After tracing Earth’s climate story across deep time, we arrive at the final chapter where the long rhythms of the Cenozoic, the precision of the ice cores, and the shock of the modern carbon pulse converge.

In this series, I have tried to approach climate change from the widest possible perspective. We began with the temperature record and the climatic regime in which civilization emerged. We looked at the growing concentration of warming over land, where people live and food is grown. We followed the physics of greenhouse gases, the relationship between carbon dioxide and water vapor, and the much deeper geological history of tectonics, degassing, weathering, and the carbon cycle. Taken together, those lines of evidence point to the same conclusion: Earth’s climate has always changed, sometimes profoundly, but human civilization developed within a relatively narrow range of conditions and is now experiencing change at a pace that is extraordinarily fast by geological standards.

The final essay returns first to the Cenozoic and then narrows to the ice-core record because this is the part of Earth history that speaks most directly to the present. It also brings into focus a distinction that is easy to miss in today’s climate debate: the difference between flows and stocks.

Most climate policy is framed around emissions—the annual flow of carbon into the atmosphere. That matters, but the more important quantity is the stock already there. Atmospheric carbon is cumulative. Even if annual emissions stop growing, or begin to decline, the atmospheric stock continues to rise as long as emissions remain greater than the amount removed by natural and artificial sinks. Slowing the flow is not the same as reducing the stock.

That distinction is the key to understanding why climate change is so difficult. The problem is not simply how much carbon we emit this year. It is the enormous quantity accumulated from past emissions, added to each year by a flow that still exceeds the Earth system’s capacity to remove it.

The Cenozoic began in the aftermath of a world-changing event. About 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid struck Earth, triggering a global environmental crisis and a mass extinction that eliminated roughly 75% of species, including all non-avian dinosaurs, and fundamentally redirected the course of life on the planet.

But Chicxulub did not create the cool world we know today. The Cenozoic began under much warmer conditions and then moved, unevenly but persistently, toward the colder climate in which humans and civilization eventually emerged.

There is an intriguing footnote to the dinosaur extinction story. From about 91 to 69 million years ago, global mean temperature fell by roughly 11°C. One recent study found evidence that several major dinosaur families were already in decline before the impact and identified global cooling as one of the likely pressures. Chicxulub may therefore have struck an ecosystem already under mounting climatic and ecological stress—turning a long deterioration into a sudden catastrophe.

The Cenozoic records the long cooling path into the icehouse world we inherited (Figure 2), but the descent was neither smooth nor continuous. It was punctuated by relatively brief but significant warming episodes, including the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) about 56 million years ago and the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum (EECO) roughly 53–50 million years ago.

Despite those interruptions, atmospheric CO₂ and global temperature tracked each other closely through much of the Cenozoic. The broad pattern is unmistakable: as CO₂ declined, Earth cooled.

The ice cores reveal, in much finer detail, how temperature, carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, and orbital forcing interacted through repeated glacial and interglacial cycles. Against that background, the modern anomaly comes into much sharper focus: human carbon emissions are occurring at a rate far outside the natural range represented in the ice-core record, while the Earth system removes added carbon only slowly. The real climate question, then, is not whether Earth can adapt. It always will. The question is whether a civilization built during the relatively stable Holocene can adapt to the climate state now unfolding.

The relationship between temperature and atmospheric CO₂ appears consistently across multiple empirical records extending hundreds of millions of years through Earth history. Nowhere, however, is that relationship more clearly resolved than in the Antarctic ice cores (Figure 3).

Much of the evidence shown in earlier essays has necessarily relied on globally averaged reconstructions with time resolution measured in hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Ice cores are different. They provide a continuous, high-resolution record from closely spaced Antarctic locations, allowing us to see glacial and interglacial climate changes in far greater detail. Over the last 800,000 years, temperature and CO₂ repeatedly rose and fell together through successive climate cycles.

CO₂ is not the whole story, but it is the most important long-lived greenhouse forcing. It accounts for roughly two-thirds of the warming influence from well-mixed greenhouse gases, with methane, nitrous oxide, and others contributing the rest.

Water vapor, however, does much of the amplifying. As CO₂ and other forcings warm the atmosphere, warmer air can hold more moisture. That additional water vapor traps more heat, producing a powerful positive feedback. In Figure 4, the relationship between temperature and calculated water-vapor capacity is extraordinarily tight, with an average r² of 0.99.

The distinction is important: CO₂ is primarily a forcing; water vapor is primarily a feedback. CO₂ initiates and sustains the warming, while water vapor amplifies the temperature response.

Methane is also an important climate feedback. Warmer conditions can accelerate microbial activity in wetlands and alter precipitation and hydrology, expanding waterlogged environments where methane is produced. Warming can also thaw high-latitude permafrost, creating thermokarst lakes and saturated soils that expose previously frozen organic matter to anaerobic decomposition.

Over the last 800,000 years, methane closely tracked Antarctic temperature, with an average r² of 0.83 (Figure 5). That relationship reflects methane’s dual role: it responds to climate-driven changes in wetlands, hydrology, and biological activity, while also reinforcing warming as a potent greenhouse gas.

In the modern era, methane is no longer just a feedback. Agriculture, fossil-fuel production, and other human activities have turned it into a significant additional forcing.

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The debate about climate change is often framed as a disagreement between those who see it as a threat to civilization and those who point out that climate has always changed naturally. Both perspectives contain an important truth.

Earth has moved repeatedly between icehouse and hothouse climate states since the emergence of complex life more than 500 million years ago. Global temperatures have ranged from several degrees colder than today to dramatically warmer, and life has persisted through most of those changes—although not without episodes of profound ecological disruption and mass extinction.

The role of carbon dioxide is especially contentious. To those who see climate change as an existential risk, CO₂ is the enemy. Those on the other side doubt it matters much but if anything, it may be a benefit because it’s a natural fertilizer that will increase crop yields and promote a greener planet. Both views are wrong,

The carbon cycle that includes CO₂ is Earth’s long-term planetary thermostat, without which the planet would be a frozen, largely lifeless world. CO₂ is a powerful greenhouse gas. Although it is only a small component of the atmosphere, increasing its concentration reduces the rate at which heat escapes to space. The resulting warming allows the atmosphere to hold more water vapor, which amplifies the initial warming. This is not some controversial new idea. The underlying physics has been understood for almost 200 years.

Over geological time, the ultimate source of atmospheric carbon is degassing from Earth’s mantle and lithosphere. This occurs on million-year timescales and is driven by heat from Earth’s interior. Mantle convection moves tectonic plates and gas is released (Figure 1). At mid-ocean ridges, plates pull apart, allowing magma to rise, form new crust, and release volcanic gases. At convergent margins, subducting oceanic plates descend into the mantle, generating magmatism that feeds chains of volcanic arcs. Within continents, crustal extension forms rifts that provide additional pathways for magma and deep-sourced carbon to reach the atmosphere.

Oceanic crust is composed largely of basalt. Plate tectonics occasionally thrusts pieces of calcium- and magnesium-rich oceanic crust onto continents. These rocks weather rapidly, especially in warm, wet tropical climates, consuming atmospheric CO₂ and ultimately transferring carbon into marine carbonate sediments that become limestone.

Both degassing and weathering vary greatly through both time and space as continents move, oceans open and close, mountain belts rise, and volcanic provinces form and disappear.

In a recent study Andrew Merdith and colleagues evaluated climate change through this kind of geological lens. They approached the alternation between icehouse and hothouse climates by constructing an Earth-system model incorporating reconstructed tectonic, paleogeographic, and geological conditions throughout the Phanerozoic.

That is importantly different from simply assembling and averaging proxy estimates of ancient CO₂ and temperature. Merdith et al. begin instead with the physical Earth system: where continents, volcanic arcs, rifts, spreading ridges, and weatherable rocks were located; how those features changed through time; and how their changing geography altered the balance between carbon sources and sinks.

In other words, the model asks an important question: Can a physically reconstructed Earth—its tectonics, geography, degassing, and weathering—reproduce the climate history preserved in the geological record?

Figure 2 shows that degassing peaked about 121–124 million years ago during the Cretaceous at roughly 1.8 times present levels. That peak coincided with intensified tectonic activity associated with the breakup of the Pangaea supercontinent, when rapid plate motions, seafloor spreading, rifting, and volcanism increased the transfer of carbon from the solid Earth to the atmosphere and oceans.

Figure 3 shows Merdith’s modeled atmospheric CO₂ history with the total degassing curve from Figure 2 superimposed without rescaling. The broad correspondence is striking. Elevated degassing generally coincides with higher atmospheric CO₂, particularly during intervals of enhanced tectonic activity in the Paleozoic and Mesozoic.

The departures between the curves are equally important. Degassing represents only the source side of the geological carbon cycle, while atmospheric CO₂ reflects the balance between carbon entering and leaving the atmosphere-ocean system. Where CO₂ falls despite relatively high degassing, carbon sinks—particularly silicate weathering and subsequent carbonate burial—must have been comparatively effective. Conversely, high CO₂ relative to degassing indicates that carbon removal was less effective or that other carbon-cycle processes contributed to atmospheric CO₂.

If degassing does not uniquely determine atmospheric CO₂, what does? Degassing is a flux, while atmospheric CO₂ is a stock that reflects the accumulated balance between carbon sources and sinks. That makes the decline from the Cretaceous hothouse especially important. A decline in degassing did not necessarily produce an immediate decline in atmospheric CO₂. Total carbon removal had to exceed total carbon addition—and that imbalance had to persist for millions of years.

That brings us to the present. Much of the climate discussion focuses on reducing the flux of carbon into the atmosphere—replacing fossil fuels over time with lower-carbon energy sources. That is important, but reducing the flow is not the same thing as reducing the accumulated stock already in the atmosphere.

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Earth’s history over the last 4.5 billion years—from volcanic upheavals and drifting continents to the evolution of climate—has been shaped by a simple thermodynamic reality: Earth is hot and space is cold. Like every hot object, our planet continuously loses heat as it moves toward equilibrium. The atmosphere, oceans, continents and carbon cycle are not separate stories but different expressions of that long process.

Earth’s core is nearly 6,000°C while the background temperature of space is only a few degrees above absolute zero. That enormous thermal gradient powers mantle convection, which drives plate tectonics. Plate tectonics, in turn, reshapes continents and ocean basins, influences volcanism and weathering, and regulates the long-term carbon cycle. Ocean and atmospheric circulation redistribute heat around the globe. Greenhouse gases affect how efficiently heat escapes to space. Water vapor responds to temperature. Methane responds to ecosystems that themselves respond to climate. Milankovitch cycles change the geographic and seasonal distribution of incoming solar energy. Each operates differently and on different timescales, but all participate in the movement and transformation of energy through the Earth system.

Climate is the evolving expression of these interacting processes. Most climate stories begin in the present and project forward to a future of increasing risk. That’s an important story, but it’s like beginning a book with the second-to-last chapter. I’d rather start at the beginning.

Figure 1 shows a reconstruction of global mean surface temperature over the last 485 million years—nearly the entire history of complex animal life. The most striking observation is that Earth has spent far more time in climates warmer than today’s than in climates resembling the present. The only comparably cold interval occurred more than 275 million years ago.

The Phanerozoic temperature record is not a story of progressive cooling. It includes at least two major cooling episodes separated by a prolonged return to very warm conditions. Earth cooled through the late Paleozoic, reaching cold conditions during the Carboniferous and Permian, before warming again through much of the Mesozoic. Temperature eventually reached a maximum during the mid-Cretaceous about 94 million years ago. A second great cooling trend followed, extending toward the present but interrupted by episodes of abrupt warming, including the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum about 56 million years ago.

Ancient life evolved across this extraordinary range of temperatures. Humans arrived only near the extreme right edge of Figure 1, during the cool and highly variable Pleistocene. The final point in the reconstruction is about 5,800 years ago, approximately coincident with the emergence of the earliest civilizations. The dashed line marks the pre-industrial average temperature around which civilization subsequently developed and expanded. Human civilization, in other words, arose during an unusually cool chapter of Earth’s history.

Broadly speaking, the Phanerozoic alternated among three climate regimes: a warm or hothouse Earth, a cold or icehouse Earth, and intermediate conditions. Hothouse worlds lacked permanent polar ice and had much higher global temperatures. Icehouse worlds supported large continental ice sheets and, within them, repeated glacial and interglacial cycles. Intermediate climates occupied the territory between those states.

The differences were enormous. Hothouse conditions averaged more than 25°C globally, compared with about 14°C during coldhouse conditions. Earth occupied a hothouse state for nearly 60% of the last 485 million years, while icehouse conditions accounted for only about 11%.

An obvious question is how we can possibly know any of this. There were no thermometers for almost all of human history, and there weren’t even humans for almost all of the period shown in Figure 1.

We know far more about ancient climate than the absence of thermometers might suggest. Judd and colleagues assembled nearly 120,000 carefully screened temperature estimates from geological and fossil evidence spanning the Phanerozoic. They reconstructed where those samples were located on the ancient Earth and combined them with climate models using sophisticated data-assimilation methods similar to those used in modern meteorology.

The result is not a 485-million-year thermometer record, nor does it pretend to be one. It is a reconstruction built from an extraordinary body of evidence, and uncertainty increases as we move deeper into geological time. Different methods disagree about some absolute temperatures, particularly during very warm periods, but the broad succession of warmer and colder climate states is considerably more secure. We cannot know every detail of Earth’s past, but we know its broad outlines remarkably well.

Another obvious question raised by Figure 1 is what caused global temperature to rise and fall by more than 20°C across the Phanerozoic. To answer that, it helps to begin with a more fundamental question: what conditions made life on Earth possible in the first place?

That is a vast subject I will not attempt to cover comprehensively, but two essential ingredients are clear: liquid water and carbon. Carbon is abundant in Earth’s rocks and circulates among the solid Earth, oceans, atmosphere and living things. Water presented a different puzzle.

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The world is experiencing the largest oil supply disruption in modern history, yet crude prices show remarkably little urgency. Flows from the Persian Gulf have fallen by at least 10 million barrels per day from normal levels of roughly 20 million. Disruptions have also spread to the Red Sea and Black Sea, while Ukrainian attacks have sharply reduced Russian refining capacity. Despite this, Brent futures trade near $90 per barrel, leaving investors and seasoned analysts alike wondering what the market is missing.

The puzzle deepens when refined products are considered. Spot prices in some markets approach $150 per barrel, and 3-2-1 crack spreads near $70 per barrel signal genuine scarcity. Product markets are behaving as though supplies are tight. Crude markets appear far less concerned. Reconciling those two signals has become one of the defining challenges of today’s oil market.

Making sense of this mystery begins with remembering what a futures market actually prices. It does not simply price today’s physical conditions. It prices competing expectations about the future.

Most people understand that prices emerge from trading, yet many still assume that current physical supply and demand should determine the price of a futures contract. But every futures trade requires two participants willing to take opposite sides based on different expectations about the same future.

That distinction matters. The most actively traded contract represents a market judgment about conditions weeks or months ahead. Think about everything that has happened during the last month of the Iran conflict. Now imagine committing your own capital based on where you believe the market will be a month from now. However confident you may be that scarcity pricing is inevitable, uncertainty remains. Markets exist to price that uncertainty.

Comparative inventory, or C.I., provides the physical counterpart to this financial contest between bullish and bearish expectations. Persistent market imbalances ultimately appear in inventories. Surpluses add to stocks. Shortages draw them down. Comparative inventory therefore represents the cumulative physical expression of the forces acting on the market.

Figure 1 illustrates how comparative inventory influences the direction in which prices tend to move. Inventory deficits increase the urgency to secure marginal supply and generally require progressively higher prices to restore balance. Surpluses produce the opposite effect.

The downward-sloping attractor traces the market-clearing relationship between price and comparative inventory. At any given data point, the inventory-implied price of the marginal barrel can be estimated by drawing a vertical line to the attractor and reading the price at the intersection. The difference between that value and the observed market price provides a simple but powerful way to estimate risk premia and discounts.

Viewed through this framework, the oil market functions less as a sequence of isolated trades than as a changing field of probabilities. Comparative inventory is the market’s physical state variable. It integrates the cumulative effects of supply and demand into a single measure of balance.

Expectations appear in the difference between the actual market price and the price implied by that physical state. Comparative inventory does not forecast the future. It defines the conditions under which particular futures become more or less probable.

An external shock such as the Hormuz crisis produces sustained scarcity pricing only if it creates a sufficiently large and persistent inventory deficit—or convinces traders that such a deficit is increasingly likely.

That distinction is crucial. Despite severe disruptions to Persian Gulf exports, comparative inventory has not yet reached the scarcity levels observed during the 2022 Ukraine war (Figure 2).

This does not mean markets have ignored the Iran crisis. On the contrary, the implied geopolitical risk premium reached roughly 30% above the attractor-implied marginal price in May, compared with about 15% at the Ukraine-war peak near $115 per barrel.

The difference is that today’s larger risk premium rests on a smaller underlying inventory deficit. Markets are assigning a higher probability to future scarcity, but they are not yet pricing the degree of physical scarcity observed in 2022.

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A little more than 200 years ago, the French physicist Joseph Fourier recognized a mystery. According to simple physics, Earth should be as cold as the Moon.

Fourier calculated Earth’s energy balance (Figure 1). About one-third of incoming solar energy is reflected back into space by clouds, the atmosphere, and bright surfaces such as ice. The remaining two-thirds is absorbed by the land, oceans, and atmosphere, warming the planet. That energy is eventually radiated back into space as infrared heat. Over long periods, incoming and outgoing energy must balance.

Yet when Fourier did the calculations, something didn’t add up. The math predicted that Earth’s average surface temperature should have been about –18 °C (0 °F)—similar to the airless Moon. Instead, observations showed an average temperature of about 15 °C (59 °F). Something in Earth’s atmosphere was keeping the planet about 33 °C warmer than simple physics predicted.

Decades later, the British physicist John Tyndall set out to identify what that “something” was. In 1859 he built an instrument to measure how different gases interact with infrared heat. Oxygen and nitrogen—the gases that make up almost all of the atmosphere—proved largely transparent. Tiny amounts of water vapor and carbon dioxide, however, absorbed heat very effectively. Tyndall had identified the missing ingredient in Fourier’s mystery.

Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius approached a different question: what caused the ice ages? Building on Tyndall’s work, he proposed that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide—then thought to result largely from variations in volcanic activity—could explain Earth’s swings between glacial and warm periods. In 1896 he estimated that reducing atmospheric CO₂ by about one-third would cool the planet enough to expand the great ice sheets, while doubling CO₂ would produce the opposite effect. He later recognized that industrial coal burning was also adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and concluded that human activity was making another ice age less likely.

Remarkably, the scientific investigation of what we now call the greenhouse effect began as scientists pursued entirely different questions. Fourier wanted to understand Earth’s temperature. Tyndall wanted to understand radiant heat. Arrhenius wanted to explain the ice ages. None regarded greenhouse gases as an environmental threat.

Figure 2 picks up where the story leaves off. It shows how Earth’s atmosphere regulates the planet’s temperature.

The little blue characters represent water vapor. Together they form a blanket around Earth that slows the escape of heat into space. Because water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas, it does most of the actual work of keeping the planet warm enough for liquid water and life.

Carbon dioxide, however, is the thermostat.

As CO₂ increases, the atmosphere warms. Warmer air can hold more water vapor, which thickens the insulating blanket and traps still more heat before it can escape to space.

Think of a home heating system. The thermostat does not produce the heat, nor is it the warm air coming from the vents. Yet by controlling when the furnace turns on, it determines how warm the house becomes. Earth’s atmosphere works the same way: water vapor is the blanket that keeps the planet warm; carbon dioxide decides how thick that blanket will be.

This is why climate scientists describe water vapor as a feedback and carbon dioxide as a forcing. Water vapor does most of the warming because there is so much of it. Carbon dioxide sets the temperature that governs how much water vapor the atmosphere can hold.

The important point is not that CO₂ is the largest greenhouse gas—it is not. The important point is that CO₂ controls the thermostat. Water vapor responds.

The first two figures explain why carbon dioxide matters. But has Earth actually behaved this way over geologic time?

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Temperature is the foundation of every discussion about climate. Everything else—causes, consequences, projections, and policy—depends on understanding how Earth’s temperature has changed. Beginning with the temperature record keeps the discussion anchored in observations rather than opinions.

The chart below puts recent warming in the context of the past thousand years. Global temperature has been anything but constant. From about AD 1000 to the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, the long-term tendency was downward, interrupted by shorter periods of both warming and cooling. After that minimum, temperatures recovered gradually.

By the middle of the twentieth century, global temperature had returned to levels last experienced during the Medieval period. It then continued rising, eventually exceeding anything shown in this millennium-long reconstruction. The sustained acceleration after the 1970s is what most clearly distinguishes the modern period from earlier variability.

Don’t get lost in the details. Climate is extraordinarily complex, but the broad pattern is remarkably clear.

Earth’s temperature has always varied. The evidence also shows that the magnitude and rate of recent warming are unlike anything in the previous thousand years.

That simple observation provides the foundation for everything that follows.

The important question is not whether temperatures have changed, but how warming has been distributed across the planet.

Earth is now about 1.44 °C warmer than its pre-industrial baseline. That may not sound like much, but if that were your body, you would have a fever of more than 101 °F. It would not send you to the hospital, but you would not ignore it. You would take it seriously and try to understand what was causing it.

The map below shows the global temperature anomaly for June 2026 compared to the average for the same month during 1951–1980. Warmer-than-average conditions covered most of the planet. The strongest anomalies were over Western Europe, the Mediterranean, north-central Asia, and the central and eastern tropical Pacific. The coolest anomalies were largely confined to parts of China and Antarctica.

The global average is real and important. But no one lives in the global average. People live in places, not statistics. What they experience are the regional patterns shown on the map.

Large areas of the continental Northern Hemisphere were operating in a substantially warmer thermal regime than the one that shaped twentieth-century agriculture, infrastructure, ecosystems, and everyday expectations.

That is probably the most important consequence of climate change. Civilization evolved—and was built—for one climatic regime. The question is whether it can adapt to another, especially one that is changing rapidly.

This does not mean every day was 1.5 °C warmer. It means hot days now begin from a higher baseline. Heat waves can become more intense. Warmer oceans supply more energy and moisture to the strongest tropical cyclones and can amplify some El Niño-related extremes. Nighttime temperatures remain higher, reducing the overnight relief that people, livestock, and crops depend on. Warmer air also increases evaporative demand, causing soils and vegetation to dry more rapidly.

Some argue that a warmer world will benefit agriculture. Perhaps in some places and for some crops. But changes of this magnitude affect where food can be grown, how much water is needed, and how often farmers face heat and drought stress. Those are not trivial adjustments. They are changes to the operating system for our food supply.

There is another pattern hidden within the global average that I had never really appreciated until I began this recent research.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why climate change is so difficult to discuss calmly.

For some, it is the defining challenge of our time. For others, it is exaggerated or even a hoax. How can intelligent, well-intentioned people look at the same evidence and reach such different conclusions?

For me, the starting point is simple. The Earth is warming, and it’s warming faster than at any time since civilization emerged. It’s as if our civilization has developed a fever.

I’m not a climate scientist by training. I’m an Earth systems scientist. That gives me a somewhat different perspective—not because I know more about climate, but because I’m interested in how complex systems behave and adapt.

When I look at the chart below—a 350,000-year history of climate and humanity—a few things stand out. Warmer interglacial periods alternated with colder glacial periods.

For almost all of that time, the human population remained remarkably small. Our ancestors survived repeated swings between colder and warmer climates, but they lived in small, mobile groups. They weren’t supporting cities, global trade, electric grids, or eight billion people.

Then, during the Holocene, something fundamentally changed. Agriculture emerged. Settlements became cities. Complexity increased. Population exploded. Civilization developed during a relatively cool interglacial period that avoided the highest temperatures reached by several earlier interglacials.

That doesn’t prove climate caused civilization. Nor does it prove that warmer temperatures are incompatible with civilization.

It does point toward a more interesting question.

Can a civilization that emerged under one climatic regime adapt to another, especially when change occurs rapidly?

It’s also one we should be able to explore together—with curiosity, humility, and a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Now let’s zoom in and look at the Holocene—the period we’re living in today.

As the Earth emerged from the last ice age, temperatures rose rapidly before entering a version of today’s climatic regime about 12,000 years ago, around the same time agriculture began to appear. The climate didn’t become perfectly stable. Temperatures continued to fluctuate, and different reconstructions disagree about exactly how much they varied. What they agree on is that the extreme swings of the last glacial period were over.

Keep in mind that this chart shows 100-year averages, so shorter-term fluctuations are smoothed out. If you’re already looking for today’s warming of roughly 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, it’s blended into the final century on the right. We’ll come back to that later. For now, it’s more useful to focus on the broader story the data are telling.

Many experts argue that the Holocene was an unusually stable period and that this stability allowed agriculture and civilization to flourish. The evidence suggests a more nuanced picture.

The Holocene wasn’t climatically static. Temperatures continued to rise and fall, sometimes substantially depending on which reconstruction you examine. But compared with the violent and prolonged shifts of the last glacial period, the Holocene represented a far more survivable climatic regime.

That distinction is important.

Agriculture didn’t emerge when climate became stable. It emerged during a different climatic regime—one that, despite continued variability, seems to have provided conditions compatible with farming, permanent settlements, and increasingly complex societies.

The planet was still changing. It was simply changing within limits to which civilization could adapt.

Rather than assuming the Holocene was unusually stable, let’s compare it with previous warm periods. Fortunately, we have reasonably good climate records from the previous four interglacial periods. In the chart below, the Holocene is shown in black.

The similarities are immediately apparent, but so are the differences. Like the earlier interglacials, the Holocene began with rapid warming as the Earth emerged from an ice age. All five belong to the same family of climatic regimes. Unlike most of the earlier interglacials, however, the Holocene lacked a pronounced early warming spike. Instead, temperatures continued to rise more gradually while most of the earlier interglacials had already begun cooling.

Perhaps the most interesting feature is what happened over time. Rather than diverging from earlier interglacials, the Holocene gradually converged toward the central tendency of the previous four interglacials. It never reached the highest temperatures of the warmest interglacials, but neither was it fundamentally different. It occupied the cooler end of the interglacial family while remaining well within its overall range of behavior.

That observation suggests a more nuanced conclusion than the familiar story of an exceptionally stable Holocene. The climate continued to change, but it changed differently—and within a climatic regime in which agriculture, cities, and eventually global civilization emerged.

So where does this popular idea of a “stable Holocene” actually come from?

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The climate debate is consumed by arguments over causes and proposed solutions while largely missing the question that matters: Can civilization survive a much warmer world?

Temperatures have already reached levels not seen for at least 100,000 years. Civilization—and the agriculture that supports it—emerged only after the last ice age, during the Holocene’s unusual period of low temperature variability (Figure 1). Whether climate change is natural or human-driven doesn’t alter the reality of extreme warming—or what it may mean for civilization.

Climate has always changed, and humans survived earlier periods warmer than today. But civilization has never experienced a climate shift like this—and never with a population that has grown from roughly 0.5 million to 8 billion in the last 10,000 years (Figure 2). It’s one thing for humans to survive a hotter world. It’s another to maintain a complex, interconnected civilization whose agriculture and infrastructure were built for this climate—not a very different one.

No one wants to think about that. It contradicts our deepest narratives about progress and the promise of a better world. So we pick the problem apart and argue over the pieces. Climate change is a hoax. The data can’t be trusted. A warmer world will be better for agriculture. Or we can fix everything by abandoning fossil fuels and running civilization on renewables or nuclear power. Technology will find a solution.

These arguments offer refuge from a more disturbing possibility: climate change may be only a symptom of something much more fundamental. What if the economic growth and technological progress we celebrate as our greatest achievements are also creating the conditions that could undermine our future? And what if warming is already far enough along that meaningful mitigation is no longer feasible?

What if we stopped arguing about what to do and tried to understand the reality of the present?

A friend called me and said he had never been more confused by oil prices.

I knew exactly what he meant. Physical markets looked tight. Shipping through Hormuz was disrupted. Inventories were falling. The geopolitical risk was obvious. And yet oil prices were drifting lower.

My answer surprised him. I told him I thought the market had mostly gotten it right.

The disruption of oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz led many analysts to argue that futures prices were too low relative to the risk. Comparative inventory tells a different story. It suggests that markets had already priced a $20 to $30 war premium above the marginal price from March through May (Figure 1). Now that the conflict has begun to wind down, that premium has not merely disappeared. It has reversed. Oil is now trading about $10 below the price implied by the historical comparative-inventory relationship.

That does not mean the market is calm. It means the market has moved from pricing acute supply risk to pricing the next problem: weak demand, distorted flows, and uncertainty about what “normal” means after Hormuz.

That is a very different framing from the way most analysts see the market. Comparative inventory (CI) makes it possible.

CI compares current inventory with the market’s seasonal expectation, using the moving five-year average as a normalized benchmark. In effect, it measures whether the market is long or short relative to what it has come to regard as normal.

Markets seem to carry a kind of collective memory. They remember what level of inventory felt comfortable, what level felt dangerous, and what price was needed to push producers to drill more—or less—to balance future supply.

I have always used CI as an empirical tool. I have not worried much about why it works because it has consistently provided a reliable calibration of the marginal price implied by current inventory levels.

This time is no exception. But it also reveals something more important: people and markets value risk very differently.

People think logically, but usually from a narrow perspective. We focus on the immediate risk we can see—in this case, the loss of oil flows through Hormuz—and imagine how prices should respond.

Oil markets do something different. They take in a wider field of information: inventories, production, spare capacity, offsets to lost flows, policy responses, expectations, positioning, and history. They do not simply price what has gone wrong. They search for how the system may adapt.

In that sense, oil markets are complex adaptive systems. That does not mean markets are always right and people are wrong. It means they are doing something different. People imagine how things could break. Markets look for the price at which the system can keep functioning.

Most experienced oil observers say that predicting oil prices is a fool’s errand. I agree. But understanding the trends and forces that shape prices over time is something different.

That distinction lies near the heart of the modern dilemma. Much of quantitative science has advanced by reducing complex systems to narrow domains where prediction becomes possible. Complexity science starts from a different premise. It looks for a small set of essential processes and mechanisms that organize behavior. These models may not deliver precise forecasts, but they can reveal the underlying regularities of a system.

Comparative inventory does that for oil markets.

It allows us to see order in the progression of oil prices over time, as shown in Figure 2, left-hand chart. Comparative inventory organizes WTI prices around surplus, deficit, and urgency. It shows that price is not random. It is responding to the market’s changing perception of abundance or scarcity.

The right-hand chart shows the same data in state space, with the time dimension removed. At first glance, it looks disordered. But on closer inspection, each cluster of data points follows a broadly similar trajectory, even though the size of each departure varies. That reveals something different from the time-series chart. It does not show the chronological sequence of prices. It shows the paths oil markets have taken around an underlying order.

Order does not have to be simple to exist.

In the time domain, the market looks relatively well behaved. In state space, it looks adaptive. Shocks such as the 2014 price collapse, Covid, Ukraine, the 2018 Iran sanctions, and the 2026 Iran war pushed the system away from its prior path. The market then searched for a new route back toward balance.

If you are looking for equilibrium in oil markets, the right-hand chart suggests you will be disappointed. But that disappointment is itself an important insight.

Oil markets are not equilibrium systems. They operate in a constant state of adaptive disequilibrium. Prices, inventories, production, demand, policy, expectations, and risk are always adjusting to one another. The market is not trying to find a final resting point. It is continually testing paths through shocks, constraints, and changing expectations.

“Oil falls after U.S., Iran conclude talks in Doha.”

“US Oil Plunges Below $70 as Ships Keep Crossing Strait of Hormuz.”

These headlines reflect an understandable but serious flaw in how analysts often think about oil markets: the assumption that price can be reduced to a single variable.

It cannot.

Complex systems are defined by relationships among many interacting variables. Oil prices are shaped by geopolitics, inventories, spare capacity, demand, refinery behavior, policy, expectations, financial positioning, and risk. No single factor explains the outcome by itself.

A common conclusion in recent years is that geopolitical disruptions no longer matter very much. After all, oil prices during the Iran war never reached the levels seen during the Ukraine war a few years earlier.

But geopolitics was only one variable.

Figure 3 shows that comparative inventory during the Iran war remained far less negative than during the Ukraine war. That is a consequential difference. Think of comparative inventory like a savings account. If you have plenty of money in savings, you do not respond to an unexpected expense with the same urgency as you would if your account were nearly empty.

That is what happened during the Iran war. The geopolitical shock was real, but the market had a larger inventory cushion. Less scarcity meant less urgency. Less urgency meant lower maximum prices.

Looking only at geopolitics gives the wrong answer. The market did not ignore the Iran war. It processed the war through the inventory state it was already in.

Now let’s look at the same data with additional years and events added, along with the dashed attractor line (Figure 4).

In complexity science, an attractor is a stable state, pathway, or recurring pattern toward which a system tends to evolve over time. It acts like an invisible gravitational pull, shaping long-term behavior even as shocks push the system away.

The Ukraine War, the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, and the Iran War each introduced new forces into the oil system. They created perturbations away from the attractor.

Whenever markets face a structural change—or even the possibility of one—they shift into discovery mode. Futures markets test new price pathways as traders reassess oil flows, supply and demand, inventories, policy, logistics, and risk.

When WTI moved toward $100 during the Iran War, the market was not reacting to current inventories alone. It was exploring a possible future in which Hormuz remained constrained for months. When prices later fell back toward the comparative-inventory relationship, it was not because the past had changed. It was because the probability assigned to that future had changed.

So the market was not oscillating randomly around equilibrium.

It was continually revising its expectations about the future.

That is how adaptive disequilibrium works. Oil markets discover risk tolerance through excursions away from the attractor. Prices move higher or lower as traders test possible futures, then move back as those futures become less likely or more clearly defined. The return toward the attractor reflects a narrowing of the probability landscape as uncertainty resolves.

That also helps explain why these excursions often precede changes in the physical market rather than lag them. Futures prices are not merely describing present conditions. They are testing what the present may become.

The previous examples focused mostly on geopolitical shocks: the Ukraine War, the Hamas attack on Israel, and the Iran War. Those events pushed oil prices away from the attractor as markets explored futures defined by supply risk, war risk, sanctions, and possible disruption to physical flows.

Figure 5 shows a more nuanced case. Between 2018 and early 2021, oil markets experienced perturbations in both directions.

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I thought I’d heard it all until I listened to Rob Hopkins describe leading audiences on imaginary time-travel journeys to a future where humanity has done everything right. After taking some 15,000 people there, he says they invariably return describing a quieter, greener, happier world.

Absurd though it sounds, the exercise reveals something profound. We seem remarkably willing to treat the future as more real—and more morally compelling—than the present. We imagine it, long for it, and judge ourselves by it, as though it already exists.

For Hopkins, the future offers redemption from the environmental and climatic mess we have made of the Earth. Others, from Peter Diamandis to Elon Musk, dream of a different utopia where technology delivers unlimited energy, lifts every human being out of poverty and disease, perfects life on Earth, and eventually carries humanity to other planets. Different futures, perhaps, but both seek salvation somewhere other than the present.

Our dissatisfaction with the present says something important about the story we tell ourselves as a civilization.

We imagine the world as a collection of parts. Causes and effects are real, linear, and traceable. The future is manageable. Progress is the direction of history. Beginning about 500 years ago, the universe came to be understood less as a living order and more as a machine. When something goes wrong, take it to the shop. Run the diagnostics. Find the broken part. Order a replacement. Install it. Make a few adjustments. Add oil and gasoline. Pay the bill. Good as new.

It is a comforting story. It is also a dead one.

It is hard to love a machine. The world-as-machine is dead matter: useful, measurable, repairable, and available. Nature has no purpose except as a warehouse of fuel, parts, and services. Meaning no longer resides in the world itself. It has been relocated into history.

That is the hidden theology of modernity: nature is purposeless, but history has a destination. Progress toward a better future becomes the substitute for salvation.

How did we get here?

For most of the last 300,000 years, humans lived in small bands, embedded in the natural world and dependent on it for energy in the form of food. Life was hard, but it was also enchanted. An animal was not merely protein. It was a being. The hunt was not simply extraction but exchange—the sacred trade of its life for ours.

Agriculture changed everything, but the mystery remained. Food production became more organized, but it did not become secure. The harvest still depended on weather, soil, fertility, pests, luck, and forces no one could fully control. Much of social life centered on rituals meant to encourage abundance and protect against failure. Surplus was possible, but deficit was never far away.

Birth, death, and renewal became the underlying liturgy of agrarian life. Seeds disappeared into the earth and returned as food. Animals died so humans could live. Human beings watched the seasons and saw resurrection everywhere. Mathematics and astronomy offered a new kind of power by observing and measuring the cycles that governed survival. Priesthoods and kingship emerged around this knowledge, administering rituals, calendars, grain, labor, and authority.

In medieval Europe, the common worldview was ordered, hierarchical, purposeful, and moral. Christian cosmology coexisted with ancient Greek natural philosophy, folk magic, local custom, practical craft knowledge, and an enchanted sense of nature.

Earth was central. Heaven was above. Nature had purposes. Things had “natural places.” The cosmos was not dead matter moving under impersonal laws. It was a meaningful order. Events could be signs, punishments, blessings, portents, temptations, or expressions of divine providence.

But daily life was messier than doctrine. A farmer might believe in Christ, saints, angels, demons, lucky days, charms, bad omens, healing herbs, local spirits, inherited customs, and highly practical weather lore all at once. This was not “pure Christianity.” It was what Charles Taylor called an enchanted world: a world in which meaning, agency, danger, and sacred force were experienced as part of the environment itself, not confined inside the human mind.

In that world, nature was not mute. It spoke through seasons, illness, storms, harvests, dreams, animals, accidents, and omens. The boundary between matter and meaning was ambiguous. Human beings did not stand outside the world as detached observers. They were part of a living cosmos.

That world did not disappear all at once. It cracked, shifted, and slowly came apart. By the late Middle Ages, the symbolic unity of Christendom was already under strain. Papal corruption, church-state conflict, religious dissent, plague, war, and competing claims to authority weakened the old order. The Renaissance recovered ancient wisdom and elevated human creativity. The Reformation shattered religious unity. The rise of nation-states displaced the universal claims of church and empire. The scientific revolution then transformed nature from a meaningful order into something increasingly understood through mathematics, mechanism, experiment, and law.

This is the change Sean Carroll means when he says that “the last five hundred or so years of human intellectual progress have completely upended how we think about the world at a fundamental level.” The shift was not merely from religion to science. It was from participation to observation, from meaning to measurement, from cosmos to universe, from an enchanted world to a world increasingly treated as external, impersonal, and available for control.

The gains were extraordinary: modern science, individualism, literature, philosophy, political freedom, and eventually industrial civilization. But they came at a cost. The shared spiritual framework that had once provided meaning, coherence, and direction steadily dissolved.

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A man without convictions, without habits, without traditions. He had no plan. Yet he alone could justify what had to be done through his ideal of glory and grandeur, his insane self-adulation, his boldness in crime, and his frankness in lying.

That was Leo Tolstoy describing Napoleon Bonaparte in War and Peace.

The parallels to Donald Trump are striking. But my interest lies less in the similarities between the two men than in what they reveal about the public’s fascination with strong leaders during periods of social upheaval and geopolitical disorder. In such times, people are drawn to larger-than-life figures who seem capable of imposing order on chaos, embodying the hopes, fears, and ambitions of an unsettled age.

Tolstoy regarded this as a profound misunderstanding of how history works. Great men do not make history; they are swept along by forces much larger than themselves. The most they can do is alter its course at the margins. They are not masters of events but riders on a wave of complexity whose origins and destination remain largely beyond their control.

War and Peace follows two Russian families against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars beginning in 1805 and culminating in the French invasion of Russia in 1812. On one level, it is a sweeping family saga. On another, it is a remarkably detailed military history with descriptions of campaigns, battles, war councils, and the strategic thinking of generals on both sides.

But Tolstoy is no passive storyteller. He is an intrusive narrator who periodically stops the action to remind the reader that his real subject is Napoleon and the way history is understood. Napoleon was the great disruptor of the early nineteenth century. Like Trump, he was intensely polarizing and impossible to ignore. People could not stop talking about him.

Tolstoy, writing half a century after the events in his novel, tells the reader that historians remain divided. Was Napoleon a genius or merely a lucky fool?

His rise to power was as unconventional as Trump’s. He was an outsider, not even French but Corsican. He emerged from the chaos of the French Revolution as a national hero after military success in Italy. That was followed by a disastrous Egyptian campaign in which the French army was ultimately forced to surrender after Napoleon abandoned it and returned to France to pursue political power.

He was intelligent, charismatic, and politically gifted. But his rise owed as much to the collapse of the old French order, weak governments, public exhaustion, and his ability to cultivate an image of strength and success as it did to any achievements of his own.

France and Britain were the superpowers of the early nineteenth century, much as the United States and China are today. Nearly all of Napoleon’s grand strategy revolved around that rivalry. After abandoning hopes of invading Britain following defeat at Trafalgar, he launched the Continental System, a trade embargo designed to isolate Britain from European markets. Like Trump, he started a trade war.

Russia’s Tsar Alexander increasingly resisted the arrangement, and in 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia to force him to comply. The campaign was initially a spectacular tactical success. French armies defeated Russian forces in the field and occupied Moscow. Yet it became one of history’s greatest strategic failures. Russia refused to surrender, the French supply chains collapsed, and the retreat from Moscow turned into a catastrophe of cold, disease, hunger, and exhaustion. Most of the Grand Army never returned.

The parallels to Trump’s war against Iran are not exact, but they are suggestive. Both campaigns achieved important military objectives while failing to resolve the larger strategic problem that prompted the war in the first place. In both cases, a superior military confronted a weaker adversary that used geography, asymmetry, and unconventional methods to create leverage and avoid decisive defeat.

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“Faith is an island in the setting sun. But proof is the bottom line for everyone,” Paul Simon wrote in 1990.

Or is it?

Steven Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, centers on a decades-long government cover-up of extraterrestrial contact. Authorities don’t believe humanity can handle the truth. Then a whistleblower obtains what believers have always demanded: hard proof.

The story follows a race to reveal that evidence before powerful institutions can stop it. On the surface, it’s a movie about contact with alien life. On a deeper level, it’s about truth and how much of the truth people are able to live with.

In Close Encounters and E.T., Spielberg’s message is straightforward: the government lies because it doesn’t trust ordinary people with the truth. But Spielberg believes ordinary people can handle the truth. The heroes are regular people who experience the reality of alien contact directly. One lesson from those films is clear: trust yourself, not the government.

In Disclosure Day, that idea gets darker.

A subplot concerns a possible North Korean-Russian nuclear threat directed at the United States and the broader international order. But Spielberg’s real subject isn’t nuclear war. It’s who controls the perception of reality. Authorities insist they are managing the situation. The media turns it into a spectacle. Experts offer competing interpretations. Ordinary people are left trying to determine what is true.

This is uncomfortably close to what is happening right now.

Since the Iran War began in late February, the U.S. government has repeatedly lied. Trump declared that a peace deal was imminent 39 separate times. This weekend, an agreement was finally reached to discuss the underlying issues. Yet even now, the United States, Iran, Israel, and other parties are offering conflicting versions of what has actually been agreed.

More pointedly, Iran’s nuclear program—the central issue behind the war—remains unresolved despite the recently signed Memorandum of Understanding.

In a June 13 Truth Social post, Trump declared that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. It will surrender its enriched material (“nuclear dust”), the United States will remove and destroy it, Hormuz will reopen, and if Iran fails to comply, the United States retains an unspecified “ultimate alternative.” To many readers, that was an unmistakable reference to nuclear weapons.

Only about 20% of what Trump wrote is true. 30% is aspirational, and about 50% exaggerated or unsupported by the reported Memorandum of Understanding.

What’s striking, however, isn’t the substance of the post but its packaging.

It reads like a trailer for The Iran War streaming series.

Obama is the villain from a previous season. Trump is the hero fixing the mistake. The B-2 pilots are supporting characters. “Nuclear dust” is a plot device. The deal is the happy ending.

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Jeff Currie argues that the world is drifting toward the largest commodity shock since COVID. Yet market prices suggest that traders still view the Hormuz crisis as a temporary geopolitical scare rather than the kind of physical supply disruption capable of reshaping economies and supply chains.

His comments reflect a widely held view among analysts that benchmark oil prices in the low-$90s significantly understate actual scarcity. In this view, futures markets are being driven more by financial positioning and expectations of resolution to the Persian Gulf disruption than by physical fundamentals, masking structural shortages.

The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has interrupted the flow of roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day from the Persian Gulf. Despite headlines highlighting occasional tanker movements through the Strait, the underlying data suggest these flows remain negligible. Figure 1 shows that tanker transits have collapsed from a pre-war average of nearly 50 per day to roughly 2 per day.

While as many as eleven oil cargoes have occasionally made it through, such volumes are insignificant relative to the scale of the disruption. Even if those higher transit rates could be sustained—which they have not been—they would fall far short of offsetting the loss of Persian Gulf exports or resolving the resulting supply imbalance.

Currie argues that futures prices remain anchored near $100 while physical markets are pricing a very different reality closer to $130. He correctly notes that shortages that began in Singapore have spread to Rotterdam and beyond, driving jet fuel and refined product prices above $200 per barrel in some regions. Physical markets are flashing scarcity while paper markets continue to discount it.

Figure 2 illustrates the divergence. Using the USO Fund as a proxy for WTI spot prices, the premium for oil available today has widened from about 20% before the war to nearly 50%. Physical scarcity is increasing much faster than futures prices suggest.

A month ago, I explained that physical and futures prices can both be correct because they measure different things. Physical prices reflect current scarcity; futures prices reflect expectations about future conditions. The gap between them is not necessarily a market failure. It reflects uncertainty about how quickly today’s disruption may be resolved and how much resilience is embedded in the system.

That resilience has proven far greater than most analysts expected. Not because the Hormuz supply shock isn’t real, but because the system has adapted. Bypass pipelines, increased U.S. exports, Chinese demand reductions, SPR releases, renewed Russian exports, and demand destruction have offset much of the lost Hormuz flow. The remarkable story is not the disruption itself but the ability of a complex system to absorb it.

Adaptation, however, is not the same thing as resolution. Many of these buffers are finite. Inventories are being drawn down, and SPR releases cannot continue indefinitely. U.S. exports may be approaching practical limits, and China’s reduced demand cannot offset lost supply forever.

The key distinction is between stocks and flows.

The global oil system was optimized over decades around Persian Gulf production, established tanker routes, and refineries configured for specific crude grades. When Hormuz was disrupted, the world did not lose all of those barrels. It lost the cheapest, fastest, and most efficient way of moving them through the system.

What emerged looks more like a supply chain problem than an actual shortage of oil.

The physical market is confronting a flow disruption with no historical precedent. The stress is concentrated in regions most dependent on Persian Gulf flows. In Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, and parts of Europe, shortages of jet fuel and diesel are real and prices reflect that reality. Global inventories may still be ample, but the barrels are not necessarily where they are needed, in the quality required, when they are needed.

Physical markets are signaling stress through regional shortages, soaring jet fuel prices, collapsing location spreads, and the convergence of discounted and premium crude grades. These are classic symptoms of transportation, refining, and distribution bottlenecks rather than outright inventory exhaustion.

Much of the debate has focused on whether inventories are high or low when the more important question may be whether those inventories are useful. Global stocks remain well above normal seasonal levels, suggesting the world is not running out of oil. Yet physical markets are behaving as though certain barrels, products, and locations are critically undersupplied. Jet fuel prices above $200 per barrel across multiple regions, the disappearance of arbitrage opportunities between Singapore and Rotterdam, and the convergence of cheap and expensive crude grades all point to a shortage of deliverable molecules rather than a shortage of inventory itself.

This brings us to the central disagreement.

HFI Research argues that U.S. commercial crude inventories are on track to reach operational minimums by late July. Under its “tank bottom” thesis, the loss of inventory flexibility would leave higher prices as the primary mechanism for balancing the ongoing Hormuz-related supply shortfall (Figure 3).

When I compare current U.S. crude and refined product inventories with historical levels, I struggle to see how deficits reach the magnitudes implied by HFI’s late-July scenario (Figure 4). Current deficits are only about one-third as large as those experienced during the Ukraine energy shock and remain well below the levels seen in early 2025 before inventories began building amid concerns about an impending oil glut.

I am not disputing that the disruption HFI describes is real. It is. The disagreement is about the rate at which inventories are being depleted. HFI argues that the available buffers are insufficient to prevent U.S. commercial crude inventories from reaching operational minimums in the near future. My reading of the data is different. Current inventory deficits simply do not suggest depletion is occurring fast enough to reach “tank bottom” levels by late July.

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A deep belief in progress lies at the heart of modernity. The assumption is that more technology, more growth, more efficiency, and more freedom will steadily improve human life. Yet that faith is increasingly inconsistent with the experience of both the material and psychological lives of many humans.

For a long time, the progress narrative seemed persuasive because modern civilization delivered extraordinary gains in wealth, medicine, mobility, communication, and productivity. Yet the impression was always less convincing than its reality. Nearly half of humanity still lives on incomes that would constitute severe hardship in developed countries.

Material advancement has unfolded alongside ecological overshoot, social fragmentation, psychological instability, loneliness, institutional distrust, and a growing sense of spiritual emptiness. These forms of malaise are harder to quantify than material poverty, but that does not make them less real or less consequential. Nor can they simply be separated from material conditions, because both profoundly shape the quality and meaning of human life.

In a recent essay, David Brooks describes a resurgence of traditionalist religion, politics, and culture. He sees this reactionary impulse emerging globally because modernity has produced psychological and social poverty everywhere. People are increasingly drawn toward older, more structured traditions because modernity no longer feels meaningful enough to hold society together.

“Sometimes I think that our whole world has become kind of like that—going backwards in time,” he writes. The religious movements thriving in today’s secular age are usually the ones that reject large parts of modern culture—the Islamist theocratic movements of the Middle East and Western Asia, but also Orthodox Judaism, conservative Catholicism, and Greek Orthodoxy.

He sees the same pattern in politics. Many assumed the modern world would become steadily more democratic, rational, and cosmopolitan. Instead, the last quarter century has looked increasingly like a return to older forms of power, identity, and authority.

Brooks is right, but he reminds us the phenomenon he describes is hardly new. More than a century ago, Oswald Spengler argued that Western civilization had entered a period of cultural exhaustion. He foresaw the rise of bureaucracy, mass entertainment, technocratic management, declining trust in democratic institutions, and politics as spectacle. These were not political accidents but symptoms of a civilization losing its creative vitality.

Spengler did not believe that Western religion had simply declined intellectually. He believed it had exhausted its living spiritual vitality. Medieval Christianity—especially Gothic Christianity—represented, in his view, the highest expression of the Western soul, embodying a deep yearning toward transcendence, infinity, exploration, and metaphysical meaning.

A civilization in winter no longer creates meaning; it administers systems. The poet gives way to the bureaucrat. The philosopher gives way to the technocrat. Questions of truth and beauty are displaced by questions of efficiency, scalability, and profit.

Joseph Campbell takes the problem back even further. “Since the middle of the twelfth century,” he wrote in Creative Mythology, “an accelerating disintegration has been undoing the formidable orthodox tradition that came to flower in that century.” To understand the implications of that statement, it helps to appreciate what medieval Europe actually achieved.

The popular image of the Middle Ages as a thousand years of stagnation is not supported by the historical record. The period from roughly 1000 to 1300 was one of the most creative and dynamic eras in European history. Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres and Notre-Dame united engineering, art, theology, and music into a single vision of the sacred. Gregorian chant, polyphony, and modern musical notation laid the foundations of Western music. The troubadours, Arthurian romances, and Icelandic sagas created enduring literary traditions, while the university itself emerged at Bologna, Paris, and Oxford. Medieval scholars such as Thomas Aquinas sought to integrate faith, reason, philosophy, and law into a coherent intellectual framework.

Technological innovations including the heavy plow, horse collar, watermills, windmills, and mechanical clocks transformed agriculture and productivity. Most remarkably, art, architecture, music, politics, economics, and spiritual life were woven together within a shared symbolic universe. Campbell, Spengler, and many cultural historians would argue that this was the period when Christian mythology was most alive and culturally generative.

Yet the very success of this synthesis contained the seeds of its dissolution.

Over time, living faith hardened into institutions, dogma, and moral formalism while science, commerce, urbanization, and competing centers of political power gradually weakened the sacred framework that had unified medieval life.

Campbell took the question deeper still. For him, mythology was the hidden source code of civilization. It was the symbolic bridge between human consciousness and the larger cosmos, giving rise to religion, philosophy, art, science, social order, and even our dreams. The great achievements of culture did not emerge from reason alone but from deeper mythic currents that gave human life meaning, direction, and coherence.

“The rise and fall of civilizations,” Campbell wrote, “can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.”

What Campbell is saying is radical. Civilizations are not ultimately held together by governments, armies, laws, or markets. They are held together by shared aspirations—the symbolic structures that tell people what reality means, what constitutes a good life, what suffering is for, and what kind of future is worth pursuing. Myth is the organizing principle of community. It is the metaphysical foundation of civilization itself. When it weakens or disappears, the life force of the civilization begins to drain away.

For those whose mythology still provides orientation, there is a sense of belonging—to a community, a moral order, and ultimately to the cosmos itself. When that mythology no longer works, the result is not merely a loss of belief. It is a dissociation from society, a weakening of the social contract, and a deeper loss of meaning and purpose. Individuals no longer know where they fit within the larger story.

And that is precisely what Campbell saw in Europe beginning in the twelfth century. By the late Middle Ages, the unity of Christendom was strained by papal corruption, church-state conflicts, religious dissent, and competing claims to authority. The process accelerated through the Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, the Black Death and later, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of nation-states.

What had once been a relatively coherent symbolic universe fractured into competing religious, political, and intellectual traditions. For Campbell, this marked the beginning of a centuries-long unraveling of a shared mythology. The gains were extraordinary—modern science, individualism, literature, philosophy, and political freedom—but they came at a cost. The unified spiritual framework that had once provided meaning, coherence, and direction for European civilization steadily dissolved.

Campbell missed an important part of the story: the role of war, energy, and material power in shaping civilization’s mythology.

The introduction of gunpowder transformed warfare and expanded the scale of conquest beyond anything previously imaginable. By the mid-fourteenth century, cannon had become common on European battlefields. Firearms soon followed. By the sixteenth century, naval artillery and broadside warfare had revolutionized conflict at sea. European powers could now project force across oceans, seize territory, control trade routes, and accumulate wealth on an unprecedented scale.

The Age of Exploration, colonization, trade, and empire did more than expand Europe’s reach. It provided a new source of meaning. As the spiritual unity of Christendom weakened, a different mythology began to emerge. The promise of salvation gradually gave way to the promise of progress.

That transition accelerated with the Enlightenment and, later, the discovery of fossil fuels. Coal, and eventually oil and natural gas, provided access to immense stores of concentrated energy. Science explained how the world worked. Technology provided the means to transform it. Together they gave rise to a new civilizational narrative: that history itself was a story of continuous material improvement.

The old quest for the Holy Grail did not disappear. It was secularized. The search for spiritual fulfillment became a search for wealth, power, growth, and technological mastery. Progress became the new sacred story.

For a time, the results seemed to justify the faith. Living standards rose, lifespans lengthened, knowledge expanded, and productive capacity exploded. But every mythology contains its own blind spots. The progress narrative treated economic growth as if it could continue indefinitely while paying little attention to the material foundations upon which it depended. The fossil fuels that powered the ascent were treated as an inheritance without limits rather than a one-time endowment.

In this sense, modern civilization did not escape mythology. It merely exchanged one mythology for another. The medieval world sought meaning in God. The modern world sought meaning in progress. Both provided coherence, purpose, and direction. Both organized societies around a vision of the future. And both became vulnerable when reality began to diverge from the promises at their core.

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I read a review today by Eric Bulson about James Joyce’s biographer, and this part near the end caught my attention:

“Joyce has made the cut in the 21st century, but just barely.”

In other words, one of the greatest writers in history now stands on the edge of irrelevance even among literary critics.

That made me wonder whether the collapse of cognitive patience is becoming a quiet crisis for modern civilization.

I have been reading Joyce’s Ulysses off-and-on for more than a year. It is extraordinarily difficult but offers extraordinary insights. I have had similar experiences with Carl Jung, Alfred North Whitehead, Joseph Campbell, and Iain McGilchrist. All are long and difficult. I don’t think many people read these authors anymore because reading them requires patience, uncertainty, humility, and sustained attention.

Joyce is difficult because consciousness is difficult. Jung is difficult because the psyche is difficult. Whitehead is difficult because process and reality are difficult. McGilchrist is difficult because perception itself is difficult. These writers are grappling with layers of consciousness, history, myth, biology, metaphysics, contradiction, and complexity that cannot be compressed into “content.”

Modern culture increasingly assumes that if something matters, it should be easily understandable and, above all, useful. We increasingly demand immediate solutions before we have even understood the problem, let alone the consequences of the solution.

But the deepest forms of understanding do not work that way. They require prolonged attention and the ability to accept uncertainty and ambiguity long enough for meaning to slowly reveal itself. They require rereading, following references down rabbit holes, and confronting ideas that may take years to integrate.

I am currently reading the “Circe” section of Ulysses, considered one of the most difficult portions of the book. It is roughly 120 pages of what feels like unconscious archetypes unfolding through an extended dream sequence. It has taken me several sittings over a few weeks to get through it. It took Joyce nine months to write it.

That perspective matters. Joyce is already offering me a “great simplification” of a lifetime of contemplation.

Last night, I watched the film Hamnet. I had only read the play Hamlet for the first time a few months ago. The film was extraordinary because it showed how Shakespeare used tragedy to process his grief over the death of his young son while simultaneously creating an experience that ordinary people at the Globe Theater could share.

Shakespeare’s wife was angry because he was rarely home and absent in her grief. Yet when she finally attended Hamlet, she was overwhelmed by what it revealed about who her husband was, how he dealt with suffering, and how private pain could become shared meaning in the hands of a skilled writer.

In Bulson’s article, he also noted that “Joyce has long since become one more specialized topic. Those already intimidated by the difficulty are likely to be further put off by the experts’ gatekeeping.”

In other words, only special priesthoods should ponder certain mysteries.

That may be how academics and critics frame these writers, but not the writers themselves. Most did not come from especially privileged backgrounds.

I am awed by Abraham Lincoln, who had almost no formal education but was consumed by the need to read everything he could find. Lincoln suffered deeply in life and became uniquely skilled at compressing wisdom into short addresses capable of moving ordinary people.

This makes me wonder whether the real issue is not intelligence but attention and patience—the willingness to slow down, quietly consider things, and resist rushing into action before understanding the problem.

Modern civilization is optimized for efficiency, speed, stimulation, productivity, specialization, and information throughput. Wisdom requires almost the opposite conditions: slowness, contemplation, ambiguity, inwardness, and sustained concentration.

The irony is that our civilization produces unprecedented quantities of information while simultaneously weakening the psychological capacities required to process it.

But this is not criticism, nor do I think the situation is hopeless. Most people throughout history never read writers like Joyce, Jung, Whitehead, or Shakespeare either. Deep insight has always been the work of small advance teams.

The issue is not whether everyone reads Ulysses. The issue is whether civilizations continue producing enough people willing to undertake difficult inner and intellectual journeys at all.

Maybe civilization survives not because everyone understands great thinkers, but because some people do—and can translate what they learn back into forms that ordinary people can feel and recognize, as Shakespeare and Lincoln did.

War is like a massive storm. You know it’s coming, but not when, where, or how hard it will hit. At first it appears chaotic. Then patterns emerge and a rough, uneasy order begins to take shape.

The war with Iran is a good example. Nearly three months into the conflict, every day still brings surprises, contradictory reports, and tactical uncertainty. Analysts and journalists remain consumed by noise: How many tankers made it through Hormuz? When will Iran run out of oil storage? Who is really in controls in Tehran—the civilian government or the Revolutionary Guard?

But the signal matters more than the noise. Iran is unlikely to restore the Strait of Hormuz to open navigation. The regime in Tehran is unlikely to surrender or collapse. Its missile and drone capabilities are more than adequate to neutralize the overwhelming conventional superiority of the U.S. and Israeli militaries. Daily uncertainty remains high, but the broader pattern becomes clearer with time.

The Iran war is a world-changing event. Even if the fighting stopped tomorrow and Persian Gulf shipping eventually returned to pre-war levels, the world would not simply “go back to normal.” Most people still imagine history as reversible. It is not.

Everything is path dependent. When shocks are small and local, their consequences fade into the background and normality appears to return. But stabilizing is not the same as “back to normal.”

Think about something ordinary. A financial loss may later be offset by gains, but the original capital—and the compounding it would have generated—is gone forever. A relationship may survive betrayal but it loses its emotional energy. Turning down—or failing to get—a job that never comes again. Another opportunity appears, but an entirely different life unfolds involving different people, places, and experiences.

History works in the same way. Systems absorb shocks and reorganize around them. The larger the shock, the larger and more permanent the reorganization.

That is why wars matter so much. Not simply because things are destroyed, but because patterns change. Trade flows change. Alliances change. Investment patterns change. Public psychology changes. Political legitimacy changes. The future itself changes direction.

Nate Hagens and I recently discussed how the Iran war could trigger cascading energy, economic, geopolitical, and civilizational crises that accelerate The Great Simplification and permanently alter the trajectory of industrial society. During that conversation, he asked how my thinking had changed over the last year about the broad arc of history.

I explained that I see the surplus story very differently and that it now includes war.

The standard narrative says that once humans learned to farm, they produced more food than they immediately needed. That surplus supposedly freed some people to govern, build, trade, invent, worship, and create. Agriculture led to cities, cities led to states, and states led to civilization. Surplus made progress possible.

Some of that is true. But Peter Turchin’s work paints a darker and more complicated picture. What transformed human society was not agriculture alone, but war. The mastery of the horse, bronze weaponry, and later iron cavalry made large-scale looting one of history’s primary engines of social organization and wealth concentration. Cities emerged as organized protection rackets against roaming armed marauders. Military power—not innovation alone—often determined who controlled labor, land, resources, trade routes, and accumulated surplus.

I also see the Industrial Revolution differently. The standard story—that fossil fuels produced extraordinary productivity gains—is true, but it overlooks war. Fossil energy, mechanized production, railroads, steel, chemicals, advanced finance, and mass mobilization transformed warfare from limited campaigns between elites into industrialized conflicts involving entire populations and economies. The scale, speed, and destructive power of war expanded dramatically. Industrial warfare became not merely a feature of modern civilization, but one of the main drivers of social, political, economic, and systemic complexity.

But these changing perspectives still leave a deeper question unanswered: what is war in the first place? That is the realm of metaphysics.

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As physical markets flash extreme tightness, many analysts now warn that oil futures curves no longer reflect physical reality. They argue that $100 oil dramatically understates true scarcity, masking structural shortages, geopolitical fragility, and nearly a billion barrels of lost supply behind a futures structure shaped more by financial positioning than physical fundamentals.

They misunderstand what futures markets are designed to price.

Physical and futures prices can both be correct if you understand what each measures. Depending on location and crude quality, physical spot barrels are effectively trading closer to $150. That is the price for oil today. The price on trading screens is something different: roughly $104 for Brent futures or options tied to delivery in late July. One is cash for an immediate physical barrel. The other is a financial contract pricing expectations roughly nine weeks into the future.

The simplest way to understand the difference is that futures markets always discount the future. A barrel delivered several months from now contains far more uncertainty than a barrel available today. Nine weeks ago, for example, Brent traded near $71—more than $30 below today’s prompt physical price. Futures markets are not pricing what oil is worth now. They are pricing what traders think conditions might look like weeks or months ahead.

Markets do not pull oil prices out of thin air. One of the most important inputs is inventory. Figure 1 shows the relationship between OECD comparative inventory and Brent price. Comparative inventory is simply current storage minus the 5-year average for the same time of year. That relationship is almost always inverse to price, and the logic is straightforward.

Comparative inventory is essentially the market’s oil savings account. When inventories are comfortably above normal, the risk of shortage is low and prices tend to fall. When inventories shrink below normal, markets become anxious about supply security and prices rise.

The EIA currently projects the comparative inventory deficit to deepen into August before gradually moving back toward the 5-year average. Its associated Brent forecast for August is about $88 per barrel. I am not arguing that the forecast is correct, only that it represents a hard data-based anchor for how markets are evaluating future supply risk.

Figure 2 shows the same data as a cross-plot. The three trend lines resemble bond yield curves except that oil price replaces interest rate and comparative inventory replaces maturity as the relevant measure of risk. In bonds, risk rises with time. In oil, risk rises as inventories fall below normal.

The red circle represents the first-quarter 2026 price-versus-value data point. By dropping a vertical line to the orange yield curve and reading across to the y-axis, we derive an implied marginal price of roughly $70 per barrel.

In other words, futures markets are not ignoring the risks associated with the Iran War. They have already embedded about a $30 geopolitical premium into current pricing. Inventories imply a price closer to $70, while markets are pricing oil near $99. That is a substantial overvaluation relative to inventory fundamentals.

This is how markets translate uncertainty into price. Oil cannot trade at theoretical values unless counterparties are willing underwrite that transaction.

That process includes price discovery. WTI storage data is released weekly whereas OECD inventory data is only published monthly, allowing for more detailed tracking of the relationship between price and supply. Figure 3 shows WTI comparative inventory, its current yield curve, and the price-volume data points that define and constrain it.

The most important thing about these yield curves is that they are not precise mathematical regressions. They are trend lines punctuated by episodes of price discovery. Deviations from the curve are therefore just as important as the data points that fall on it.

Those excursions occur when traders believe something structural in the market may have changed. Prices are bid up or down until the market reaches the price limit at which counterparties are willing to buy or sell. At that point, price-volume relationships either revert toward the existing yield curve or establish a new one if the discovery process reveals a fundamentally different level of supply urgency.

The Iran War and the 2026 price-volume data points are a textbook example of such a price excursion. WTI at $106 was not an arbitrary number. It represented the highest price traders were willing to pay for a futures contract during the week ending May 1, 2026. One may believe that current physical scarcity justifies $150 oil, but markets do not move to theoretical scarcity values automatically. Price only rises to levels at which counterparties are willing to make a trade. Like it or not, that is how the process works.

Another important way to evaluate oil markets is through spreads—the difference between the first-month and some future month contract price. The wider the spread, the greater the implied supply urgency. A steep backwardation—the front month price is higher than the later-dated contract—signals that buyers are willing to pay a substantial premium for oil today relative to oil in the future.

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The U.S. is not energy independent—and cannot be—because oil quality matters. The U.S. has plenty of oil. A lot of it’s just not the right kind.

The U.S. now produces more oil than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined, and as much natural gas as Russia, Iran and China combined. That’s the headline from a recent Department of Energy release—complete with charts that imply political leadership is responsible for the surge (Figure 1).

The numbers are technically correct—and deeply misleading.

Production alone says very little about a country’s underlying energy position. Saudi Arabia holds roughly four times more oil reserves than the United States, and Russia about 1.5 times as much. For natural gas, Russia has nearly three times U.S. reserves, and Iran more than 2.5 times.

Production is a flow. Reserves are the stock.

Producing more today means depleting faster tomorrow. It’s not dominance. It’s draining America first.

Yet the belief that the United States is “energy independent” persists, reinforced by official statistics.

The United States has been a net total energy exporter—total energy exports have been higher than total energy imports—since 2019.

U.S. Energy Information Administration

That statement is also technically correct—and just as misleading.

It aggregates crude oil, refined products, natural gas, coal, and electricity into a single heat-equivalent metric. In doing so, it collapses fundamentally different energy forms with different end uses into one number and obscures a critical reality: the United States still depends on imports of specific fuels—especially heavier crude oil—to keep its energy system running.

That distinction matters because oil still dominates U.S. energy system, accounting for nearly 40% of the total (Figure 2).

Oil is not just another fuel—it’s the economy. It powers transport, agriculture, mining, and construction, and it underpins global trade. Most goods either contain oil or depend on it somewhere in their supply chain. When oil flows smoothly, the economy functions. When it doesn’t, everything slows, breaks, or gets more expensive.

The United States remains a substantial net importer of crude oil. Imports averaged about 6.3 million barrels per day in 2024 and 2025, while exports were only about 4.0 million barrels per day (Figure 3).

Why does the U.S. both import and export large volumes of crude oil?

Because not all oil is the same.

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The U.S. war with Iran may be the last gasp of an old world order fighting with weapons that no longer decide outcomes. Societies evolve like species, only faster, and military breakthroughs disrupt and force them to reorganize.

The mastery of the horse expanded the reach of human violence, adding speed and shock that forced villages into larger political units. Gunpowder and ocean navigation followed, giving small European states global reach. Coal and oil concentrated power, aircraft added a new dimension, and nuclear weapons marked a quantum leap that still shapes today’s conflicts.

The U.S. and Israel attacked Iran with industrial-scale firepower. Thousands of targets were struck—missile bases, air defenses, command centers, and elements of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Economic damage is significant, and military losses are real, but the core objectives—regime collapse and destruction of Iran’s nuclear program—remain unrealized.

Iran is fighting a different kind of war. It has launched waves of cheap drones, missiles, and fast boats. These have damaged U.S. positions across the region and pushed naval forces into standoff positions. They have not won, but they have imposed a war of attrition with disproportionate costs on the U.S. side.

The real laboratory for modern warfare is Ukraine. What began as a conventional invasion has become something else. Ukraine survived not because it matched Russia’s scale, but because it changed the nature of the fight. It shifted from platform warfare to systems warfare. Drones turned the battlefield upside-down. A country with no navy has degraded a major fleet. A country with limited long-range strike has hit strategic infrastructure deep inside Russia.

Success depends on mass, resilience, and constant innovation. It requires millions of weapons systems, not thousands. The advantage goes to the side that learns and iterates fastest. Ukrainian drone makers update software weekly and redesign hardware every few weeks. Their military adapts tactics just as quickly. That is the new model.

The U.S. used drones in the Iran war, but mostly as part of a high-end, networked system—surveillance, targeting, and support for pilots. Iran used them differently: cheap, expendable, and numerous. U.S. capabilities were superior in every conventional sense—air dominance, precision strike, intelligence—but superiority did not translate into control.

Drones did not erase U.S. dominance, but they changed the economics of the battlefield. Bases, ports, shipping lanes, and energy infrastructure became vulnerable. Defense became expensive and incomplete.

It would be unfair to say the U.S. did not anticipate drones. It did. But their strategic impact appears to have been underestimated. That is likely because the expectation was a short war. Iran was supposed to collapse under overwhelming force. It did not.

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It’s hard to separate signal from noise in assessing the Iran war and what it means going forward. War is always confusing, but there’s a growing sense that this one is different—more consequential than most conflicts of recent decades. At the same time, the frameworks we use to interpret events like this are outdated. They come from an era of greater global cooperation and surplus, and our mechanistic approach to complex systems no longer explains what’s actually happening.

It is increasingly clear that this war is not working out as planned for the United States and Israel. At best, it can be described as a tactical success but a strategic failure. Strikes have degraded elements of Iran’s military capability, but not enough to prevent meaningful retaliation against U.S. bases, ships, and aircraft. More importantly, the central objectives—eliminating Iran’s nuclear program and forcing regime change—have not been achieved.

A more realistic assessment is that the war is beginning to look like failure for the U.S. and Israel—not because Iran is winning militarily, but because it has shifted the battlefield. The war is taking place as much in the global economy as it is in the region. Iran does not need to physically control the Strait of Hormuz; by making it risky and unreliable, it has made it effectively unusable. Traffic has collapsed, flows are minimal, and global markets are already feeling the pressure.

Most analysis still focuses on the war itself: how much missile capacity has been degraded, how many assets have been destroyed, what infrastructure is offline, and whether tankers are moving. It tracks timelines—how long the bombing continues, the state of negotiations, and which countries are aligning or staying out. The global effect of reduced oil and gas supply is treated as one variable among many.

A different perspective is emerging among central banks and economists. They are less focused on battlefield and more on system-level consequences: how constrained flows of oil, gas, fertilizer, and helium affect trade, inflation, GDP, and interest rates; how Gulf investment behavior shifts under different war duration scenarios; and how long it might take for any ceasefire—or managed access to Hormuz—to translate into normalized energy and financial flows.

A few analysts try to connect the war and the world, but most still rely on a mechanistic approach. They break the conflict into parts, analyze each in isolation, and then attempt to reconstruct the whole into a forecast. What’s largely missing is a more basic question: what is the nature of the system we are trying to understand?

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