James Fallows Declares Victory in Metaphorical Frog War
As you probably know, if you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly raise the temperature, the frog won’t notice the water is getting hotter. Soon enough, the pot’s boiling and the frog’s cooked! It’s a great metaphor for all kinds of situations. But biologically, it’s false, and James Fallows has been on the warpath ever since he started blogging to try to get people to knock it off. And in today’s column, Paul Krugman writes:
I’m referring, of course, to the proverbial frog that, placed in a pot of cold water that is gradually heated, never realizes the danger it’s in and is boiled alive. Real frogs will, in fact, jump out of the pot — but never mind. The hypothetical boiled frog is a useful metaphor for a very real problem: the difficulty of responding to disasters that creep up on you a bit at a time.
Fallows proclaims himself satisfied “I had not previously thought of Paul Krugman as a peacemaker or placater, as opposed to a provocateur, but he may now have shown a new field of achievement.”
Krugman’s column, which is good, is about economic policy and stimulus. But of the current policy debates, the one that most resembles the proverbial frog is of course climate change. By the time average global temperatures are 7-8 degrees higher than they are today and people start getting really bothered by the consequences, atmospheric CO2 levels will be so high that even if we suddenly cut emissions levels to zero we’d be in store for additional warming. And of course it won’t be possible to suddenly cut emissions levels to zero, we’ll be looking at the same difficulty of implementing cuts but from a much higher future level. And yet on any given day, it’s more convenient for the political system to respond by doing nothing.
27 Responses to “James Fallows Declares Victory in Metaphorical Frog War”
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July 13th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Krugman writes better than Matt, so there’s no real need to sum up each of his columns here. But the link to Fallows was interesting; that’s one journalist with eclectic interests.
July 13th, 2009 at 9:44 am
“Krugman’s column, which is good, is about economic policy and stimulus. But of the current policy debates, the one that most resembles the proverbial frog is of course climate change”
Ooops.
July 13th, 2009 at 9:53 am
That is a FAT frog.
I hope it is not a mutant.
July 13th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Krugman:
July 13th, 2009 at 10:02 am
@Why oh why – Do you disagree with Matt’s politics? Do you dislike the subjects he choses to cover? What exactly is the point of insulting him? Matt refers to Krugman’s columns, and Krugman returns the favor. It is as simple as that. I just don’t get your need to be snarky about it.
July 13th, 2009 at 10:15 am
R. Howe, Matt has interesting links and writes a lot, so that’s nice. But he doesn’t have any real expertise yet offers his opinion on everything, and it is becoming a problem for me; that’s the road to DC hackery.
But the real problem here is that he didn’t read the column…
July 13th, 2009 at 10:26 am
You write:
However, CO2 persists for approximately 150-200 years. That means that all the CO2 that has been emitted since the beginning of the industrial revolution is going to keep warming for many years to come. Most of the warming we expect to see by 2050 will come from what we already emitted. That is why there is such necessity to reduce our emissions immediately in order to keep warming minimized.
Indeed, the frog metaphor is apt.
July 13th, 2009 at 10:30 am
So are we the only species that will stay in a dangerous situation until we’re cooked?
July 13th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Trust me, people are going to notice long before a 7-8 degree increase. The piles of dead bodies will be a big tipoff.
July 13th, 2009 at 10:45 am
@Why oh why – Do you disagree with Matt’s politics? Do you dislike the subjects he choses to cover? What exactly is the point of insulting him? Matt refers to Krugman’s columns, and Krugman returns the favor. It is as simple as that. I just don’t get your need to be snarky about it.
One of the joys of the Internet that no one really anticipated is that it frees everyone to be publicly obnoxious.
Back in school or hanging out in the neighborhood, there were immediate deterrents to being a bully–someone might pop you one, or at least you could be confronted by the target and might have to back down in front of the class or the crowd. On the job or at home, of course, you have to be with people for hours at a time. There are consequences to be a jerk. You develop a bad social smell, at the least, and the management, who have enough problems without tolerating a troublemaker, might lean on you to behave yourself.
On the Internet, there’s a social distance between you and everyone you converse with. You can be a complete a**h*** and enjoy the pleasures thereof without penalty. No social conquences to speak of, other than the occasional scolding by someone whose opinion you could care less about.
No more explanation than this is needed.
July 13th, 2009 at 10:46 am
The frog looks cold to me, like he is all tucked up to prevent himself from shivering.
In fact, if you put some spectacles on him I think he could be George Will, in appearance and outlook.
July 13th, 2009 at 10:55 am
In fact, if you put some spectacles on him I think he could be George Will, in appearance and outlook.
If you give him a bow tie, he could replace Will on Sunday morning TV and nobody would notice.
July 13th, 2009 at 10:59 am
If you give him a bow tie, he could replace Will on Sunday morning TV and nobody would notice.
My guess is that the frog would be smart enough to avoid picking fights on macroeconomics with a Nobel Prize-winning economist.
July 13th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Midland, nice rant, but I fail to see how it relates to pointing out that Matt didn’t read the column. What’s the non-obnoxious, non-bully way to say it?
July 13th, 2009 at 11:48 am
However, CO2 persists for approximately 150-200 years.
Unfortunately, this appears to be optimistic. Because the uptake of CO2 is governed by several processes, the atmospheric lifetime of CO2 is complex, but a fair fraction of the CO2 we generate from fossil fuels will be around, for all practical purposes, forever.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Trust me, people are going to notice long before a 7-8 degree increase. The piles of dead bodies will be a big tipoff.
Floods do have a way of killing masses of people. Which one can then throw in the face of the Pseudochristians, by recalling that God explicitly forbade Himself the re-flooding of the planet, meaning that all them good ole boys driving F-150s to church on Sunday are responsible, and so probably going to face a certain amount of heated divine retribution.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
@16 Greg: “God explicitly forbade Himself the re-flooding of the planet”
I never understood why He did that -voluntarily giving up one of his most effective tools.
It would be like the Cleveland Cavaliers forbidding themselves from ever again using Lebron James.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Apparently, people can be killed by high temperatures without realizing it.
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/naked-science/3569/Overview
The combination of 115F temperatures and 100% humidity can cause so much interior organ cell damage that you won’t know you’ve been mortally injured until its too late to do anything about it. Even if you walk out of the hot zone you eventually drop dead. Of course, a frog is more likely than a human to be able to tell when it’s taking more heat than it can endure.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
My guess is that the frog would be smart enough to avoid picking fights on macroeconomics with a Nobel Prize-winning economist.
Perhaps you’ve heard of this other winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html
Horray for name dropping, we don’t actually have to have a purpose or understanding of what we say.
July 13th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
7 to 8 degrees? It will be too late well before that.
July 13th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Krugman rocks. I met him and would have loved to fuck him but alas he was with his wife.
July 13th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Matt,
Krugman’s column addresses climate change also–did you not read it all the way through? A correction is in order.
July 13th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
It’s easy for the frog in the pan to get a supermajority of his one vote to get out of the pan.
July 13th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
7-8 degrees Fahrenheit, international readers.
July 13th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Actually the frog story doesn’t even apply correctly as told. THe problem with global warming isn’t that it is gradual its that there is a lot of latency. As you said it takes a long time for our policies to have an effect, but there will be gradual changes that we can react to and measure which will make it harder to do nothing. If you had a problem with a lot of latency whose effects were sudden and obvious like nuclear weapons that would be much worse than global warming. IF we do nothing on on-proliferation for another decade nobody will notice but then 20 or 30 years from now someone will use them. In other words the scientifically acurate frog story is more applicable in most situations than the phony one.
July 13th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Midland, nice rant, but I fail to see how it relates to pointing out that Matt didn’t read the column. What’s the non-obnoxious, non-bully way to say it?
I was responding primarily to R. Howe’s comment, so I was not making the claim that yours are the rudest of the personal insults that turn up on this blog everyday. You do manage to lead with patronizing comments towards Matt in two of your first three postings.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
You wrote: “By the time average global temperatures are 7-8 degrees higher than they are today and people start getting really bothered by the consequences…”
Um, at 7-8 degrees, people won’t be “bothered by the consequences,” they’ll be dying by the hundreds of millions, with entire continents at war or starvation or worse.
Unless you’re talking Fahrenheit and then it may only be tens of millions and regional wars.