一本教會你“做對”題的6級閱讀書 day18 passage1
Passage 1 Geological History of New York City
氣候變化模型 《今日美國》
[00:01]USA Today article questions climate models
[00:06]Geological history of New York City
[00:09]Someday, school children will learn about the bustling metropolis
[00:14]once called New York City, crossroads to the world.
[00:19]But they won't be able to go there because it will be uninhabitable,
[00:24]as the New York City area has been on and off for much of its history.
[00:29]Just 12,000 years ago, it was bitterly cold and covered by an ice glacier
[00:35]that was miles high, habitable to only the hardiest microbes capable of
[00:41]surviving unfavorable conditions.
[00:44]At other times in its geological history, it was at the top of a mountain.
[00:49]Tens of millions of years ago, it was at the bottom of a tropical sea
[00:54]that covered most of the earth. If geological history is any indicator
[01:00]and the human race survives that long, it is very likely that portions of
[01:05]the United States will be uninhabitable 10,000 years from now,
[01:10]no matter what legislation people pass and how people bahave.
[01:16]Intellectual debate versus media suppression
[01:20]An intellectual debate still spreads forcefully among scientists
[01:25]in the pages of the world's most credible scientific journals
[01:29]over the full story of what caused the dramatic temperature changes
[01:35]in the earth's past. The battle is a scientific, not political, one.
[01:41]There are wildly divergent ideas and theories about
[01:44]what makes the planet warm and cool in the course of evolution.
[01:50]Most Americans have had no exposure to these ideas
[01:55]because the media suppresses news of studies
[01:58]that don't strictly conform to its global warming orthodoxy.
[02:03]The self-regulating and self-supervising
[02:06]are intense within the media on the issue of global warming.
[02:11]It seems that there exist the underlying rules in the media
[02:17]which the personnel have to abide by. Two years ago,
[02:21]a reporter was singled out for ridicule in the Columbia Journalism Review
[02:27]for daring to present two sides in a piece on global warming.
[02:32]USA Today article questioning climate models
[02:36]So it is quite something when a newspaper like USA Today actually admits
[02:42]that reputable scientists have published a credible study in the journal
[02:47]Nature Geoscience questioning whether the world's climate models,
[02:52]the ones used to predict global warming, are wrong.
[02:57]USA Today didn't go so far as to actually publish this article
[03:02]in its print edition, as it did with other Nature Geoscience studies
[03:08]on subjects like lightning, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods,
[03:13]droughts and asteroid collisions in the past year.
[03:17]But some editor did find the recklessness
[03:21]and boldness to deliver it to the paper's Web site,
[03:25]which required a high level of courage
[03:28]and determination in this era of widespread newspaper layoffs.
[03:34]The piece, headlined "Could We Be Wrong About Global Warming?"
[03:38]would have fascinated readers of the print edition. In fact,
[03:42]it's a good thing to make the general public aware of the latest study.
[03:48]After all, climate change or global warming will concern everyone.
[03:53]Nobody should be in the dark.
[03:56]According to the article, the study found that only about half of the warming
[04:02]that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago
[04:07]can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
[04:12]No one knows what caused the remainder.
[04:16]"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe
[04:21]in the geological record," says oceanographer Gerald Dickens,
[04:26]study co-author and professor of earth science at Rice University.
[04:30]"There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature
[04:36]and carbon are linked together in climate models."
[04:40]During the warming period, known as the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM),
[04:48]for unknown reasons, the amount of carbon in Earth's atmosphere rose rapidly.
[04:55]This makes the PETM one of the best ancient climate analogues
[05:00]for present-day Earth.
[05:02]As the levels of carbon increased,
[05:05]global surface temperatures also rose dramatically during the PETM.
[05:11]Average temperatures worldwide rose by around 13 degrees
[05:16]in the relatively short geological span of about 10,000 years.
[05:21]Dickens said the conclusion is that something other than carbon dioxide
[05:26]caused much of this ancient warming.
[05:29]Although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
[05:32]even used the models for current best estimates of 21st century warming,
[05:38]some feedback loop or other processes aren't accounted for in these models.
[05:44]It is likely that some feedback loop
[05:47]or other processes caused a substantial portion of the warming
[05:52]that occurred during the PETM.
[05:56]Right deeds for media
[05:59]Could that be going on today? The question is far from settled
[06:04]because no one could give any definite answer.
[06:09]The Environmental Protection Agency recently used the models of
[06:14]the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to conclude
[06:18]that man-caused global warming is threatening the country.
[06:22]In fact, some scientists have been criticizing the models of the IPCC,
[06:29]which is old news to those who have followed the rich scientific debate
[06:34]on this online. There have been dozens of studies and papers
[06:40]challenging the models that the public doesn't know about
[06:44]because they never see the light of day in the mainstream media.
[06:49]It is clever for people to think otherwise no matter what and how
[06:53]the mainstream media are propagandizing for climate change.
[06:58]Worse yet, journalists routinely make mistakes by picking studies
[07:04]that fit the global warming mold.
[07:07]Nearly all the big news outlets used a series of studies to proclaim
[07:13]that global warming had caused an increase in hurricane frequency
[07:18]and intensity despite numerous studies to the contrary and
[07:22]the warnings of well-respected scientists that the question wasn't settled.
[07:28]When the weight of scientific evidence becomes too great to ignore,
[07:32]the same media outlets would be forced to print stories to the contrary,
[07:37]which is often the case.
[07:40]The scientific community is having a rich debate about all aspects of
[07:45]global warming throughout the earth's history and what caused it.
[07:49]It's time the American media let the American people in on it.
[07:54]USA Today took the first baby step last week. Good for them.
