Boiling Frog Phenomenon

The world is getting dangerously hot. Storms have been ferocious. Whole land masses are disappearing. Have you noticed this incredibly bad weather of late?

Not fully, scientists say. New research demonstrates a terrifying adaptability of 21st century human beings: in the face of unprecedented climate change, we are normalising the weather temperatures, and not realising how truly bad things have become.

There's a famous analogue for this phenomenon; one that's both fitting and frightening. It's called the boiling frog effect – the notion that a frog immersed in gradually heating water will fail to notice the creeping change in its circumstances, even as it's literally being boiled alive.

Contemporary scientists no longer subscribe to this now discredited observation, but as a metaphor for the way in which humans are sailing unfazed into a dire-looking future of irreversible climate change, it's perfectly apt.

"This is a true boiling-frog effect," says climate scientist Frances C. Moore from the University of California, Davis.

"People seem to be getting used to changes they'd prefer to avoid. But just because they're not talking about it doesn't mean it's not making them worse off."

Moore and her team sampled over two billion geo-located tweets between March 2014 and November 2016, measuring the sentiment in public posts about weather, and cross-referencing them with localised temperatures, and comparing them against a baseline reference of weather data from 1981 to 1990.

Basically, they were looking for how people reacted to significant changes in localised weather conditions, to determine what kinds of weather people find normal or unusual.  READ MORE