James Fallows of The Atlantic has been banging on against the boiled frog metaphor often used to describe the slow public reaction to the threat of climate change.
Why? One reason: it’s not true (here).
Personally, I’m sick and tired of the canary in a coal mine metaphor, but at least that has a basis in fact.
Here’s a new candidate. Comes out of a quote in the fine book Big Coal, by Jeff Goodell, published in late 2006. (I’m only catching up now.) From the intro:
Wally Broecker, the great climatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, has compared the earth’s climate to a dragon: when you poke it, you can never be sure how it’s going to react. As Broecker says, "We’re playing with the whole planet, dammit, just to get energy for a few hundred years."
Use as prescribed.
Kit Stolz 