The peer-reviewed findings represent the most comprehensive longitudinal dataset ever collected on the structural density of legislative apathy.
The findings, published posthumously in Nature, detail a rigorous 45-year methodology in which the late environmental lobbyist repeatedly presented the 1979 Charney Report and subsequent climate models to fossil fuel executives and senators, carefully measuring their complete failure to act. The retrospective analysis provides a flawlessly executed dataset on the exact rate at which a governing body can march toward its own thermal collapse.
Researchers noted that Pomerance's experimental design, which involved standing in front of lawmakers and explaining the greenhouse effect with escalating urgency, yielded incredibly stable results across four decades. From his initial 1979 baseline measurements of the Carter administration up through the present day, Pomerance demonstrated with incredible precision that presenting lawmakers with apocalyptic atmospheric data produces absolutely no variation in policy.
The sheer volume of pure, unadulterated negligence he managed to catalog over four decades is simply breathtaking. To sustain that level of non-response across multiple generations of policymakers requires an almost unfathomable structural density.
However, other researchers cautioned against drawing overly broad conclusions from the Pomerance dataset. Writing in Science, a competing team noted that while the methodology of begging the Senate to care about the biosphere was robust, the study lacked a proper control group of lawmakers who were not actively funded by ExxonMobil.
While the findings on total legislative paralysis are highly significant, further replication is needed before definitive conclusions can be drawn, the critique stated. The authors suggested that before science can definitively prove humanity is biologically predisposed to willingly incinerate itself, researchers must run the same experiment in an environment where the subjects' reelection campaigns are not underwritten by Chevron.