181Sociological Connections to Climate Change
these disasters were mixed. The announcement by NASA that the oceans
were getting warmer, the escalating greenhouse effect, the drastic melting
of the Siberian permafrost releasing trapped methane, and the unexpected
shrinking glaciers on the Antarctic ice sheet shocked the scientic commu-
nity, yet received no real reaction from sociologists.
Lever-Tracy’s explanation for the nonalarmist response does make sense.
She explains it as a aw in the science of sociology and attributes it to two
factors. The rst factor is the mirroring of an indifference sociologists nd
in contemporary society towards to the future. The second factor is soci-
ologists’ continuing foundational suspicion of naturali ...