A frog story
I'm sure this will hit the wingnut machine soon, so I guess I'll bring it up first.
In Al Gore's new movie "An inconvenient truth," Gore shows a cartoon version of the anecdote about putting a frog into a pan of water. In the anecdote, if you pop the frog into a pan of boiling water, it will jump right out. However, if you put the frog in a pan of cold water and warm the water slowly to the boiling point, it will just sit there until it ...
Josh Marshall mentioned this old saw in his blog and immediately had a number of comments saying the story is false. The frog will hop out of the water as it gets hot, if he can.
Unfortunately, I suspect the wingnuts will use the fact that Gore relied on a false wive's tale in his movie to insist that the more important claims of global warming were equally false.
Let's just get it straight at the beginning. Gore's use of the frog anecdote was simply meant to be a humorous analogy to all of us sitting there on the earth as the water warms to the boiling point. It had no other purpose, and was not offered as an important fact bearing on the subject of the movie. It does not logically follow that Gore's failure to check out the validity of his humorous anecdote means he got the principal facts of global warming wrong in the movie. He didn't!
Just today, there was a new finding reported in the New York Times that the sea temperatures in the arctic 55 million years ago were 74 degrees farenheit, far warmer than previously thought, indicating that the impact of greenhouse gases on the climate may be far stronger than previously thought.
Gore is right. Global warming is a deadly serious fact that we have to deal with quickly before the earth becomes uninhabitable.
In Al Gore's new movie "An inconvenient truth," Gore shows a cartoon version of the anecdote about putting a frog into a pan of water. In the anecdote, if you pop the frog into a pan of boiling water, it will jump right out. However, if you put the frog in a pan of cold water and warm the water slowly to the boiling point, it will just sit there until it ...
Josh Marshall mentioned this old saw in his blog and immediately had a number of comments saying the story is false. The frog will hop out of the water as it gets hot, if he can.
Unfortunately, I suspect the wingnuts will use the fact that Gore relied on a false wive's tale in his movie to insist that the more important claims of global warming were equally false.
Let's just get it straight at the beginning. Gore's use of the frog anecdote was simply meant to be a humorous analogy to all of us sitting there on the earth as the water warms to the boiling point. It had no other purpose, and was not offered as an important fact bearing on the subject of the movie. It does not logically follow that Gore's failure to check out the validity of his humorous anecdote means he got the principal facts of global warming wrong in the movie. He didn't!
Just today, there was a new finding reported in the New York Times that the sea temperatures in the arctic 55 million years ago were 74 degrees farenheit, far warmer than previously thought, indicating that the impact of greenhouse gases on the climate may be far stronger than previously thought.
Gore is right. Global warming is a deadly serious fact that we have to deal with quickly before the earth becomes uninhabitable.
posted by walldon | 3:24 PM
1 Comments:
So, let me get this straight: the frogs are smarter than us? Or just smarter than The Regime and its pet pseudo-scientists?
Or is it just that frogs can jump out of the overheated water, whereas we can't jump out of an overheated globe?
So, WallDon, when the ocean rises and your place becomes waterfront property, you can have us out for a visit. If it keeps rising and your place becomes a marsh, you can come visit us, although we are not all that far above current sea level ourselves (and still less above the level of Lake Michigan).
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