Climate Scientists Urge Public to Stop Eating Ice Caps
NEW YORK — A group of climate scientists gathered in New York City have issued an urgent plea to the public to stop eating polar ice caps in order to avoid exacerbating the effects of global warming.
Emphasizing the ice caps’ role in regulating global temperatures, the group expressed “profound alarm” at the damage inflicted by human consumption in recent years. “The Greenland ice sheet alone has lost six trillion metric tons of ice since 2002, and more than a third of that is due to people going out and just eating chunks of the ice.”
The scientists, who were in New York for the thirty-fourth annual Conference of the League of Climatologists, Biologists, Physicists, Oceanographers, Chemists, and Other Scientists Who Are Against Polar Ice Getting Eaten (CLCBPOCOSWAAPIGE), explained that rates of ice consumption had risen dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was little else to do. While acknowledging that it was understandable that so many people were drawn to the crisp, pure, immaculate quality of the ice—“basically like the ice cubes in your freezer times a million”—they warned that if the current rate of consumption continued, the ice caps would disappear altogether within a few decades.
“Collective sacrifices are needed now so that we can preserve the possibility of sustainable ice consumption for future generations,” the group explained.
CLCBPOCOSWAAPIGE implored the public to consider less destructive uses of their time and money than traveling all the way to the Arctic or South Arctic Circles to eat ice, such as spending time with family, riding bikes, or playing minigolf. “Minigolf is actually a lot like eating polar ice, only there’s windmills and dinosaurs and things, and you don’t eat anything, and it’s not cold.”
In a post on Instagram released minutes after the scientists’ statement, the actor Dick Van Dyke wrote, “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. I’m gonna eat polar ice all day long until I die. Fuck you.”
Griffin is the deputy managing editor for this paper, and was born early in the morning.
