If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, so they say, it will hop right out again. Frogs aren’t stupid. Well, okay, but they’re not that stupid.
However, if you put a frog in a pot of cool water, and gradually turn the heat up under it, the frog will not notice what’s happening. It will happily sit there until the water boils, and it dies.
Now, I have never carried out this experiment personally — I prefer my frogs’ legs fried — so I can’t vouch for the truth of it. Besides, I already knew human beings have trouble detecting slow-moving threats.
The foundation of every civilization is an adequate food supply: human beings simply cannot live at the density of population civilization implies without a reliable agriculture. But the supply of good agricultural land is limited, and the number of human beings is not.
Governments everywhere are well aware of the problem: we are now seven billion people, heading for an estimated 11 billion by the end of this century, and the food situation is already getting tight. So tight, in fact, the average price of the major food grains has doubled in the past 10 years. But everybody finds local reasons to ignore that fact.
Most governments in the developing countries know it is the tropics and the sub-tropics where the warming will hit food production first and hardest, but the short-term political imperative to raise living standards takes precedence over the longer-term imperative to curb the warming. So headlong industrialization wins the policy debate every time, and we’ll worry about the food supply later.
The developed world’s governments do nothing because until recently they believed the catastrophe would mostly hit countries in the former Third World. Recently, however, it has become clear the developed countries will also have trouble feeding themselves.
Many of them depend heavily on underground aquifers for irrigation and the water is running out. For example, the amount of irrigated land in Texas has dropped by 37 per cent since 1975. The amount in Kansas has fallen by nearly 30 per cent in the past three years.
It is also becoming clear that the impact of warming will also be much greater than anticipated in the developed countries. They are already experiencing extreme weather causing massive floods and prolonged droughts — like the heat wave that hit grain production in the US Midwest last summer, or the coldest spring in 50 years in England that has cut wheat yields by one-third.
Combine the steep fall in irrigation, the crop losses to wild weather, and the diversion of large amounts of cropland to grow “biofuels” instead of food, and it is not at all certain the developed world will be able to grow enough food for its own citizens in five or 10 years’ time. So are the leaders of these countries launching crash programs to stop the warming, cut down on water losses and end the lunacy of biofuels?
Of course not. The smarter ones just reckon that since their countries will still be rich, they will buy up whatever food is available elsewhere and feed their own people that way. It will be other people, in other countries, who go hungry.
And the slower ones? They’re just frogs.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.