Facing global warming, are we like frogs?

CONFRONTED BY new evidence of global warming, will people react like frogs? According to an often-told story, a frog will try to jump out if you drop it into hot water but will stay, and eventually die, if you put it in a pan of cool water and slowly bring it to a boil. A United Nations report to be released in Paris on February 2 will include the strongest warning yet that humans are stoking global warming that may cause colossal damage to nature if, like the doomed frog, they ignore rising temperatures. Ex-US Vice President Al Gore tells the story with croaking cartoon frogs in his movie An Inconvenient Truth to urge more action to save the planet. In his version, a hand dips in and rescues a swooning frog just as the water starts to bubble. “It’s important to rescue the frog,” he says. And UN officials also sometimes mention the boiled frog as a cautionary tale of the dangers of human complacency about global warming. There is only one problem — it’s not true. “The ‘boiled frog’... is definitely an urban myth,” said Victor Hutchison, a zoology professor at the University of Okla-homa in the US. “If one places the animal in a container and slowly heats it, it will at some point in- variably try to escape.” The UN report, by 2,500 scientists, will say there is at least a 90 per cent chance that human activities led by burning fossil fuels are the main cause of warming in the past 50 years. The warming may cause more floods, heatwaves, droughts and rising sea levels by 2100. It will also guide governments seeking to extend the UN’s Kyoto Protocol for fighting warming be- yond 2012. But will the world’s governments hop? If the much-maligned frog is smart enough to jump when the mercury rises, there must surely be hope for humans too? Scientists’ warnings about the risks of carbon dioxide have often gone unheeded. Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, a Nobel chemistry laureate, first pointed to a likely link between warming and industrial carbon dioxide emissions a century ago. In a world where millions of individuals are unable to quit smoking or avoid obesity, action to curb global warming seems a tall order. And, like the fabled boiled frog, people may find it hard to tackle an invisible threat. “Our evolutionary biology... equips us to respond far more easily and naturally to a threat from a snake, or a fang, or a claw or a spider than from a threat that can only be understood by the use of abstract reasoning,” Gore said in a presentation in Oslo in 2006. “It’s not impossible, but it does take more time.”


* Source: http://epaper.hindustantimes.com, dated - Thursday, January 25, 2007.*