Climate Change Is Real - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 200

is true, then our atempts to reduce our contributions to climate change
will have no effect and our future is truly bleak. Such a person should also
be very interested in reflecting—at least in some fashion—on what it is
like to live in a world with a disappearing future. The thought experiment
in imagining this alternative rendition of our present dilemma ultimately
takes us right back to the central questions of this topic.
Very well , one might say, climate change is real and is caused by human
beings, but the rise in temperatures isn't that great—not enough for us to
worry about . Some observers argue that if we gather data about Earth's
temperatures more carefully, for example by filtering out the “urban heat
effect” (the drift toward higher temperatures caused by urban encroach-
ment into areas where weather data is collected), we'd find that the Earth
simply isn't warming as much as we thought. 175
At first, this sounds like an intriguing objection. What if the data
about warming is exaggerated? On this score, skeptical inquiry is justi-
fied: shouldn't we be fairly certain that we measure global tempera-
ture shifts accurately if we are to have a clue in understanding the pres-
ent biosphere?
Richard A. Muller of the University of California at Berkeley found
enough flaws in previous studies of global temperatures that he led a
research team in examining the entire question. As a result of this effort,
he published an opinion piece in July, 2012, that began, “Call me a con-
verted skeptic.” Taking up a series of objections raised by climate change
skeptics (regarding the urban heat effect, faulty data selection, and
human bias) and subjecting them all to a comprehensive statistical analy-
sis, that team ultimately found that none of these objections held true—
and that the emission of greenhouse gases has indeed forced an increase
in global temperatures of two and one half degrees Fahrenheit over the
past 250 years and of one and one half degrees over the past fifty.176 176 hat
group further found that no explanation other than human activity bet-
ter accounted for this rise in temperatures—not even a change in solar
intensity. Such a serious, apparently neutral, and thorough examination
of the question should remove most doubts on this score.
But it's also important to recognize that objecting to the reality of cli-
mate change on this basis misses the point. It looks for certainty in how
we measure climate change rather than thinking about its results . he best