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.

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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.

Organizational Man: Refined or Repressed?

Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideal is the courageous, ancient Greco-Roman nobility, including the unashamed conquerors replete with self-confident will to power rather than shame at having vanquished formidable resistance. Rather than actually advocating that we return to the raping and pillaging that took place back then, Nietzsche wanted to depict modern, emaciated man as a contrast in order to turn the weakening of man around in Europe. Similar to Sinclair Lewis, who wrote his satirical novel, Babbit (1922) to showcase the utter vacuity of the middle-class businessman in America, Nietzsche laments “the reduction of the beast of prey ‘man’ to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal . . .”[1] By that he meant us: modern, enervated, and cultured incarnations of human nature relative to the full, untamed, and resilient lives of the ancient Greco-Roman conquerors. Having no knowledge of the lives that they lived in terms of full, unashamed and unconstrained will to power as will to living life with gusto, we scarcely realize the extent to which our societal institutions and vocational organizations box up our nature to that which is inoffensive and even polite even to competitors.

How very much our very nature has been contorted so as to fit within the modern straitjackets that we moderns ourselves have constructed. We have cut off our limbs and yet even as we still hold the knives, news of our deeds has not reached us, like light from a distant star has already happened but has not yet reached our planet. Nietzsche uses this imagery in explaining the death, or, more accurately, discrediting of the Abrahamic conception of God—Gott ist tot. Anticipating Freud, Nietzsche liked to remind us that we don’t really know ourselves as well as we think we do. In grizzled suits sitting in an office—something utterly unknown to the Roman conquerors!—are we not purblind when facing a mirror at “the repellent sight of the ill-constituted, dwarfed, atrophied, and poisoned?”[2] Who is aware of being poisoned when each dose is small and the course of weakening is of long duration? In fact, “the ‘tame man,’ the hopelessly mediocre and insipid man, has already learned to feel to feel himself as the goal and zenith, as the meaning of history, as ‘higher man.’”[3] Like arrogance on stilts during a flood, modern man speaks of progress while ignoring the weakening impact of creature comforts in sedating our will to power as will to experiencing the fullness of life into something like a will to comfort.

At this point in Genealogy, Nietzsche writes as only he has—vintage Nietzsche. “At this point I cannot suppress a sigh and a last hope. What is it that I especially find utterly unendurable? That I cannot cope with, that makes me choke and faint? Bad air! Bad air! The approach of some ill-constituted thing; that I have to smell the entrails of some ill-constituted soul!”[4] Elsewhere in his writing, Nietzsche refers to the bad odor of the weak, voluntarily impotent creatures whose inner bird-of-prey nature has been replaced by spite and resentment of the strong under the subterfuge of polite society.

Modern man knows passive aggression all too well; university faculties specialize in it under the cover of calmness. To be not calm, but to shout at the betrayal of a friend—this we have almost lost. Stuffing feelings can diminish direct communication that is unashamedly honest. Even though direct, unfiltered communication of especially strong feelings is generally considered indecent in public, such communication clears the air by flushing toxic residue away so genuine human connection can finally exist or the combatants can separate cleanly and forget each other. This advice applies of course to romantic relationships, but also to co-workers in the workplace. How shocking it would be to Babbit to hear two workers shouting at each other in a workplace that has been designed to remove all but a pallid version of human nature in its fullness! Of course, the need for monetary compensation to cover rent, utilities, and food makes employees reasonably fearful of bringing their full human nature to work. My point is that the ubiquity of passive aggression in the workplace means that too much of our innate nature is repressed in the business world; perhaps two angry employees could take their argument outside, escaping the overly disinfected office space for a bit.

In an emotionally-fearful society of banal convenience, a person can be unaware of how “much one is able to endure: distress, want, bad weather, sickness, toil, solitude. Fundamentally one can cope with everything else, born as one is to a subterranean life of struggle; one emerges again and again into the light, one experiences again and again one’s golden hour of victory—and then one stands forth as one was born, unbreakable, tensed, ready for new, even harder, remoter things, like a bow that distress only serves to draw tauter.”[5] How different such an expression of human nature is than that which is permissible under the tight watch of security cameras. So much of our nature is proscribed by organizational policies—as if policies were laws and subcontracted security guard were police. In utter disgust at modern man having become “thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent,” Nietzsche yearns for even just a glimpse of a person “wholly achieved, happy, mighty, triumphant, something still capable of arousing fear! Of a man who justifies man, of a complementary and redeeming lucky hit on the part of man for the sake of which one may still believe in man!”[6] Nietzsche wanted to believe in our species but found a downward trajectory from strength to weakness—a “diminution and leveling.”[7] Nietzsche would likely claim that the hierarchies that exist in social/religious, business, and governmental organizations pale in comparison to natural hierarchies that enable a pathos of distance between the now-rare, strong breed that values and acts out ancient noble virtues such as courage and honesty and the now ubiquitous weak breed of timid, emotionally-vacuous organizational humanoids.

The modern woman who is attracted to the insipid corporate type sufficiently high on the corporate ladder has lost her way, Nietzsche would no doubt say, and is denying her primal nature; not so the woman who is instinctually attracted to a passionate, dominate male who lifts weights and is not ashamed to be vocal in overcoming resistance from a rival and even from her, and who wrestles or maybe even street-fights from time to time when provoked rather than calls on police to intercede, thus subcontracting his basic instincts. So distant the corporate man is from raw human instinct, and yet modern society counts business executives as powerful and of high standing in society. It is as if we all have been fooled into taking weakness for strength. Business ethicists lash out at business managers with “Thou Shalt Not!” as if the managers should be ashamed of the power that they wield, but this assumes that corporate power evinces Nietzschean strength as self-confident pride rather than timidity in overcoming obstacles. So very pallid is corporate speak, and yet how very many nonsupervisory, uneducated workers on the margins, such as at call centers, use the tone and lingo as a club as if from a position of strength rather than weakness. The weak who seek to dominate the strong—think of a call-center employee on the phone with a legitimately aggrieved customer—are not strong enough to master their most intractable instinct, Nietzsche claims, which is to feel the pleasure of power even by dominating if necessary. The strong need not dominate, for their self-confident power overflows. Confidence is attractive, whereas dominance, which Nietzsche theorizes manifests from weakness, is ugly.

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library1968), p. 478.

2. Ibid., p. 479.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., pp. 479-80.
5. Ibid., p. 480.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.