Climatic Change & Frog Syndrome

Frog syndrome refers to the first experiment done by Henzman where he came to the conclusion that a frog if put in a large vessel at room temperature and then the water is heated very gradually then the frog would not attempt to escape and gradually will adjust to the rise in temperature, feel drowsy and if the temperature is very high then it may eventually  die. Whereas, if the frog is put in a vessel with water temperature high enough, then it will immediately jump off.

At the basic level the frog syndrome is a cautionary warning against complacency. It has been linked to organizational changes, government policies, our apathy to climatic change, the world over rise in pollution level, the economic meltdown and career related stress.

The world is getting hot, storms have been ferocious, land masses disappearing, arctic ice is melting, air pollution is increasing, more earthquakes and tremors, more severe floods, etc. New researches in these fields also indicate the adaptability of the 21 century human beings. In the face of unprecedented climatic change we are normalizing the weather temperatures and not realizing how truly bad things have become. During lock down it was possible to see Dauladhar ranges and Himalayan ranges from as far as 200 to 250 Km away. We could hear singing and chirping of birds and the wild animals could be seen in villages and rural areas and this clearly points out as to what we have lost and accepted the present situation because it developed gradually. Unfortunately we have normalized all these things and have accepted the present conditions as the new normal.

As pointed out by Moore that” There is a risk that we will quickly normalize conditions we do not want to normalize.” It is also possible that in the future the climatic changes may produce temperatures beyond the psychological and biological threshold of humans besides other kinds of extreme weather.  Taken to this extreme does this mean that human will never realize that like the frog that we are in the boiling pot of water and eventually become extinct? But maybe this will be generalizing the things too far and as the Club of Rome in 1972 with 100 members in their famous report “The limits to growth” pointed out that the technological advances may be able to offset not only this limit to growth but also these extreme climatic changes provided we realize the gravity of situation before it becomes too late.