It's Not Inevitable for the Frog to Boil

Will we jump out of the pot in time?

Smoke over New York City from wildfires in Canada, June 2023. Photo by Ahmer Kalam on Unsplash.

The smoky East Coast scenes last week gave some of us here out West a little PTSD. We’ve been through it. More than once.

Wildfires have been plaguing our region for a while; it’s been nearly three years now since we experienced the Smoke-pocalypse in the Bay Area, and that was by no means the first major fire in these parts. We’re accustomed to wildfires affecting rural areas more directly than urban neighborhoods, and of course that was the case during the fires then. But cities were also blanketed in smoke and ashes, and on one particularly ominous day the sun never made an appearance:

Our neighbors’ house as seen from our window on 9 September 2020, when we had to keep our lights on all day. I wrote about solar production on that day here.

There’s nothing like being in the middle of an apocalyptic scene like this to make you face reality. This video gives a good sense of it:

While the East Coast smoke was in the news, I kept feeling somewhat surprised to see blue skies around me. Then intense relief. And I knew that my relief was temporary. It wasn’t our turn for fires and smoke right this moment, but someday it would be once again.

It’s all too easy to dismiss faraway disasters as unique to some other place and assume we’ll never have to deal with them. Hurricanes only happen in the tropics and tornadoes in the Midwest, right? Wildfires only happen in dry western states, right?

These may have been safe assumptions in the past, but they no longer hold true. A friend who moved to a village in Ecuador encouraged me to check it out as a relocation option, with the lure of it somehow being a safe place. But there is no safe place. We’re all in this together, whether we like it or not — and whether we act like it or not.

What will it take?

You’d think we’d seen enough. You’d think we’d realize we’re boiling and be ready to jump.

When Hurricane Katrina struck, I thought that would be it. Surely, that extreme event would wake people up to the gravity of climate change and we’d finally do something about it. That was in 2005 — already 18 years ago. Then Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast hard in 2012 — and I thought the same thing.

These events, along with so many others, have in fact made a dent in public opinion. More than half of Americans now believe that climate change is a serious issue and that we should prioritize renewable energy development (it’s hard for me to believe that a chunk of Americans don’t believe these things, but there we are). Even so, most Americans are still reluctant to completely phase out fossil fuels or to rate climate action as our top priority. That’s in part because they don’t always see how climate change affects them on a daily basis — unlike more obvious daily realities like the economy.

Now, with yet another disaster that’s affected people directly, will priories shift? With the East Coast having faced what they thought was reserved for people elsewhere, will things change? With the latest catastrophe affecting millions of people and directly visible in our nation’s capital, will we finally see the light and take real action?

Based on past experience, I’m reluctant to hope for a major shift. But each time one of these events happens, part of me thinks that maybe, just maybe, we’re at the point when the frog realizes it’s boiling. Maybe it’s not too late to jump out of the pot.

How long have we known about the pot?

It’s a pot we’ve been in for a long time — and unlike the frog, we’ve known about it for a while.

As early as 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius noted that human activity, in particular burning coal, was “pumping atmospheric CO2 above the natural levels that help make the Earth habitable.” But Arrhenius estimated that it would take 3000 years for our coal-burning to increase CO2 levels by about 50%.

By 1912, a Popular Mechanics article had accelerated the prediction a bit, estimating that “the effect may be considerable in a few centuries.”

From the 1912 article “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate — What Scientists Predict for the Future.”

Various media outlets around the world ran pieces referring to that prediction, so this knowledge wasn’t a closely guarded secret. Yet it wasn’t enough to get people worried about global warming, which still seemed so distant.

Even when people are worried, it’s hard to make a coordinated, concerted effort to take action. I was reminded of that a couple years ago during the Miami condo collapse. Several years before the collapse, an inspector had found a serious error in the building’s integrity. But the condo residents spent that time debating how and whether to make the millions of dollars in required repairs — so, predictably, nothing was done. The longer the residents waited to make repairs, the more expensive those repairs got. That made it even harder for them to resolve to take action.

What can we do?

Since that September 2020 day of orange skies, what’s happened to stop climate disasters from happening again and again?

Not nearly enough.

We have made some progress, to be sure. The Biden Administration, though far from perfect, has enacted a number of initiatives to promote renewable energy and energy justice. The Inflation Reduction Act is the single biggest piece of climate legislation ever in the U.S., and its impact could be huge.

But we need to do more. A shift to renewables and electrification at speed and scale is the linchpin — and we have numerous additional options, as detailed in this Table of Solutions from Project Drawdown.

While we can all take individual action to help in the collective effort that’s needed, it’s up to our government to take the lead (and to facilitate that individual action).

One thing our government can do is to declare a climate emergency. Calls to do this are being revived in light of the unprecedented conditions on the East Coast.

Declaring a climate emergency would do far more than just make a statement. As Bloomberg reports, “An emergency declaration by President Joe Biden would unlock sweeping executive powers, including blocking crude oil exports and placing other limits on fossil fuels.”

Biden already considered this action last summer and decided against it. There’s no doubt that it would be a fraught political move, and things are already tense. But things will get much more tense when we’re dealing with severe food shortages and mass climate migrations. Already, some insurance companies have stopped issuing home insurance policies in California and Florida because of climate concerns, and more actions like these will make people decidedly nervous.

It’s a tough time to get anything done. But times will get much tougher if we don’t act now.

Scientists are saying that it’s not — yet — too late to at least mitigate the worst effects of climate change and “secure a livable sustainable future for all.” So there’s that. And it turns out the frog in the boiling pot is a myth; frogs do jump out when the pot gets uncomfortably hot. I hope I’m around to see us jump out of the pot in time — perhaps a bit scalded, but at least alive.

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I was planning to follow last week’s post by writing about ways to create community. But the events on the East Coast took over my thoughts. In this newsletter, I try to be guided by possibility, rather than digging into dire warnings or dreadful circumstances. But sometimes we have to pause and take stock of the uncomfortable realities in front of us, as hard as it is to face them. I keep going back to my post about living in these times to remind myself of ways to deal with our current reality. I offer it again here as an antidote to this week’s post (it even provides some climate action tips!).