The cynic in me has wondered the past couple days whether all this new climate change coverage is a full-court press by Democrats in anticipation of the next election. Seems to have become a hot topic in the news just within the past few weeks.
See the article. Headline is for the extreme scenario, total clickbait.
There is a massive problem in tying a real issue we don’t understand fully into being synonymous with a specific solution (tax policy) supported by a single political ideology.
It’s a wedge issue being used as bulletproof points to get elected. The politicians who are flying private everywhere and supporting policies like preventing nuclear are not actually interested in solutions, just power.
Climate change is constantly in the headlines because it’s constantly causing various newsworthy conditions and being actively studied. Some stories bubble up to the mainstream audience and some don’t, but that’s not much different with shootings or any other regularly occurring news event in the US. Attention on climate change has always ebbed and flowed.
Scientists have been ringing the alarm since the 1970s. In the US and Canada, conservatives have gone to great lengths to censor this science and and the center-left has collaborated in the advancement of oil in spite of the increasingly overwhelming evidence that we're causing significant climate change. This study is just some climate scientists doing their jobs, and the publication date was Monday. Such things happen on a very regular basis.
A new generation of progressive candidates are advancing concrete plans to tackle climate change, and candidates talking about their policy proposals should be expected ahead of an election.
Is there a recent swell of coverage? Yes, that's normal. Is this article part of a "full court press?" Sounds to me like correlation but not causation. In fact, I'd say that the Democrats who care, care because they're familiar with the science: the causative relationship is quite the opposite of your cynicism.
I will admit I didn't read the article, which now that I look, it's from a scientific journal. So you're right, this article doesn't apply to my statement.
As others have pointed out, the headline is trash. My takeaway is that the melting ice sheets introduce greater uncertainty to climate models. Loss of uncertainty means that our ability to reason about the climate is diminished.
In sports terms: imagine that the star players on two teams are all suddenly taken out. Suddenly it's a rookie game, and there's barely any stats to go by. Do you bet more aggressively, or more conservatively?
In this case, the "conservative" bet is to pump the brakes on the most significant anthropogenic source of climate change: greenhouse gasses such as carbon emissions. The "aggressive" bet is to continue subsidizing the profiteering oil/gas/coal industries.
Case in point, some of the most little-c conservative institutions are treating climate change as real: insurance companies, and the US military. Insurance companies because they can't survive catastrophic losses, and the military because climate change will cause global instability. Their reasoning is a result of pragmatism, not politics.
A better analogy is that one of your star players (ice sheet stability) maybe isn't as good as you thought he was (turns out snow accumulation > surface melting is not the whole picture) and has some major potential weaknesses (marine ice sheet instability and marine ice cliff instability) which you probably really need to investigate or you might be losing in the big game. Also, call your bookie and adjust your bets appropriately.
