Confronted by new evidence of global warming, will people react like frogs?

According to an often-told story, a frog will try to jump out if you drop it into hot water but the hapless creature will stay, and eventually die, if you put it in a pan of cool water and slowly bring it to the boil.

A United Nations report to be released in Paris on February 2 will include the strongest warning yet that humans are stoking global warming that may cause colossal damage to nature if, like the doomed frog, they ignore rising temperatures.

Ex-US Vice President Al Gore tells the story with croaking cartoon frogs in his movie An Inconvenient Truth. In his version, a hand dips in and rescues a swooning frog just as the water starts to bubble.

"It's important to rescue the frog," he says. And UN officials also sometimes mention the boiled frog as a cautionary tale of the dangers of complacency over global warming.

Next month's UN report, by 2,500 scientists, will say there is at least a 90 percent chance that human activities led by burning fossil fuels are the main cause of global warming.

The warming may cause ever more floods, heatwaves, droughts and rising sea levels by 2100 it says.

Strengthening the conclusions of a 2001 report that blamed humans for warming, it will guide governments seeking to extend the Kyoto Protocol for fighting warming beyond 2012.

But will the world's governments hop?

Scientists' warnings about the risks of carbon dioxide have often gone unheeded.

Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, a Nobel chemistry laureate, first pointed to a likely link between warming and industrial carbon dioxide emissions a century ago, but little has been done in the intervening years.

"This is a problem we have been aware of for a very long time and action on it is way overdue," said Naomi Oreskes, a history and science professor who specialises in climate change at the University of California in San Diego.

Agencies

(China Daily 01/25/2007 page9)