But, in all this conversation, I couldn’t help thinking of the boiling frog story. Our struggling scientists have been thrown into a perplexingly hot phenomenon, looking to find the trip wire for alarm. Measuring this, measuring that. As for the frogs, Paul Krugman would say, they’ll jump ship. Therein lies your dilemma. But your dilemma is critical to all of us. So, good luck. I think Virginia did a good job pointing out a cause for immediate alarm.

An interesting quotation from wikipedia on the subject of boiling frogs:

“In philosophy the boiling frog story has been used as a way of explaining the sorites paradox. This paradox describes a hypothetical heap of sand from which individual grains are removed one at a time, and asks if there is a specific point when it can no longer be defined as a heap.” —Wikipedia