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Why You Can’t Ignore the Changing Climate — by Eugene Linden

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问题             Why You Can’t Ignore the Changing Climate
                                                       — by Eugene Linden
                                            PARADE Magazine (June 25, 2006)
    As we learned last year in New Orleans, weather can be a weapon of mass destruction. With the 2006 hurricane season now upon us, scientists say the climate is changing in ways that could produce many more superhurricanes, as well as extreme floods, droughts and heat waves that could threaten our way of life.
    Still, it’s easy to ignore the signs of global warming because we’ve always had crazy weather. Unfortunately, many of the predicted changes have begun, and they already affect our health and pocketbooks. Here’s what we know:
        Look Outside: The Weather Already Is Changing
    Every year since 1997 has been in the Top 10 list of hottest years, and 2005 set a record. The Earth has warmed about 1.4°F since the late 19th century, and the warming has accelerated during the past four decades.
    That increase sounds small, but it has been sufficient to make weather records fall by the thousands. Studies by Kerry Emmanuel at MIT and others have documented that hurricanes are getting more intense. Extreme storms like the one that flooded New England with more than 10 inches of rain in May are becoming more frequent too. Birds are migrating earlier. Trees are blooming, and flowers and crops are popping up unseasonably early across the country.
    The warming has produced clear winners: pests. Mosquitoes love the warmer weather and are celebrating by bringing infectious diseases to new places. A recent Duke University study found that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has led to out-of-control growth of poison ivy (常春藤), as well as increased levels of allergy-producing pollen (引起过敏的花粉). Beetle populations have exploded in evergreen trees. Why should we care about beetles? It was beetles that killed the trees in Southern California, which provided the dry fuel for the wildfires that destroyed hundreds of homes in 2003.
    Higher temperatures also are causing glaciers (冰川) to melt fast. Mount Kilimanjaro (乞力马扎罗山— 非洲的最高山峰), for instance, has been topped with ice for at least 11,700 years. Within the next 15 years, however, its summit might be ice-free, according to Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University. The fastest warming is taking place in the far north, where glaciers are receding. You may think this isn’t relevant to those of us farther south, but snow and ice play a big role in balancing Earth’s climate by reflecting sunlight back into space. Melting snow and ice could push climates everywhere past a tipping point: As the Earth warms, melting snow and ice expose dark surfaces such as land and oceans, and the switch from heatreflecting to heat-absorbing surfaces could turbo-charge further warming.
                We’re Making It Worse
    "I’m changing the climate! Ask me how" reads a bumper sticker that activists have been plastering on SUVs. Their point is that gas-guzzlers (耗油量大的车) contribute to climate change. In a more sober way, the great majority of scientists are saying the same thing: Burning gas or oil in engines and furnaces has pushed carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere far above where they’ve been for hundreds of thousands of years, and the debate has ended over whether these emissions are making the planet hotter. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of more than 1,500 scientists from 60 countries, asserts that some portion of the recent warming is the result of human activities.
    Last year, the world’s leading scientific journal, Science, looked back at all the scientifically credible articles published between 1993 and 2003 that dealt with modern climate change. Not one took issue with the consensus that humans are contributing to the changes we are seeing.
             A Darkening Financial Forecast
    Changing weather already costs you money. Of course, many Americans have felt the impact of hurricanes and floods, but even those not directly affected by extreme weather are paying a steep price:
    On May 13, the front page of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune trumpeted the news that State Farm Insurance, Florida’s largest property insurer, was seeking to raise rates by more than 70% for houses and 95% for mobile homes. That would jump average insurance costs from about ＄1,733 to ＄ 3,101. But even if you live on Cape Cod — more than 1,000 miles from the Gulf Coast— insurers are raising rates and pulling out of some markets as they try to adjust to a new world in which the past behavior of hurricanes is no longer a reliable guide to the future.
    Southern California — where water availability is largely determined by snowfall in faraway mountains —already must scramble for water. Scarcities will become a severe problem if the snow pack continues to shrink and melt earlier because of warming temperatures, leaving residents extremely thirsty during the summer months. An extended water crisis will likely hurt house prices, setting off a chain reaction of job losses, foreclosures (回赎权取消) and bank failures.
    Drought in the West already affects hydro-electric power production. Power shortages could reach the Pacific Northwest if the region’s river flows dropped below the levels needed to cool even coal- and gas-fired power plants. For America’s workers, climate change will feel like an enormous tax, stripping savings and imposing costs ranging from disrupted jobs to a rash of health threats.
          Climate Has Destroyed Past Civilizations
    From the Fertile Crescent to the Yucatan Peninsula (尤卡坦半岛美洲北部), past civilizations made the fatal mistake of assuming that good weather would continue. An abrupt shift to drought in Mesopotamia (美索不达米亚地区) 4,200 years ago probably spelled the doom of the Akkadian (古比伦阿卡得人的) culture, which united city-states into the first known empire.      Others see the fingerprints of climate in the collapse of the Mayans (马雅人) around 900 AD., the disappearance of the Anasazi from the American Southwest a few centuries later and the end of Norse expansion into the New World in the 14th century. A recurrent pattern of history has been for civilizations to take root and flourish while the weather is good, only to fall when the weather suddenly changes.
    But don’t our technology and markets make us different? Absolutely, but 6 billion people still rely on crops grown in fertile areas like the American Midwest —areas vulnerable to drought in a warming world.
    Past civilizations had no way to know that climates could change. We do. But if we are to prevent disaster from happening, we have to act on our knowledge, and we haven’t done that yet.
As the result of insurance rates rising nationwide, Americans as a whole are suffering financially, no matter whether they are directly affected by destructive weather or not.
选项 A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案A
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