Friday, December 08, 2006

A Chilling Way to Look at Global Warming


We're frogs. We're screwed. When it comes to recognizing the looming dangers of global warming, we're as dumb as frogs. Huh?

Here's what we have in common. Twisted kids have known this for - well, forever. If you put a frog in a pot of hot water, it'll jump right out. However, if you place a frog in a pot of cold water, you can literally boil it to death and it won't jump out. The trick is to heat the water slowly. In small increments the frog adapts to the heating - at first - but, by the time it gets life threatening the frog has lost its ability to jump. It just sits there and dies.

We're learning how to adapt to global warming at least in those parts of the world where we still have that option. This gives a lot of us the idea that we don't have to radically change our lives and transform our societies to fight the problem. Don't worry, be happy. Hey, ask any frog.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Al Gore uses the same analogy in An Inconvenient Truth. He makes the point that it is important to pull the frog out before it boils to death.

We do have an extraodinary capacity to cope. With climate change we may just cope ourselves to extinction. A pyrrhic quality of ours, to be sure.