Global Warming Accelerating

When I took calculus in my first college-degree program, the graduate-student instructor didn’t bother to tell the class that a derivative signifies changes in the rate of acceleration. A derivative is not the rate itself, but, rather, the change in the rate—something much more difficult to detect empirically, as in watching an accelerating car. Formulae were the instructor’s focus, as if they constitute ends in themselves. By the time the climate numbers for 2025 came in, scientists could confidently say global warming was accelerating. The rate itself may have been increasing (i.e., a positive derivative), but attention to that by the media would have taken an educational reform as to how calculus was being taught. We think in terms of speed and acceleration. In this respect, we may be deficient in climate change itself as it has been unfolding. More decades than I care to admit had passed by 2025 since I had that course in calculus; only now can I say that I have used the math, albeit theoretically rather than via formulae.

Looking at the numbers for average global temperature for 2023, 2024, and 2025, Robert Rohde, the chief scientist at the Berkeley Earth Monitoring Group, said in early 2026, “The last three years are indicative of an acceleration in the warming. They’re not consistent with the linear trend that we’ve been observing for the 50 years before that.”[1] A linear trend represents no acceleration, so the rate of acceleration only became positive in 2023. Relative to the prior years, the averages for 2023, 2024, and 2025 “seemed to jump up,” said NOAA climate-monitoring chief Russ Vose.[2] The average for 2024 was 1.6C degrees above pre-industrial levels, hence slightly above the internationally agreed-upon limit of 1.5C degrees, and the averages for 2023 (1.48C above) and 2025 (1.47C above) were essentially tied so close to 1.5C that the average of the three years is above 1.5C. Even though the “leap” from the previous years since at least 2015 instantiates an acceleration, more years may be needed to assess whether the rate of the acceleration was increasing (mathematics majors would know this). At the outset of 2026, the three preceding years appeared as a plateau rather than evidence of continued acceleration, but a plateau could exist within a trend even of a positive derivative. My point is that we should have been more focused on changes in the rate of acceleration, for if the rate itself was increasing, then it would not be long until the threshold of 1.5C is surpassed and more extreme symptoms of climate change occur.

One of the weaknesses of democracy is that such symptoms may have to be experienced and seen before electorates treat climate-change as an important issue in voting. Human nature itself, a product of natural selection, still prioritizes the immediate over the long-term, especially in regard to threats. Instant gratification too is “hard-wired” in us all, which is why we tend to vote to keep gas prices low rather than to cut off the further manufacture of gasoline-powered cars. Whereas these contributory drawbacks in our nature, inherited from the gradual process of natural selection in evolution (mostly in the hunger-gatherer period of our species), have been associated with the lack of sufficient political will in the world since 2016 at Paris to keep the average global temperature from surpassing 1.5C above the pre-industrial level, our cognitive impairments that are also contributory are less well-known. This is the idea.

In addition to difficulties in conceptualizing and keeping attuned to what the derivative represents (i.e., change in the rate of acceleration, rather than the rate itself), our arrogance of pride in what we think we know also holds us back from grasping the magnitude of the human contribution to climate change. Just days before writing this essay, a man aged 75 declared to me that climate change is “just the natural cycles.” I don’t know whether that person had gone to college, but I do know that he was not a scientist. So the man’s declaration itself rang out as being out of place, given his actual level of knowledge on climate science. Similar to how we tend to focus on acceleration rates rather than changes in those rates, most people would be attuned to the content of the man’s statement—that climate change is merely part of a long-term natural cycle that will eventually reverse itself—rather than to the declaratory form of speech with which he made the statement. It is too difficult for us to grasp changes in rates of acceleration and focus on the presumption of entitlement that can be detected in the way a person makes a statement, whether it is written or verbal, and yet we tend not to realize that we have trouble with both. As one consequence, we understate the severity of climate change.

Lest anyone needs a refresher, “Rohde said nearly all of the warming is from human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases. . . . Samantha Burgess, strategic climate head of the Copernicus service, said the overwhelming culprit is clear: the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.”[3] Lest it be conveniently assumed that the burning has been going on somewhere in nature away from humans, Burgess doesn’t mince words: “Climate change is happening. It’s here. It’s impacting everyone all around the world and it’s our fault.”[4] Climate change is not just from a natural cycle that would be occurring even if there were no homo sapiens species.

So, Joe the plumber, a person let’s say who barely graduated from high school, would not only be incorrect in declaring that climate change is just part of a natural cycle; he would also be presumptuous in slighting the contradicting knowledge of climate scientists, whose years of study are indeed superior to Joe’s opinion. Like arrogance on stilts during a flood, Joe’s self-love issuing out in puffed up “knowledge” may one day be underwater if he happens to live on a coast when enough of the polar ice has melted to rise the level of oceans appreciably. That Joe would likely react angrily to being corrected even though his declaration of knowledge actually has no foundation is yet another indication of the presumptuous that may be endemic to the human mind but seems to be more salient in uneducated people. Formerly known in Western civilization as the sin of pride, which Augustine and Paul set as the worse (and thus intractable) sin, treating one’s own opinion as a fact of knowledge can be added to the list of the deficiencies in our nature that may wind up causing the extinction of our species as the Earth’s climate approaches a new equilibrium sooner rather than later. How much sooner depends at least in part on whether the relevant derivative is positive.

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1. Seth Borenstein, “Scientists Call Another Near-Record Hot Year a ‘Warning Shot’ of a Shifting, Dangerous Climate,” APnews.com, January 14, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid. Italics added for emphasis.

The Summer Solstice: Astronomy Is Not Meteorology

It boggles the mind that the same meteorologists who know that June, July, and August days are counted when calculations are made on the average temperature for summer nonetheless broadcast the summer solstice that falls three weeks into June as the first day of summer. To do so in the context of weather forecasts is nothing short of intellectually dishonest. To an unfortunate extent, those meteorologists may simply be following the herd of tradition at the expense of thinking for oneself. The human brain is suited for much more than a herd-animal mentality.
 
“What’s the difference between meteorological and astronomical seasons? These are just two different ways to carve up the year. While astronomical seasons depend on how the Earth moves around the sun, meteorological seasons are defined by the weather. [Meteorologists] break down the year into three-month seasons based on annual temperature cycles. By that calendar, spring starts on March 1, summer on June 1, fall on Sept. 1 and winter on Dec. 1.”[1] Therefore, meteorologists who broadcast the summer solstice, which falls between June 20-22 depending on the year (as per leap years), as the first day of summer can be reckoned as intractable herd animals in their own profession. Distinct from the weather, as “the Earth travels around the sun, it does so at an angle relative to the sun. For most of the year, the Earth’s axis is tilted either toward or away from the sun. That means the sun’s warmth and light fall unequally on the northern and southern halves of the planet. The solstices mark the times during the year when this tilt is at its most extreme, and days and nights are at their most unequal. During the Northern Hemisphere’s summer solstice, the upper half of the earth is tilted toward the sun, creating the longest day and shortest night of the year. This solstice falls between June 20 and 22.”[2] This does not signify the first day of summer in terms of climate or weather, and yet too many meteorologists continue to mislead the public by stating on a weather graphic that the first day of summer falls on the summer solstice.
At most, meteorologists should constrain themselves on the summer solstice to announcing that daylight hours are most on that day (and least on the winter solstice, which falls well into December rather than on December 1, which is the first day of winter as we know it. By June 20-22, summer as we know it here below on Earth is well underway. During that week in 2025, parts of North America and Europe were already in a heat-wave, so it would be ludicrous to claim—especially by meteorologists as they should know better—that meteorological summer has just begun. And yet the basic category mistake continued unabated.

A television station in Boston, MA misleading the public as if June 20, 2025 were the first day of meteorological summer even though the graphic itself shows a heat-wave coming up! (left). On the right, Weather.com shows the forecast high then for London, UK. Obviously, June 20, 2025 was not the first day of meteorological summer in the Northern Hemisphere, so the claim to the contrary by meteorologists is nothing short of puffed up ignorance based on a category mistake broadcasted publicly by people who should know better because weather is their profession. Meteorology and astronomy are distinct domains, even though they are related. Maybe meteorologists in London should have telephoned those in Boston to pass on the tip that 90F in London is well into meteorological summer rather than its first day. 

That cognitive phenomenon is aptly described by Nietzsche in regard to his infamous claim that God it dead. Even though he states that he is referring to a particular conception of God—the Abrahamic one in which God is both vengeful and omnibenevolent—he is been thought to have been an atheist. Rather, his claim that adding “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” to a deity that is omnibenevolent is to place an internal contradiction in that conception of the divine, as vengeance contradicts benevolence. The people responsible for this contradiction had no idea what they had done—their murderous act of discrediting an extant conception of the divine. Like light coming from the most distant star but not yet reaching Earth, news of their own deed did not arrive to them even as they had blood on their hands. Similarly, news of committing a category mistake has not reached the meteorologists who know that calculations regarding temperatures in a summer include June, July and August and yet broadcast that the first day of meteorological summer doesn’t “arrive” until the astronomical “summer” solstice. News of their own confusion and conflation hasn’t reached them yet, and yet their recurrent deed should be obvious to them especially, as their profession is meteorology. Perhaps astronomers could step and change the names of the astronomical “seasons”—not even using that word—so the public might realize that astronomy and meteorology are two distinct, albeit related, domains. Even astronomy is misleading in this respect in calling quadrants of the Earth’s orbit “seasons.” Therefore, I submit that the professions of both meteorologists and astronomers are at fault in enabling the confusing category mistake wherein two distinct domains are conflated. 

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1. The Associated Press, “Sunshine Abounds as the Summer Solstice Arrives,” APnews.com, June 20, 2025.
2. Ibid.

 

On the Ethics of AI

In June, 2024 at the international political meeting of the G7, a group of seven industrial nations, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, spoke on the ethical dimension of artificial intelligence, or machine-learning. Regarding what the Pope called the “techno-human condition,” machines capable of AI are yet another manifestation of human propensity, which our species has had since its inception, to use tools to mediate with the environment. Although tools can be thought of as an extension of our arms ad legs, it is important to distinguish the human from the machine, even as we posit human characteristics onto some advanced machines, such as computers. In the film, 2001, the computer Hal sounds human, and may even seem to have human motivations, but any such attributions come to an abrupt end when Hal is shut down. To say that Hal dies is to commit a basic category mistake. It would be absurd, for example, to claim that Hal has an after-life. So too, I submit, is there a category mistake in taking the Pope’s talk on the ethics of AI as being religious in nature. Just as it is easy to imprint the human mind on a machine-learning computer, it can be tempting to superimpose the religious domain onto another. The Pope overreached in arbitrarily bringing in religious garb on what is actually an ethical matter in the “techno-human” world.

The full essay is at "The Pope on AI."