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.