Don't even think about it: why our brains are wired to ignore climate change

Abstract

In Al Gore's documentary film on climate change, An Inconvient Truth, he employs a short cartoon to illustrate the different ways in which animals react to gradual vs. sudden change. In one frame of the cartoon a frog is dumped into a pot of boiling water at which instant it jumps right out. In a second frame the frog is placed into a pot of cold water which is then gradually heated to boiling to which the frog does not react. What Gore was attempting to illustrate about animal behavior is so fundamental that little time is spent in discussion. It's relevance to climate change is similarly too obvious, supposedly, to need much explanation climate change is so gradual that it does not trigger rapid response.