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.

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.