El Nino as a Distraction as the E.U. Swelters

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.

---

1. Liam Gilliver, “’El Nino Is a Distraction’: Why Europe’s Deadly Heatwave Isn’t Down to a Natural Weather Phenomenon,” Euronews.com, 24 June, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5.  Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Sect. 2, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 495.

Free Will and Moral Responsibility

According to Rousseau, we are born free but we live out our life in chains. Although some people subvert background context and foreground personhood such that the chains are believed to be societally imposed as if people are not sufficiently free to transcend or counter the “binding” external strictures of some institution or society, Nietzsche argues that the sovereign individual is lies at the end of an arduous long process by which our species has become bred to be “to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable” and thus certain people can be trusted to be reliable in promise-keeping.[1] Such people are free individuals. They are autonomous even against the “Though Shalt Nots” of moral mores, which had their place as virtual societal straitjackets in the development of the species but are legitimately cast off by people who can be relied upon to keep promises without violating them in the heat of the moment. Such people are individuals, but not narcissists, for the latter calculate each moment as to what lies in their self-interest—the feelings of others be damned if they are in the way. It is ironic that moral responsibility applies to the latter rather than to the autonomous individuals because only the free ones can call their “dominating instinct” a “conscience.”[2] Modern society, at least in the West, could use an elaboration on Nietzsche’s description of the autonomous individual in so far as such a person is antipodal to the herd animals on whom moral responsibility should be imposed because they cannot be trusted, for they are not promise-keepers. St. Paul’s dictum to keep the fools at a distance is ironically in line with the second essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, where the Christian ascetic priest is lampooned for its innate weakness even as it seeks to dominate the strong out of ressentiment.

At the end of human prehistory, and arguably even well beyond that—at the end of a process in which “the morality of mores and the social straitjacket” fashioned the species as being capable of being relied upon and thus of having a memory fortified against the encroachment of legitimate forgetfulness—lies “the ripest fruit,” the “sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated again from morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral.”[3] Such an individual must be in some sense have achieved regularity, and thus be calculable by others who rely on the promises made. To Nietzsche, autonomous and moral are mutually exclusive.[4] But this does not mean that the autonomous person who is free from one’s own instinctual urges that compete with that of that of conscience necessarily acts immorally. This “emancipated individual,” freed from moral mores, even well-ensconced as custom, that would otherwise be binding and thus hold a person as though in chains, has one’s “own independent, protracted will and the right to make promises.”[5] In this type, we have our species “come to completion.”[6] Free will is not a precondition for external moral customs to be legitimately applied to human beings, and yet it is the autonomous individual who has “the right to make promises.”[7] In such a person, conscience as an instinct is dominate and thus we can say that the morality of keeping one’s own promises is internal and thus consistent with free will.

Whereas Rousseau’s fictional character, Emile, says to his mentor, Lycurgus, “I have decided to be as you made me,” Nietzsche’s autonomous individual says to oneself, “I have decided to me as I have made me,” as being capable of being relied on in the keeping of one’s own promises to others. Such people voluntarily hold themselves to their word. Paradoxically, the autonomous individual “is bound to honor his peers, the strong and reliable (those with the right to make promises)—that is, all those who promise like sovereigns, reluctantly, rarely, slowly, who are chary of trusting, whose trust is a mark of distinction, who give their word something that can be relied on because they know themselves strong enough to maintain it in the face of accidents, even ‘in the face of fate.’”[8] Accidents are things that come along that tempt a person to violate one’s promises. Even though an autonomous individual free of moral custom is free to put one’s instinctual urges that favor satisfying those “accidents” before the urge to keep one’s promises, the person can be relied on to go on putting the promise-keeping urge first. “Here I stand and I cannot do otherwise,” Luther stated as a priest free from Rome; he could have done otherwise, but is inner conscience, a long-standing instinctual urge, was his autonomy. He was free to overcome (i.e., master) his most intractable instinctual urges to the contrary, and strong enough to do precisely that. The output of his mastery were his 95 theses, which he defiantly nailed to a church door. His statement, “I cannot do otherwise,” should not be taken literally as instantiating determinism, but, rather, as a statement of a free decision to go on principle with a resounding force of conscience that follows from a free choice rather than as cutting it off. This is how autonomous and cannot can be viewed as being consistent rather than as contradictory.

The autonomy is inside the “ripened fruit” of our species. The type of moral responsibility that is consistent with this is that which comes voluntarily from within. “The proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over fate, has in his case penetrated to the profoundest depths and become instinct, the dominating instinct.”[9] The power over oneself is one’s will in choosing to treat one’s conscience as one’s dominant instinct, but can an instinct that is dominate over others really be chosen? Is not the outcome of tussling instincts a result of the contending instincts rather than a separate, internal will? Nietzsche states that the strong cannot be other than strong, and the weak are inherently weak, so presumably free will does not apply to the decision on whether to be weak or strong.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche gives the autonomous individual credit for having a reliable will. “The ‘free’ man, the possessor of a protracted and unbreakable will, also possesses his measure of value.”[10] Perhaps then the autonomous individual applies a measure of high value to the conscience, which can thus act as an instinct that is dominant (though Nietzsche viewed the instincts in physiological terms). Kant claims that reason has absolute value because rational beings use reason to apply value to things. For Nietzsche, it seems that the free will—autonomy within a person—has absolute value because it is the will that can assign values to contending instincts if the will is free of even the most dominant of them, but is the will not itself an instinct according to Nietzsche?

The thorny questions on whether the autonomous individual has free will rather than merely being autonomous of moral customs aside, Nietzsche’s distinction between a promise-keeper and a promise-breaker is clear. A pathos of distance naturally exists between the two basic types of people because one is a free agent who can be trusted whereas the other is a slave to himself and thus should not be trusted.  To be able to keep promises, such that “a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of will may be interposed without breaking this long chain of will,” and thus to be able “to stand security for his own future,” such a person should “be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors.”[11] How “much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he arouses—he ‘deserves’ all three—and of how this mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures?”[12] The deservingness with the superiority, and indeed the respect due all distinguish the promise-keeper from the promise-breaker. The mastery of the autonomous individual extends even over nature, such that perhaps in willing the instinctual urge that we call conscience to be dominant, the free individual makes it so physiologically within himself. In utter contrast are “the feeble windbags who promise without the right to do so, . . . and the liar who breaks his word even at the moment he utters it.”[13] Although Nietzsche claims that the free individuals who will themselves to be reliable in promise-making such that the promises are kept are “bound to reserve a kick” for the promise-breakers, I contend that any association would violate the natural pathos of distance that legitimately exists between the promise-keepers and promise-breakers (and liars).

Ironically, the inferior person, whose narcissism manifests as pathological lies in order to manipulate other people, is more likely to enforce the distance out of envy and resentment, whereas the promise-keeper is likely to engage with other promise-keepers without a thought to the pathetic losers who find it so easy to break their promises and otherwise lie to get what they want. Such people are those who instinctively obviate commitment by “redefining” a romantic relationship as anything goes, including even separate sex with emotional attachment or romantic connection.

For example, being confronted by an autonomous individual for acting like a “trophy whore,” a narcissist who is enslaved to his most intractable urges (and thus refuses to keep promises, and thus cannot and should not be trusted) will refuse to look within and admit to the validity of the accusation and thus be willing to change.  As though a trapped animal, the promise-breaker and liar will strike out at the messenger, viewing that friend as a threat. People with a vested interest in the promiscuity and even in promise-breaking as if it were a virtue would gladly be manipulated by the narcissist into pushing back against the promise-keeper even though the latter would actually like to see the liar as reliable and thus as being capable and deserving of trust.

In short, even though the pathos of distance may be created by the promise-keeper refusing to trust the promise-breaker and pathological liar, the latter makes sure that the distance is enforced, out of sheer anger. “How dare you call me a trophy whore!”, “I will never talk to you again,” and even, “I’m going to manipulate people I know to run you out of town so I never have to see your disgusting face again” constitute a very different response than, “I don’t like myself for lying and reneging so much; I didn’t realize what I have become. Would you please help me so I might become capable of being trusted so someday I could enjoy genuine friendships and even an emotionally-intimate romantic relationship with someone whom I can trust?”

Sadly, the narcissist who views himself as too weak even to ask for help and perceives wake-up calls as attacks will never change, never be trusted; such a person will go through life in a series of superficial relationships lacking commitment and trust. No promise-keeper would agree to be lied to and betrayed by a person who insists on having his cake and eating it too. Even in locales where having separate sex with other romantic interests is the norm, and even deemed worthy to be imposed in a relationship, narcissists will ruin themselves in refusing to maturate into adulthood. Of course, an autonomous individual would object to such an arrangement as being utterly selfish and inconsiderate, and even hurtful; a pathos of distance would naturally be erected like the wall that separated Eastern and Western Europe after World War II for decades.

Whereas an autonomous individual has the strength and free will with which to face oneself internally and thus to change so as to grow as a person and be capable of emotional intimacy in friendship and romance, people who let their immediate urges rule are static entities that will not change. If the two types try to become friends or even a romantic couple, what begins as a stream between them inexorably becomes an abyss that cannot be crossed because they are like oil and water. I am not suggesting that autonomous individuals adopt a savior complex; that would diminish their internal freedom. Rather, I submit that calling out narcissistic liars is a worthy activity because there is a chance that one day some may change as a result, even if they are likely to retaliate because that is easier than facing their own demons and recognizing that selfless love may actually exist and have been freely bestowed on them without them being able to reciprocate. Because Nietzsche claims that the weak cannot become strong, even with external help, it may that simply respecting the natural pathos of distance that separates the honest from the liars is best. It is sad, though, that potentially reliable people who are otherwise good people, even lovable and potentially deserving of unconditional love, must be lost due to their own stubborn intractability and refusal to look within rather than act on the momentary instinctual urge to strike out as if a trapped wild animal. Primitive animals are not free of their momentary, primal urges, and so they are not free to hold themselves as reliable, and thus as trustworthy by other animals. What a species we are in having bred ourselves as a species by means of moral customs to be reliable and yet to still have in our midst people who are utterly untrustworthy, who even treat commitment as if it were a dirty word and use sex as a weapon so as to inflict pain on promise-keepers as if being reliable, and thus honest, were a crime against humanity. The spite with which the weak resent the strong is something on which Nietzsche wrote extensively. Two different orbits; two different types, yet astonishingly of the very same species!

---

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 495.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 496.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., pp. 494-95.
12. Ibid., pp. 495-96.
13. Ibid, p. 496.