This sounds like something out of The Onion but it’s completely real.

Robby Soave reports at Reason.

This University of Oregon Study on Feminizing Glaciers Might Make You Root for Trump

What does gender theory have to do with climate change and the depiction of glaciers in popular culture? You can decide for yourself by reading what must be the least essential paper ever written: “Glaciers, Gender, and Science—A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental climate change.”

The recently published, utterly incomprehensible paper was co-authored by a team of historians at the University of Oregon, and funded via a grant from the National Science Foundation. I hope American taxpayers feel like they got their money’s worth. From the abstract:

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

You are probably wondering whether I am trolling you. You might be checking the date to make sure this isn’t an April Fool’s joke. Surely a satirist who set out to write a deliberate parody of left-wing papers using the jargon of the earnest social justice warrior could not have done a better job than a paper on “just and equitable human-ice interactions.”