2. 外语
  3. Carbon Capture Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation? A)Last September, as someone wh

Carbon Capture Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation? A)Last September, as someone wh

admin2015-07-13  96
问题                              Carbon Capture
        Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?
A)Last September, as someone who cares more about birds than the next man, I was following the story of the new stadium that the Twin Cities are building for their football Vikings. The stadium’s glass walls were expected to kill thousands of birds every year, and local bird-lovers had asked its sponsors to use a specially patterned glass to reduce collisions: the glass would have raised the stadium’s cost by one tenth of one per cent, and the sponsors had hesitated. Around the same time, the National Audubon Society issued a press release declaring climate change "the greatest threat" to American birds and warning that " nearly half" of North America’s bird species were at risk of losing their home by 2080. Audubon’s announcement was retransmitted by national and local media, including the Minneapolis Star Tribune, whose blogger on bird-related subjects, Jim Williams, drew the inevitable inference: Why argue about stadium glass when the real threat to birds was climate change? In comparison, Williams said, a few thousand bird deaths would be "nothing. "
B)I was in Santa Cruz, California, and already not in a good mood. The day I saw the Williams quote was the two hundred and fifty-fourth of a year in which, so far, sixteen had qualified as rainy. To the injury of a very dry weather came the daily insult of radio forecasters describing the weather as beautiful. It wasn’t that I didn’t share Williams’s anxiety about the future. What upset me was how a terrible prediction like Audubon’s could lead to indifference toward birds in the present.
C)Whether it’s prehistoric North Americans hunting the mastodon(乳齿象)to extinction, Maori wiping out the large animals of New Zealand, or modern civilization deforesting the planet and emptying the oceans, human beings are universal killers of the natural world. And now climate change has given us an eschatology(末世论)for reckoning with our guilt: coming soon, some terribly overheated tomorrow, is Judgment Day. Unless we confess and mend our ways, we’ll all be sinners in the hands of an angry Earth.
D)Rarely do I board an airplane or drive to the grocery store without considering my carbon footprint and feeling guilty about it. But when I started watching birds, and worrying about their welfare, I became attracted to a strain of Christianity, inspired by St. Francis of Assisi’s example of loving what’s concrete and sensitive and right in front of us. I gave my support to the focused work of the American Bird Conservancy and local Audubon societies. Even the most obviously worsened landscape could make me happy if it had birds in it.
E)And so I came to feel miserably conflicted about climate change. I accepted its supremacy as the environmental issue of our time, but I felt threatened by its dominance. Not only did it make every grocery-store run a guilt trip: it made me feel selfish for caring more about birds in the present than about people in the future. What were the eagles killed by wind turbines(涡轮机)compared with the impact of rising sea levels on poor nations? What were the local cloud-forest birds of the Andes compared with the atmospheric benefits of Andean water-power projects?
F)A hundred years ago, the National Audubon Society was an active organization, campaigning against random bird killing and the harvesting of large birds for their feathers, but its spirit has since become gentler. In recent decades, it’s been better known for its holiday cards and its toy birds, which sing when you squeeze them. When the organization shifted into Jonathan Edwards mode, last September, I wondered what was going on.
G)In rolling out its climate-change initiative, Audubon mentioned the "citizen science data" it had mobilized(调动), and a " report" prepared by its own scientists, that justified its terrible predictions. Visitors to its updated Web site were treated to images of climate-endangered species and asked to "take the pledge" to help save them. The actions that Audubon suggested to pledge-takers were gentle stuff—tell your stories, create a bird-friendly yard—but the Web site also offered a "Climate Action Pledge" , which was long and detailed.
H)The climate-change report was not immediately available, but from the Web site’s graphics, which included range maps of various bird species, it was possible to deduce that the report’s method involved a comparison of a species’ present range with its predicted range in a climate-altered future. When there was broad overlap between the two ranges, it was assumed that the species would survive. When there was little or no overlap, it was assumed that the species would be caught between an old range that had grown inhospitable(荒凉的，不适合居住的)to it and a new range in which the place where the species live was wrong, and would be at risk of disappearing.
I)This kind of modelling can be useful, but it’s full of uncertainties. A species may currently breed in a place with a particular average temperature, but this doesn’t mean that it couldn’t tolerate a higher temperature, or that it couldn’t adapt to a slightly different place farther north, or that the more northerly place won’t change as temperatures rise. North American species in general, having contended with hot July days and frosty September nights as they evolved, are much more tolerant of temperature fluctuations than tropical species are. Although, in any given place, some familiar back-yard birds may have disappeared by 2080, species from farther south are likely to have moved in to take their place. North America’s birds may well become more diverse.
J)The eagle was an especially odd choice of poster bird for Audubon’s initiative. The species nearly became extinct fifty years ago, before DDT was banned. The only reason we can worry about its future today is that the public—led by the then energetic Audubon—rallied around an immediate threat to it. The eagle’s dilemma was a primary impetus for the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and the eagle is one of the act’s great success stories. Once its eggs were no longer weakened by DDT, its population and range expanded so dramatically that it was removed from the endangered-species list in 2007. It’s hard to think of a species less liable to be trapped by geography. Even if global warming squeezes it entirely out of its current summer and winter ranges, the melting of ice in Alaska and Canada may actually result in a larger new range.
The Endangered Species Act of 1973 was enacted mainly owing to the eagle’s difficult situation.
选项
答案J
解析 定位句指出，鹰遇到的困境是《1973年濒危物种法案》的主要动力，并且鹰是该法案最伟大的成功故事之一。题干中的the eagle’s difficult situation是原文中the eagle’s dilemma的同义转述，故J)为答案。
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