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  3. In the course of a long weekend in 1991, the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo volcano injected enough sulfur dioxide into the stratos

In the course of a long weekend in 1991, the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo volcano injected enough sulfur dioxide into the stratos

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问题     In the course of a long weekend in 1991, the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo volcano injected enough sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to temporarily reduce the sunlight reaching the earth’s surface by about 10%. As a result, global temperatures dropped by an average of 0.5 degrees °C over the next 18 months. Turns out the lesson nature taught us that weekend has not been wasted; it may help us combat global warming.
    The late climate scientist Stephen Schneider used to compare the modern world’s dependence on fossil fuels to a drug addict’s need for heroin. The habit is dangerous and unhealthy, yet almost impossible to break. Certainly, that’s the lesson to be drawn from the inability of the world’s governments to reduce carbon emissions over the past 20 years. So what are we to do? The solution for addiction often involves palliatives like methadone for a heroin junkie, and so it may be for our addiction to fossil fuels. Our planetary methadone, Schneider said, may be geoengineering—or the attempt to replicate the effect Mount Pinatubo had on the climate in 1991.
    Geoengineering, the deliberate modification of the environment to suit human needs, has long been regarded as the height of hubris by many people and most environmentalists. We are a long way from fully understanding how the climate system works. Who’s to say that in our efforts to tinker with it we won’t make things worse? These are valid concerns. But it is increasingly hard to see how we are going to solve global warming without some reliance on it. Indeed, after a lengthy study(in which I participated)the U.S. Government Accountability Office just issued a report about geoengineering that makes this very point.
    Can geoengineering really do the job? The evidence is all around us. Modern global warming is itself evidence of inadvertent geoengineering, the result of all that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere for a century or so. But it was the Pinatubo eruption that provided a modern-day example of geoengineering’s potential. Scientists studying the eruption wondered if they could do the same thing deliberately. The eventual result was an ingenious technology known as stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI, which today is on the verge of providing us with a potentially powerful tool to cool the planet.
    Under a plan currently being developed by Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures, sulfur dioxide would be pumped up a 25-km-long pipe suspended by high-altitude balloons, then sprayed out into the stratosphere. Myhrvold, formerly Microsoft’s chief technology officer, says just one such pipe less than a foot in diameter could do the job for the entire northern hemisphere—at a cost of less than $1 billion. More research is needed, however, to establish the technology’s ramifications, including its effects on ozone levels.
In paragraph 3, the author discusses that______.
选项 A、none represent any kind of permanent solution to climate change
B、global warming may approach a point beyond which there would be no going back
C、geoengineering is not a long-term solution but a way to keep the earth from overheating
D、despite there are uncertainties about the geoengineering, it’s still a potential subjec
答案D
解析 属信息归纳题。作者用了第三段的大部分篇幅讨论“有人认为人类的过度自信，人类还没有完全掌握气候系统是如何运作的，谁能保证事情不会发展得更糟”。这一切都在暗示虽然我们在应用地球工程学时需更加谨慎，因为地球工程学仍有很多的不确定性，但是这个学科还是很有潜力的，尤其是在治理全球变暖问题上。故选项D为正确答案。
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