The Frog in the Pot: A Story We Tell Ourselves

A metaphor about climate change and the danger of slow warming

The familiar story goes like this

If you place a frog in a pot of cool water and slowly turn up the heat — one degree at a time — the frog won’t notice the gradual change. It will stay put as the water warms, unaware of the danger, until the pot reaches a boil.

People repeat this story because it feels like a warning about us:

danger rising slowly
no single moment of crisis
no clear signal to act
and by the time we realize what’s happening, it’s too late

It’s a powerful metaphor for climate change. We keep adding carbon to the atmosphere, warming the planet fraction by fraction, year by year. The changes feel small in the moment, but they accumulate into something irreversible — melting ice sheets, rising seas, collapsing ecosystems, and destabilizing the systems that make Earth habitable.

In the story, the frog stays in the pot.
And in the story, we do too.

But here’s the part we rarely say out loud

The story isn’t true.

A real frog does not sit still as the water warms. It does not wait. It does not boil.

When the temperature rises enough to signal danger, the frog jumps out. Its survival instincts work exactly as nature designed. It reacts to the change long before the danger becomes lethal.

And this is where the metaphor becomes more revealing than the myth.

The biological truth makes the human truth harder to ignore

The frog escapes danger.
Humans do not.

The frog reacts to rising heat.
Humans continue raising it.

The frog cannot control the pot, so it leaves.
Humans can control the pot — and keep turning the knob up.

The frog’s biology protects it.
Human cognition traps us.

We rationalize.
We delay.
We normalize each new degree of danger because it arrives slowly, quietly, without a single moment that forces us to act.

We are not behaving like the frog.
We are behaving like the fictional frog — the one that doesn’t exist.

That’s the real warning.

The metaphor, corrected

If humans behaved like real frogs, we would have acted already.
Instead, we behave like the imaginary frog — the one that stays in the pot.

The danger is not that we fail to notice the warming.
The danger is that we notice it, understand it, and continue heating the only pot we have.

Earth cannot be jumped out of.
But the temperature can be turned down.