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  3. Among the phrases you really, really do not want to hear from climate scientists are: "that really shocked us," "we had no idea

Among the phrases you really, really do not want to hear from climate scientists are: "that really shocked us," "we had no idea

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问题     Among the phrases you really, really do not want to hear from climate scientists are: "that really shocked us," "we had no idea how bad it was," and "reality is well ahead of the climate models." Yet in speaking to researchers who focus on the Arctic, you hear comments like these so regularly they begin to sound like the thumping refrain from Jaws: annoying signs of something that you really, really wish would go away.
    Let me explain the phrases above. The "shock" came when the International Polar Year, a global organization studying the Arctic, froze a small vessel into the sea ice off eastern Siberia in September 2006. Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen had done the same thing a century before, and his Fram, carried by the drifting ice, arrived eastern Greenland 34 months later. IPY scientists thought their Tara would take 24 to 36 months. But it reached Greenland in just 14 months, stark evidence that the sea ice found a more open, ice-free, and thus faster path westward thanks to Arctic melting.
    The loss of Arctic sea ice is well ahead of what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast, largely because emissions of carbon dioxide have topped what the panel—which foolishly expected nations to care enough about global warming to do something about it—predicted. "The models just aren’t keeping up with the reality of CO2 emissions", says the IPY’s David Carlson. Although policy-makers hoped climate models would prove to be alarmist, the opposite is true, particular in the Arctic.
    The IPCC may also have been too cautious on Greenland, assuming that the melting of its glaciers would contribute little to sea-level rise. Some studies found that Greenland’s glacial streams were surging and surface ice was changing into liquid lakes, but others made a strong case that those surges and melts were short-term aberrations, not long-term trends. It seemed to be stuck. More reliable data, however, such as satellite measurements of Greenland’s mass, show that it is losing about 52 cubic miles per year and that the melting is accelerating. So while the IPCC predicted that sea level would rise 16 inches this century, "now a more likely figure is one meter (39 inches) at the least," says Carlson. "Chest high instead of knee high." Hence the "no idea how bad it was."
    The frozen north had another surprise in store. Scientists have long known that permafrost, if it melted, would release carbon, aggravating global warming, which would melt more permafrost, which would add more to global warming, on and on in a feedback loop. But estimates of how much carbon is locked into Arctic permafrost were, it turns out, woefully off. It is about three times as much as was thought, about 1.6 trillion metric tons, which has surprised a lot of people," says Edward Schuur of the University of Florida. That 1.6 trillion tons is about twice the amount now in the atmosphere. And Schuur’s measurements of how quickly CO2 can come out of permafrost, reported in May, were also a surprise: 1 billion to 2 billion tons per year. Cars and light trucks in the US emit about 300 million tons per year.
    In an insightful observation in The Guardian this month, Jim Watson of the University of Sussex wrote that "a new kind of climate skeptic is becoming more common": someone who doubts not the science but the policy response. For instance, the G8, led by Europe, has vowed to take steps to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius by reducing CO2 emissions. We are now at 0.8 degree. But the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is already enough to raise 2 degrees. The only reason it hasn’t is that the atmosphere is full
    of crap (dust and aerosols that contribute to asthma, emphysema, and other diseases) that acts as a global coolant. As that pollution is reduced for health reasons, we are going to blast right through 2 degrees, which is enough to aggravate droughts and storms, wreak havoc on agriculture, and produce a planet warmer than it’s been in millions of years. The 2 degree promise is an illusion.
The thing "that really shocked us" in the text is that________.
选项 A、a small vessel was frozen into the sea ice off eastern Siberia in 2006
B、the International Polar Year met with the same situation with Fridtj of Nansen
C、it took Fridtj Nansen and his Fram 36 months to float to Greenland
D、it took the International Polar Year’s vessel 14 months to reach Greenland
答案D
解析 本题关键词是“that really shocked us”，出现在第一段，属于词义理解题，但是第二段开头提到Let me explain the phrases above，因此将答案定位于第二段。根据第二段第四、五句，IPY(国际极地年)的科学家们认为他们的塔拉号将用时24至36个月，但却仅用14个月就抵达了格陵兰岛。由此可以推断，真正使科学家们感到震惊(shocked)的是塔拉号用时如此之短。因此选项D与原文属于相同含义，为正确答案。选项A、B、C均属于就事论事，这三个选项虽然都可以和第二段某个句子对应，但这些都只是为叙述后面的结果做铺垫，并不是使科学家们震惊的事。第一段：人们不想从气象科学家口中听到那些令人不安的预报。第二段：北极海冰融化为挺进西部开辟出更快捷的道路。
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