renegade7 said:
The first thing I've noticed is that it's not quite as insane as OP's news article makes it look. In fact, it's actually a reasonably well-written article, at least from what I've covered so far, and I would encourage everyone else here to also read it.
You think this is well written? I'd argue that this is a prime example of a poorly written academic paper and I intent to put up a large wall of text to gripe about that. (not directed just at you in particular)
Just the first couple of paragraphs annoyed me to no end. There is hardly a sentence which isn't entirely obtuse. Many are incoherent when taken literally and vague when taken metaphorically. Some parts are just plain dishonest and some parts contradict themselves at least in the smaller details. There are comparitives which compare a single thing and nouns and adjectives get combined in ways that are an affront to grammar and common sense. This is a problem that I've encountered in more academic papers, especially from certain philosophical backgrounds. There is a mess of small writing errors each of which individually would have been wholly forgivable but which combined make nonsense of the text. As for some examples of this, I'll go through the first couple of paragraphs to show what I mean:
Glaciers are icons of global climate change, with common representations stripping them of social and cultural contexts to portray ice as simplified climate change yardsticks and thermometers. In geophysicist Henry Pollack's articulation, 'Ice asks no questions, presents no arguments, reads no newspapers, listens to no debates. It is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it crosses the threshold from solid to liquid. It just melts' (Pollack, 2009: 114). This perspective appears consistently in public discourse, from media to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
While this isn't the worst thing ever, they could have waited until at least after introducing a position, before calling it simplified and accusing people of stripping glaciers from social and cultural contexts. Poisoning the well in your first sentence isn't a cardinal sin, but it isn't ideal either. Secondly, they weirdly excluded the first sentence of the paragraph they quoted which said 'Nature's best thermometer, perhaps its most sensitive and unambiguous indicator of climate change is ice.' Now obviously choosing which parts to quote and which parts not to can be a though call, but excluding that sentence is a problem for two reason. For one, that sentence I just quoted frames that quote in quite a different way than the article does (more on that, later), and secondly, they already halfheartedly mention the omitted sentence in their first sentence. I could have forgiven everything so far, but then it goes wrong.
But the 'ice is just ice' conceptualization contrasts sharply with conclusions by researchers such as Cruikshank (2005), who asks if glaciers listen,
Ok, my first major grievance: who actually said 'ice is just ice'? Why are there quotation marks there? It is unclear whether this is something they quoted somewhere, possibly in Pollack or whether this is the name they adopted for a certain position they believe others hold. If it is the latter, it is unclear what the position they have given this label to, actually entails.
A second problem here is a weird, though forgivable contradiction: a question is not a conclusion. Now the tactic of phrasing your opinions as loaded questions is popular, sadly also amongst certain academics, but I want to point this out, as at the very least this is a grammatical error and one that betrays a certain lack of care for honesty.
A third problem is that 'asks if glaciers listen' tells me absolutely nothing at all about what Cruikshank actually said. Taken literally the question is silly but I haven't the faintest clue what it could metaphorically mean. It might mean various things. If they can't properly introduce a topic, they should just postpone mention of it until they can explain what they are on about.
Orlove et al. (2008b), who analyze the cultural framing of glaciers, Carey (2007), who sees an endangered species narrative applied to glaciers, Jackson (2015), who exposes how glaciers are depicted as ruins, and S?rlin (2015), who refers to the present as a cryo-historical moment because ?ice has become historical, i.e. that ice is an element of change and thus something that can be considered as part of society and of societal concern? (S?rlin, 2015: 327).
I have no issue with Orlove, Carey and Jackson but the description given of S?rlins views are just silly. Being an element of chance and being of societal concern have very little relation to one another. The force gravity exerts is constant but of great concern to society and there are plenty of things changing right now, (take some far away star turning into a supernova a billion lightyears away) which are of little to no societal concern at all. I can think of no interpretation of this last part which doesn't say that changing makes something of societal concern which is just bizarre.
N?sser and Baghel (2014) also reject the 'ice is just ice' assertion. Glaciers, they argue, 'have increasingly become contested and controversial objects of knowledge, susceptible to cultural framings as both dangerous and endangered landscapes' (N?sser and Baghel, 2014: 138).
Who made that assertion? What does that assertion even entail? Why is, what was a moment ago a conceptualization, now an assertion? Those words don't seem interchangable to me. Note also how 'a contested and controversial object of knowledge' might mean that a glacier is both an object of knowledge and contested, or that the knowledge claims about them are contested. The second of those interpretations makes more sense in context but in that case, what exactly are we being told. Do N?sser and Baghel disagree that glaciers are melting? There is no reason, even in a short introductory paragraph to be this unspecific and vague.
Glaciers, after all, affect people worldwide by influencing sea level, providing water for drinking and agriculture, generating hydroelectric energy from glacier runoff, triggering natural disasters, yielding rich climate data from ice cores, shaping religious beliefs and cultural values, constituting identities, inspiring art and literature, and driving tourist economies that affect local populations and travelers alike (e.g. Carey, 2010; Cruikshank, 2005; Gosnell, 2005; Hewitt, 2014c; Orlove et al., 2008a).
I want to point out that the closest thing we have of an explanation of the 'ice is just ice' assertion/conceptualization was a quote from a person called Pollack. I looked up his book which was the source of the quote on google books. It is called 'A world without ice' and it is about climate change. The entirety of the book is about the ice we have in this world, how it affects us and how we affect it. Both the foreword by Al Gore and the preface by Pollack make it clear that they are well aware of the relatio between ice and society and how issues to do with that relation motivated writing the book in the first place. I cannot see how these arguments can be a relevant counter to Pollacks point of view. So lets get back to that quote of his. When he said that ice asks no questions, etc, did he mean that the relation between ice and human society is non-existant or uninteresting. That seems extremely doubtful as the entire book he wrote explicitly contradicts that opinion by its explicit premise. So what else might he have meant? Well, the omitted sentence gives us a clue: the melting of ice proves the heating of our climate beyond any reasonable doubt and this fact should take epistemic presedent over any sophistry that oil-industry representatives, politicians or pseudoscientists might have to offer. Is this perhaps denigrating to certain points of view? Yes, and rightly so. Climate change denialism isn't reasonable and the existance of climate change isn't the subject of reasonable debate. I honestly don't get why the paper went after that quote from Pollack in the way it did. It grossly misrepresents him for seemingly no other reason then to have a strawman to tell that glaciers and ice have relevance to society and can be looked at in multiple ways. Something they weren't able to demonstrate to be denied by anyone.
Despite their perceived remoteness, glaciers are central sites - often contested and multifaceted - experiencing the effects of global change, where science, policy, knowledge, and society interact in dynamic social-ecological systems.
This sentence takes the cake for obtuse nonsense. Not because it is wrong. On a very friendly interpretation what it says is entirely trivial. But the sentence is still entirely unspecific and vague and a complete stylistic disaster to boot.
For one, on the surface of an almost spherical earth things aren't just central without qualifacation. Taken literally or metaphorically anything that is central is central
to something. Mentioning that glaciers are contested and multifaceted serves no other purpose than to sound more wishy washy. Glaciers don't experience effects, because they don't experience. Science, policy, knowledge and society interacting happens everywhere where policy is anyway, since policy is ussually based on knowledge obtained through science and policy by its very nature is designed to interact with society. Lastly 'dynamic social-ecological systems'? Why does the article make pretenses at having mathematical models when it doesn't have anything of the sort? There is a certain reputation that certain brands of philosophy and social sciences have for using words from the STEM fields for no other reason than that they sound kinda cool and scientific. This kind of weird namedropping is a reason for that. I think what this sentence was meant to convey was something like 'Glaciers are important to society and policymaking and should be researched with that in mind'. In fact, the entirety of the first two paragraphs of the paper could have been replaced with that lone sentence and I think the article would have been better for it.
Today, there is a need for a much more profound analysis of societies living in and engaging with mountains and cold regions (Halvorson, 2002; Byers and Sainju, 1994; Bloom et al., 2008),
More profound than what? We can't be sure because these authors use comparitives to compare a thing that doesn't exist yet to nothing at all. I'll also point out that the word 'profound' is ussually used to express admiration for things that we wouldn't expect. If we
need produndity, we have a problem.
including the social, economic, political, cultural, epistemological, and religious aspects of glaciers (see e.g. Allison, 2015; Gagn? et al., 2014).
None of these are aspects of the glaciers themselves. These are aspects of the cultural reception of glaciers.
To summarise my endless complaining: there is a mess of small writing errors, everything could have been made more specific, less pretentious and shorter and the authors grossly strawman Pollack in order to argue a point that nobody disagrees with. I did not bother to read much beyond that.
