recession,  the absolutist interpretation of national sovereignty might finally have to be compromised in order, ultimately, for the species to survive or at least not be inundated even in the twenty-first century with climatic havoc. To the extent that the explosion of the human population is the root cause of the increase in carbon (and methane) in the atmosphere and oceans, even government regulation enforced at the global level would be difficult, even ethically, especially as countries fear an older demographic in a declining base. It would be a lot to ask bankers to take this on. Nevertheless, societies and governments can legitimately ask banks not to exacerbate global warming by acting so as to dramatically increase human consumption too much given the business environment. As the managerial role is profit-seeking by design and incentive, however, it is not likely that bankers would agree. Hence I have viewed corporate social responsibility as a creature more of marketing than duty, especially in societies in which the honor of duty is not valued. 

Source:

Kathy Chu, “Consumer Loans Surge Across Asia,” The Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2013.