Ruth Carruthers: Boiling a frog
The dangerous confusion between climate change and the weather.
More like this...
I’m going to be predictably British here and talk about the weather.
For the UK, it’s been cold recently, really cold. So cold, in fact, you would have been forgiven for thinking you were looking at Greenland if you saw the BBC satellite image that was taken last week.
It may be the coldest winter in 30 years but much to my frustration, BBC Breakfast News was dominated entirely by updates on ‘the big freeze’ for most of last week. This included endless interviews with frustrated parents who couldn’t send their kids to school and unprepared drivers stuck in their cars for the night – even though they were advised not to drive in such conditions. There is only so much talk about 'grit shortages' that I can take in the morning.
I’m not complaining about the weather though. That probably has something to do with the fact that I’m a snowboarder, I don’t have kids, I don’t live in the back of beyond and I don’t drive to work. Still, I’m not the only one smiling: ski resorts in Scotland are having their best winter in a decade. However this doesn’t mean that climate change isn’t happening according to experts. Sorry to always burst the bubble, guys.
The confusion sets in when people fail to distinguish between weather, which changes from day to day, and climate, which is characterised by average weather. And unfortunately for our little planet, the trend is that Earth is still getting warmer despite the recent cold spell in the Northern Hemisphere. Furthermore, whilst the UK may be under a thick blanket of snow and ice right now the Met Office say Canada is 10 °C warmer than usual. Alaska, the Mediterranean and North Africa also experiencing above average temperatures for this time of year.
But for a nation so obsessed with the weather, why are we not making this much of a fuss about climate change? I suspect that if we knew that the snow was coming, we could have taken precautionary action and stockpiled enough grit. The funny thing is we know climate change is happening; we’ve held international conferences, listened to people’s stories and studied the science, but we’re still to see any real action.
This is because unlike the sudden dump of snow we just received, climate change is happening a lot slower. I can’t help but think that the 'boiling a frog' anecdote suits the human race particularly well right now.
The phrase ‘boiling a frog’ refers to experiments carried out in the 19th Century that did exactly what it says on the tin. It was found that if you place a frog into a pan of already boiling water it will jump out immediately - no prizes if you saw that one coming. However, it's said that if a frog is placed into a pan of cold water which is then very gradually heated, the frog will remain there until it is too late and boils to death.
The term is now used as a metaphor to describe the inability of people to react to significant changes that occur gradually. And by the looks of things, this weather could lull us all into a false sense of security. It's a bit like adding a couple of ice cubes into an already warm pot – it’s cooler right now but we’re still sitting over the heat.
But maybe if enough of us push we can knock this pot from the stove before BBC Breakfast News is dominated entirely by updates on ‘the big heat’ and interviews with people saying it’s too hot to go to school, too hot to drive and that there’s not enough water to go round.
Subscribe to HUCK for six issues
Only £20 (UK) / £43 (EU) / £58 (Rest of the World).
Boiling a frog (text) by Ruth Carruthers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (2)
Please note: Your comment may be held in moderation for approval by an administrator to prevent spamming. This usually doesn't take long, please be patient.
I once heard someone very ignorantly say how they were looking forward to Mediterranean summers in the UK thanks to global warming. Obviously, they neglected to realise that we live in a very delicate ecosystem and when we start upsetting the balance, 'a bit more rain/sun/snow' is the least of our worries.