On January 2, 2007, I asked: Does Al Gore make a good case?
Robin Hanson, who watched the movie, spotted this erroneous (not “biased”) segment:
If a frog jumps into a pot of boiling water, it jumps right out again, because it senses the danger. But the very same frog if it jumps into a pot of luke warm water that is slowly brought to a boil, will just sit there and it won’t move. It will just sit there even as the temperature continues to go up and up. It will stay there until.. until.. it is rescued. It is important to rescue the frog. The point is this: Our collective nervous system is like that frog’s nervous system. It takes a sudden jolt sometimes before we become aware of a danger.
And Robin Hanson linked to this debunker:
[Dr. Victor Hutchison at the University of Oklahoma]‘s answer was as follows: “The legend is entirely incorrect! The ‘critical thermal maxima’ of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.” Naturally, if the frog were not allowed to escape it would eventually begin to show signs of heat stress, muscular spasms, heat rigor, and death.
But our good doctor Hanson leaves out the rest of the debunker, which might give material to Al Gore et al.:
So where does that leave us with the metaphor for the human response to environmental degradation? Well the idea that you can induce a frog to remain in boiling water if you start it off in cold water is not true biologically. But that does not diminish the need to keep an eye out for the gradual relaxation of environmental laws and regulations. The metaphor lies in the frog’s ability to escape from the container: if there’s no way out, then the frog’s fate is a foregone conclusion.
Indeed, humans are prisoner of the Planet Earth’s biosphere, some might say. So this corresponds to the metaphor of the frog that can’t escape the container… and dies inside.
But I’m sure that cryonics-believer Robin Hanson and his friends, the Extropians and the TransHumanists, will ultimately find a way to escape our biosphere and colonize other planets… maybe by sending their frozen heads in galactic vessels (but who would thaw out these heads at the other end??).
The possibility of cryonics does not much effect what we should do about global warming. But then the fact that you could boil a trapped frog doesn’t have much to do with it either.
“But then the fact that you could boil a trapped frog doesn’t have much to do with [global warming] either.”
I’ve a neutral position on global warming, but I suppose that the environmentalists would say that humans are trapped in our “polluted” biosphere, just like the frog is trapped in the hot container.
As for my cryonics line, yes, it was an attempt at humor.
Another example would be a boiled lobster.
Even if it does realise it’s being boiled alive, it’s not going to jump out anyway.
It’ll form a committee with other like minded lobsters in the pot in order to evaluate its predicament with a view to the most logical course of action.
The committee will conclude that the best strategy is to remain in situ given that all other lobsters not in the pot must have a superior evolutionary adaptation, and that it is consequently their duty to remove their undesirable traits from the species.
You may get one or two less scrupulous lobsters who attempt to escape up the sides of the pot anyway – rarely successfully.
Thankfully, Homo Sapiens has a few more brain cells than Homaridae, and our committees may confront our predicament as a challenge to be surpassed rather than a fate to be ameliorated.
Well, I have no pretensions to knowing that much about the actual science of climatology, but I can still tell the selective distortion/ intellectual dishonesty/ unfounded assumptions/ apocalyptic fear-mongering of the climatology crowd has put them on par with any (west of Mecca) religion in my book.
Is what they are saying actually true, in the aggregate? I don’t know. But the science hasn’t convinced anybody outside of the climatology circuit that there’s an impending disaster, so they have resorted to overblown predictions of this winter going to be a hurricane apocalypse, etc. And the fact that they have to present unlikely scenarios as prophecy in order to gin up government funding indicates that, taken alone, their data do not make a convincing case.
The best conspiracy theory I’ve heard about ‘global warming’ is that it’s FUD deliberately put about by the oil industry (and other polluting industries) to deflect the flack they’re getting about environmental pollution (other than heat).
So here we all are obsessed about climate change conveniently losing sight of chemical, biological, nuclear and particulate contamination of the environment.
How did they do it?
They cunningly biased all their arguments defending against accusations of pollution as arguments defending against their role in climate change.
Everything’s squeaky clean now, it’s just that we’re all to blame for making it warmer.