Don't
Be the Boiling Frog
On
Independence Day, our world broke free of all
past records and reached a new all-time high
global average temperature of 62.9°F. Cities,
towns, and villages from the US South, to
Mexico, to Germany, Austria, Tunisia, China, and
India are reeling from scorching heatwaves that
have killed hundreds of people and put millions
more at risk. Urgent heat advisories from
governments have requested the elderly, the
young, the pregnant, and the sick to stay
indoors or seek out cool places to shelter
in.
“We are moving into a
catastrophic situation,” UN secretary general
António Guterres warned yesterday, following
an unofficial
analysis that the world may have just seen
its hottest seven days in a
row.
Meanwhile, here in my
hometown of Berkeley, California, we have
been donning socks and jackets and cheering when
the sun escapes the clouds for a few afternoon
hours. My sister’s family, on summer break from
Phoenix — where daily highs are hitting 113°F to
118°F each afternoon and an excessive
heat warning has been extended through most
of next week — is poorly outfitted for this
weather and dazed by the cognitive dissonance of
it all.
“Disaster is, almost by
definition, a kind of existential dissonance,”
author John Valliant writes in his excellent and
timely new book Fire
Weather. “For the individual, it is
cognitive dissonance made manifest: a disruption
to one’s personal and physical world order so
profound that you don’t know where to file it,
how to measure it, or even how to react —
because you have no precedent, because it’s
simply too big and violating to grasp.” (My
interview with Valliant will air next Friday.
Look for it on the Journal’s podcast page.)
My
mind keeps going back to the boiling frog
metaphor. The basic premise behind it — that a
frog placed in boiling water will jump out, but
when placed in cold water that is slowly
heated will not perceive the danger and be
cooked to death — is not scientifically
accurate. But University of California, Davis
climate scientist Frances C. Moore says we are
indeed experiencing “a true boiling-frog
effect." Her research
shows that that despite the discomfort and
the deaths, we are beginning to normalize
extreme weather conditions based on our
experience of the climate in recent
years.
So yes, climate chaos
is certainly “too big and violating” to wrap our
minds around, but attempt to grasp we must.
Because cool summer weather in Berkeley or no,
we are all being slowly cooked.
Maureen Nandini
Mitra
Editor, Earth Island
Journal Photo by Jay Huang
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