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NEWS > SCIENCE > SCIENTISTS CONFUSED, ANGRY ABOUT SLOWING OF GLOBAL WARMING
SCIENTISTS CONFUSED, ANGRY ABOUT SLOWING OF GLOBAL WARMING
February 9 2012
Washington, D.C. – There was a time when people, including many scientists, believed that the Earth was on the verge of a complete and total environmental catastrophe in the form of global warming. Movies were made about and Nobel Prizes were awarded for people bringing awareness of the issue, which really just served to make a lot of people scared, and then something happened.
It turned out that some of the information people had been relying on to make their assessments about global warming were faulty and even faked, and while global warming was certainly happening, the cause was far less clear than it had been only a few years before, giving credence to a lot of the cynics and anti-scienceniks who triumphed, however briefly, in their embrace of ignorance because, it appeared, they were right.
Well, they weren’t completely right. Ice caps were still melting, coral reefs were still dying, and oceans were still getting hotter, as they are today, but the fear that most people felt, the idea that the world was on the edge, had evaporated and along with it much of the will to do anything about it, something which continues to be a problem today especially after new studies have found that the polar ice caps simply aren’t melting at the rate most scientists believed, making it much harder to prove their point and show those non-believers that they were right all along.
“Vast quantities of ice melting into the ocean is not exactly good news but the rate is about 30 percent less ice is melting than previously thought,” said John Wahr of the University of Colorado. “Even with an eight-year estimate, it's not clear how far into the future you can project. A lot of people want to predict into the end of the century, but I think it's too dangerous to do that … We don't have enough info to know what'll happen. There's some ebb and flow to these things.”
Wahr appeared slightly crestfallen upon reporting the news, though still spoke optimistically about the future rate of decline.
He did note that other signs of global warming such as dead reefs and unusual fish migrations were still a positive sign that global warming was indeed underway.
“We knew it was never going to be an instantaneous thing, that all of a sudden the world was going to melt like an ice cube in boiling water, but we did expect it would be going much faster than this and really, we were relying on that. It scared people into action, and showed those doubters that science was right,” said Scrape TV Science analyst Dr. Howard Poe. “The science is ultimately sound, it’s just taking way longer than anyone expected and that means that less people are going to forced into action, which means the long term might be even worse, not only the effects but the nattering from the other side.”
It’s not clear how long it will take before the seas begin to boil now, but it will likely take a few more years than previously predicted.
“That’s really the worst part of it, having to hear this chatter from all these people who don’t know anything about science, most of them not even caring one way or the other. They just don’t like being told what to do by people smarter than them and it’s frustrating to have to listen to them,” continued Poe. “I mean all we need is for things to get a little hotter, have a few polar bears die and maybe have an ice floe travel down to New York. That would really get people’s attention much more readily than dealing with all this science which people don’t really listen to anyway. It really sucks.”
No polar bears have drowned today, yet at least.
Anna Phillips, Science Correspondent
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