Climate Change Is Real - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 201

response to this objection is to try out another thought experiment. Let's
say this objection is correct: what follows?
The answer is immediate and quite damning. Evidently, the rise in
temperature, however high or low, is already having surprising effects. As
I mentioned in the irst pages of this topic, the sea ice in the Arctic—and
the methane clathrates on an Arctic continental shelf—are both melting
far more quickly than scientists predicted just a few years ago, suggesting
that the effect of the warming we've already experienced is more severe
than we recently suspected. If such massive Earth systems can transform
so greatly and so soon, the rise in the planet's average temperature, what-
ever the precise numbers might be, are enough to get our atention. Is it
really wise to keep disputing how to gather temperature data for another
decade or so and let the world's ecosystems just take care of themselves?
here is very litle doubt that we have a serious problem on our hands.
Scientists have arrived at an overwhelming, nearly unanimous consensus
that we're causing climate change and that it is already causing devastat-
ing changes to Earth's living systems. The fact that our knowledge about
how it works is not yet absolute should not encourage us to ignore it for
the time being, since the very great uncertainty about whether we'll have
a future dramatically outweighs the relatively technical uncertainties in
our knowledge. The fundamentals of climate change science, in short, tell
us that this problem is real.
Notes
156. William R. L. Anderegg and others, “Expert credibility in climate change,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America ,
volume 107, number 27 ( June 21, 2010), 12107-12109, doi:10.1073/
pnas.1003187107.
157. For a widely cited early example, see Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific
Consensus on Climate Change,” Science , volume 306, number 5702
(December 3, 2004), 1686, doi:10.1126/science.1103618.
158. For a representative atempt by scientists to demonstrate their sense of
the urgency of the crisis and the need for public action, see the National
Academies' joint statement, “Climate change and the transformation of
energy technologies for a low carbon future,” May 2009, available online as a
pdf document.