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  3. Overall, belief in climate change has declined in the American public from roughly 75 percent to 55 percent between 2008 and 201

Overall, belief in climate change has declined in the American public from roughly 75 percent to 55 percent between 2008 and 201

admin2014-09-05  85
问题     Overall, belief in climate change has declined in the American public from roughly 75 percent to 55 percent between 2008 and 2011, with a recent rebound to 62 percent in the fall of 2011, the Brookings Institution survey finds. One noted reason for the rebound was personal experiences with warmer fall and winter temperatures.
    Though this kind of weather disruption is what climate scientists predict, they hesitate to place too much emphasis on one or two unusual seasons as a trend that changes public opinion. If next winter is more normal, the public may get the wrong impression about the dangers of climate change. Better for science to be more convincing.
    But there’s the rub. The American public is generally illiterate when it comes to science. And when American scientists complain about public illiteracy and lethargy on the vitally important subject of climate change, they also have themselves to blame.
    Generally, those who know the most about climate—and other important scientific fields—are locked up in their university ivory towers and conference rooms, speaking a language only they can understand. And they speak mostly to each other, not to the general public, policymakers, or business people—not to those who can actually make things happen.
    This is dangerous. We live in an age when scientific issues permeate our social, economic, and political culture. People must be educated about science and the scientific process if we are to make rational and informed decisions that affect our future. But instead, the relative absence of academics and academic scholarship in the public discourse creates a vacuum into which uninformed, wrong, and downright destructive viewpoints get voiced and take hold.
    Here’s a typical example. After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh argued that " The ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone. . . " In fact, the spill created extensive damage to wide ranging marine habitats as well as the Gulf Coast’ s fishing and tourism industries. Long-term impacts are still unclear as scientists continue to monitor underwater plumes of dissolved oil that lie along the bottom.
    The fact is that today’ s scientists are indeed lost to the academy. The failure begins with training in doctoral programs and continues through professional development where the constant immersion in academic seminars and journals serves to weaken scientists’ literacy in the language of public, economic, and political discourse. Scientists limit involvement in such "outside activities" because tenure and promotion are based primarily on publication in top-tier academic journals.
    In my view, few contemporary issues warrant critical analysis by problem-focused researchers more than environmental sustainability, and particularly climate change. Universities need to train emerging and seasoned scholars in the skills of communicating science to the public and policy makers. We need to develop a new generation of scholars for whom the role of public intellectual is not an anachronism. Without such changes, the climate change debate devolves into a " logic schism" where the ideological extremes dominate the conversation and the space for solutions disappears into a rhetorical shouting match.
The example of oil spill is used to highlight______.
选项 A、the public’ s illiteracy in scientific issues
B、the media’ s guilt in misleading the public
C、the danger of the absence of scientists’ voice in public issues
D、the scientists’ slow response to public events
答案C
解析 作者在第五段中提到，科学家不积极参与公共问题的讨论，会造成危险的局面。因为我们现在置身于一个科学问题无孔不入的时代，各类社会、经济、政治问题都需要科学家提供专业的知识。如果科学家在这些问题上缺席，就会导致荒谬愚见乘虚而人，误导大众，从而造成破坏性的影响。为了讨论这个问题的严重后果，作者才举了墨西哥湾漏油事件的例子。在那次事件中，一位脱口秀主持人居然声称，“海洋能够自行消化漏油”。事实上这是完全错误的，漏油事件造成的生态危害长远而持久。在这个问题上，因为没有专家站出来发表他们的真知灼见，就导致了拥有一定话语权的愚昧者误导了大众。因此，作者举这个例子的目的是为了证明自己上文提到的科学家在公共问题上缺席的危害，正确答案应该选[C]。
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