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  3. Add CO2 to the atmosphere and the climate will get warmer—that much is well established. But climate change and carbon aren’t in

Add CO2 to the atmosphere and the climate will get warmer—that much is well established. But climate change and carbon aren’t in

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问题     Add CO2 to the atmosphere and the climate will get warmer—that much is well established. But climate change and carbon aren’t in a one-to-one relationship. If they were, climate modeling would be a cinch. How much the globe will warm if we put a certain amount of CO2 into the air depends on the sensitivity of the climate. How vulnerable is the polar sea ice; how rapidly might the Amazon dry up; how fast could the Greenland ice cap disintegrate? That’s why models like those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change spit out a range of predictions for future warming, rather than a single neat number.
    One of the biggest questions in climate sensitivity has been the role of low-level cloud cover. Low-altitude clouds reflect some of the sun’s radiation back into the atmosphere, cooling the earth. It’s not yet known whether global warming will dissipate clouds, which would effectively speed up the process of climate change, or increase cloud cover, which would slow it down.
    But a new study published in the July 24 issue of Science is clearing the haze. A group of researchers from the University of Miami and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography studied cloud data of the northeast Pacific Ocean—both from satellites and from the human eye—over the past 50 years and combined that with climate models. They found that low-level clouds tend to dissipate as the ocean warms—which means a warmer world could well have less cloud cover. "That would create positive feedback, a reinforcing cycle that continues to warm the climate," says Amy Clement, a climate scientist at the University of Miami and the lead author of the Science study.
    Getting data on cloud cover isn’t easy. There is reliable information from satellites, but those only go back a few decades—not long enough to provide a reliable forecast for the future.
    Clement and her colleagues combined recent satellite data with human observations—literally, from sailors scanning the sky—that go back to 1952, and found the two sets were surprisingly in sync(harmony or harmonious relationship). "It’s pretty remarkable," says Clement. "We were almost shocked by the degree of concordance. "
    The data showed that as the Pacific Ocean has warmed over the past several decades— part of the gradual process of global warming—low-level cloud cover has lessened. That might be due to the fact that as the earth’s surface warms, the atmosphere becomes more unstable and draws up water vapor from low altitudes to form deep clouds high in the sky. Those types of high-altitude clouds don’t have the same cooling effect. The Science study also found that as the oceans warmed, the trade winds—the easterly surface winds that blow near the equator—weakened, which further dissipated the low clouds. The question now is whether this process will continue in the future, as the world keeps warming.
The new study published in Science indicates that
选项 A、low-level clouds tend to warm the ocean.
B、more cloud cover means a warmer world.
C、the warming of ocean is a threat to the low-level clouds.
D、the Pacific Ocean has more low-level clouds than before.
答案C
解析 事实细节题。由题干关键词The new study published in Science定位至第三段。该段第三句指出“伴随着海洋的变暖，低层的云易于消散”，由此可知[C]与之相符，故为正确答案。第三段第三句只是提及了海洋变暖对低云层的影响，故排除[A]；由第三段第三句可知，更热的世界意味着更少的云，故排除[B]；由第三段第三句“一个更暖和的世界将会有更少的云层覆盖”可排除[D]。
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