The myth of the boiling frog
Two frogs are minding their own business
in the swamp when WHAM—
they’re kidnapped.
They come to in a kitchen,
captives of a menacing chef.
He boils up a pot of water
and lobs one of the frogs in.
But it’s having none of this.
The second its toes hit the scalding water
it jumps right out the window.
The chef refills the pot, but this time
he doesn’t turn on the heat.
He plops the second frog in,
and this frog’s okay with that.
The chef turns the heat on, very low,
and the temperature of water slowly rises.
So slowly that the frog doesn’t notice.
In fact, it basks in the balmy water.
Only when the surface begins to bubble
does the frog realize: it’s toast.
What’s funny about this parable is that
it’s not scientifically true… for frogs.
In reality, a frog will detect slowly
heating water and leap to safety.
Humans, on the other hand,
are a different story.
We’re perfectly happy to sit in the pot
and slowly turn up the heat,
all the while insisting it isn’t our hand
on the dial,
arguing about whether we can
trust thermometers,
and questioning—
even if they’re right, does it matter?
It does.
Since 1850, global average temperatures
have risen by 1 degree Celsius.
That may not sound like a lot, but it is.
Why? 1 degree is an average.
Many places have already gotten
much warmer than that.
Some places in the Arctic
have already warmed 4 degrees.
If global average temperatures
increase 1 more degree,
the coldest nights in the Arctic
might get 10 degrees warmer.
The warmest days in Mumbai
might get 5 degrees hotter.
So how did we get here?
Almost everything that makes modern life
possible relies on fossil fuels:
coal, oil, and gas full of carbon
from ancient organic matter.
When we burn fossil fuels,
we release carbon dioxide
that builds up in our atmosphere,
where it remains for hundreds
or even thousands of years,
letting heat in, but not out.
The heat comes from sunlight, which passes
through the atmosphere to Earth,
where it gets absorbed
and warms everything up.
Warm objects emit infrared radiation,
which should pass back out into space,
because most atmospheric gases
don’t absorb it.
But greenhouse gases—
carbon dioxide and methane—
do absorb infrared wavelengths.
So when we add more of those gases
to the atmosphere,
less heat makes it back out to space,
and our planet warms up.
If we keep emitting greenhouse gases
at our current pace,
scientists predict temperatures
will rise 4 degrees
from their pre-industrial levels by 2100.
They’ve identified 1.5 degrees of warming—
global averages half a degree warmer
than today’s—
as a threshold beyond which
the negative impacts of climate change
will become increasingly severe.
To keep from crossing that threshold,
we need to get our greenhouse gas
emissions down to zero
as fast as possible.
Or rather, we have to get emissions
down to what’s called net zero,
meaning we may still be putting some
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,
but we take out as much as we put in.
This doesn’t mean we can just keep
emitting and sequester all that carbon—
we couldn’t keep up with our emissions
through natural methods,
and technological solutions would
be prohibitively expensive
and require huge amounts
of permanent storage.
Instead, while we switch
from coal, oil, and natural gas
to clean energy and fuels,
which will take time,
we can mitigate the damage by removing
carbon from the atmosphere.
Jumping out of the proverbial pot
isn’t an option,
but we can do something the frogs can’t:
reach over, and turn down the heat.