Even though people keep using the famous simile — “the fatally slow human response to climate change makes us like a slowly boiling frog” — it is not quite right.

As Wikipedia puts it, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz “demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but his intact frogs attempted to escape the water.” Other 19th Century studies appeared to have different results, but modern experiments (!) show that frogs with brains are in fact smart enough to leap out of water as it is heated up.

James Fallows of The Atlantic, who I am quite certain holds the world record for boiling frog posts, has one from Michael Jones who cites “Sensation in the Spinal Cord” from Nature, Dec. 4, 1873:

“Goltz observed that a frog, when placed in water the temperature of which is slowly raised towards boiling, manifests uneasiness as soon as the temperature reaches 25° C., and becomes more and more agitated as the heat increases, vainly struggling to get out, and finally at 42° C., dies in a state of rigid tetanus. The evidence of feeling being thus manifested when the frog has its brain, what is the case with a brainless frog? It is absolutely the reverse. Quietly the animal sits through all successions of temperature, never once manifesting uneasiness or pain, never once attempting to escape the impending death.”

Even so, I am inclined to agree with Jones that this should not be fatal to the metaphor.  It just needs to be tweaked.

Technically, we are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, as I’ve said before (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“).  Such are the privileges of being the only species that gets to name all the species, so we can call ourselves “wise” twice! But given how we have been destroying the planet’s livability, I think at the very least we should drop one of the “sapiens.” And, perhaps provisionally, we should put the other one in quotes, so we are Homo “sapiens” sapiens at least until we see whether we are smart enough to save ourselves from ourselves.

If we destroy a livable climate, which means “billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse” and are renamed just plain Homo, then in fact we will  have demonstrated we are dumber than frogs (who were, after all, doing just fine until we came along).

At that point, we will be brainless frogs.

Related Post:

• Glenn Beck proves he’s a brainless frog, warning (?) “Barack Obama has galvanized the country…. He’s forced us to think!”
• An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces

The worst direct impacts to humans from our unsustainable use of energy — over the next few decades — will, I think, be Dust-Bowlification and extreme weather and food insecurity:  Hell and High Water.

But all of the impacts occurring simultaneously will have an even more devastating synergy (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts“).  It means the rich countries will be far less likely to be offering much assistance to the poorer ones, since there will be ever worsening catastrophes everywhere simultaneously so we’ll be suffering at the same time.  Heck, this deep economic downturn and the record-smashing disasters of the past two years has already exacerbated media myopia and compassion fatigue to help those around the world staggered by floods and droughts.

And that suggests another deadly climate impact — far more difficult to project quantitatively because there is no paleoclimate analog — may well affect far more people both directly and indirectly: war, conflict, competition for arable and/or habitable land.

We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding decades if not centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source — if not the source — of two of our biggest recent wars.

Last November, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan “said rising temperatures and rainwater shortages are having a devastating effect on food production. Failing to address the problem will have repercussions on health, security and stability.”

The NYT reported in 2009:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

That’s a key reason 33 generals and admirals supported the comprehensive climate and clean energy jobs bill in 2010, asserting “Climate change is making the world a more dangerous place” and “threatening America’s security.”  The Pentagon itself has made the climate/security link explicit in its Quadrennial Defense Review.

Sadly, the chance that humanity will avert catastrophic climate impacts has dropped sharply in the past two years (see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2“).  And that means it is increasingly likely we face a world beyond 450 ppm atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, which in turn means we likely cross carbon cycle tipping points that threaten to quickly take us to 800 to 1000 ppm — a world of rapid warming and a ruined climate far outside the bounds of any human experience.

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by Ned L. Harvey, via Rocky Mountain Institute

Over the weekend I read a blog post by author Nicholas Carr describing what he calls the hierarchy of innovation.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about innovation, especially about how it might spread through the global energy system. I’m especially interested in how entrepreneurs and new technologies may create disruptive innovation within the system and what that’s likely to look like.

Carr’s blog is a little off that topic, but it did get me thinking about the underlying drivers of innovation. The article is essentially an attempt to explain and to some extent lament what he and others perceive as stagnation in innovation in the last century. Carr describes what he refers to as the Hierarchy of Innovation, which is loosely analogous to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. As Carr puts it:

“The focus, or emphasis, of innovation moves up through five stages, propelled by shifts in the needs we seek to fulfill. In the beginning come Technologies of Survival (think fire), then Technologies of Social Organization (think cathedral), then Technologies of Prosperity (think steam engine), then technologies of leisure (think TV), and finally Technologies of the Self (think Facebook, or Prozac).”

I’m OK with the hierarchy concept and think it’s a fine first-order mechanism to understand the underlying social values driving innovation at any given stage in civil development.

However, I think much deeper drivers are worth considering. Obviously, the one with which I’m most familiar relates to the ability of a civilization to harness energy to drive the economic wealth and ultimately wealthy lifestyles, which push them up what I’ll call Carr’s first-order innovation pyramid.

Most of the 19th and early 20th century innovations highlighted in the article relate directly to or result directly from a radical revolution in humankind’s ability to harness energy for its own benefit. Prior to the industrial revolution, energy for economic production came primarily from livestock and human labor. By the mid-19th century, Western civilization was pushing on the very capacity of those energy-producing technologies to sustain the economic growth and wealth creation demanded by its societies, setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution.

With the Industrial Revolution, humankind harnessed the power of fossil fuels and unleashed an entirely new paradigm of production and economic wealth generation. This created the energy production “headroom” that set the stage for the massive change in human capabilities in the early to mid-20th century. In fact and quite literally, without the energy technologies and production capacity we developed 100-150 years ago, we never could have escaped the bounds of Earth and started our exploration of the solar system. However, sometime mid-century as we achieved new heights of global economic prosperity, we stopped innovating on energy and moved up Carr’s innovation hierarchy to focus on leisure and self.

Presently, 125 years later, civilization is still reliant on the core energy production technologies created in the Industrial Revolution. Economies with the mastery and control of those technologies enjoy almost unlimited access to abundant and cheap energy, and it is in those societies that we see the shift in innovation so lamented by Carr in his article.

Yet the current energy paradigm, not so unlike the one based on livestock and human power, is fundamentally based on commodity fuels and highly fragmented production and distribution industries that can be owned and controlled (usually to their own benefit) by anyone with the resources and power to do to so. As such, the paradigm is defined by energy haves and have-nots; and the energy have-nots are consistently plagued by crushing poverty and disease. This disparity is growing rapidly. On a global basis, this imbalance is likely coming to a critical point, and, like the mid-19th century, the stage is formally set for another innovation in energy production, one that frees us from the burdens and challenges of fossil fuels and unleashes another unprecedented transformation in economies and ultimately the human condition.

So in the end, I’m still left pondering innovation in the energy system. I can’t help remembering the grade school axiom that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Carr’s pyramid is interesting and maybe a cynical comment on the modern developed world, but to me its not that complicated. If he and his peers want to refocus innovative energy on Technologies of Prosperity, their time may be better served by exploring the deeper issues than simply describing the problem.

Ned L. Harvey is the Chief Operating Officer of the Rocky Mountain Institute. This piece was originally published at RMI’s Outlet blog and was reprinted with permission.

by Daniel J. Weiss, Jackie Weidman and Celine Ramstein

Memorial Day weekend is an opportunity to remember and honor the countless sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform in order to protect this great nation. It also marks the traditional start of the summer driving season—when families pack their bags and pile into their cars or minivans to hit the road for destinations across the country. This weekend nearly 35 million Americans are expected to travel 50 miles or more to visit family and friends. Ninety percent of them will likely drive to their destination, filling up their tanks with expensive gasoline or diesel fuel before hitting the road.

The number of Memorial Day travelers is expected to increase by 1.2 percent—an estimated 500,000 more people—to 34.3 million travelers this year compared to 2011. But those travelers are projected to stay closer to home this weekend, with the average travel distance dropping by 19 percent. This may reflect the spike in gasoline prices earlier in the year, averaging around $4 per gallon at one point.
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