雙語美文:對(duì)全球變暖的不同思考

時(shí)間：2021-06-12 13:47:05 經(jīng)典美文我要投稿

　　A changing climate of opinion?

雙語美文:對(duì)全球變暖的不同思考

　　Some scientists think climate change needs a more radical approach. As well as trying to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, they have plans to re-engineer the Earth.

　　THERE is a branch of science fiction that looks at the Earth’s neighbours, Mars and Venus, and asks how they might be made habitable. The answer is planetary engineering. The Venusian atmosphere is too thick. It creates a large greenhouse effect and cooks a planet that is, in any case, closer to the sun than the Earth is to even higher temperatures than it would otherwise experience. Mars suffers from the opposite fault. A planet more distant from the sun than Earth is also has an atmosphere too thin to trap what little of the sun’s heat is available. So, fiddle with the atmospheres of these neighbours and you open new frontiers for human settlement and far-fetched story lines.

　　It is an intriguing idea. It may even come to pass, though probably not in the lifetime of anyone now reading such stories. But what is more worrying—and more real—is the idea that such planetary engineering may be needed to make the Earth itself habitable by humanity, and that it may be needed in the near future. Reality has a way of trumping art, and human-induced climate change is very real indeed. So real that some people are asking whether science fiction should now be converted into science fact.

　　Tinkering with the atmosphere or the oceans on the scale required to do this would be highly risky and extraordinarily complex. But the alternative, getting the world’s population to give up fossil fuels, is proving exceedingly hard. Geo-engineering, as it has come to be known, may be a way of buying time for the transition to a low-carbon economy to take place in an orderly manner.

　　In the past, geo-engineering was taboo because many felt that the very possibility of fiddling with the climate would create an excuse to avoid the hard choices a low-carbon economy would taboo. However, the feeling is now growing that if politicians came to scientists for advice on the matter, it would be a good idea for them to have some to offer. To that end, the Royal Society, Britain’s oldest scientific academy, has published a series of papers in its Philosophical Transactions outlining some of the options, and suggesting a few experiments to test whether they would work.

　　對(duì)全球變暖的不同思考?

　　一些科學(xué)家認(rèn)為有必要采用更為激進(jìn)的方法處理氣候變化。除了試圖減少溫室氣體(二氧化碳)的排放，科學(xué)家們計(jì)劃改造地球。

　　有一類科幻小說關(guān)注地球的鄰居——火星和金星，并設(shè)想如何使這些星球變得適合人類居住。答案就是星球工程。金星的大氣層太厚了。這造成了巨大的溫室效應(yīng)，并使得離太陽更近的金星的溫度越發(fā)的高�；鹦请x太陽更遠(yuǎn)，那里的溫度非常低。比地球離太陽更遠(yuǎn)的星球其大氣層同樣太稀薄，以至于不能存貯太陽提供的少量熱量。所以，對(duì)我們這些鄰居星球的大氣層做文章看起來開辟了人類居住的嶄新領(lǐng)域，同時(shí)也為科幻小說提供了新的題材。

　　這是個(gè)有趣的想法。甚至這個(gè)想法有可能實(shí)現(xiàn)，不過任何現(xiàn)在正在閱讀這些故事的讀者在其有生之年很可能不能看到這個(gè)想法的實(shí)現(xiàn)了。但是更讓人擔(dān)心的——同時(shí)也是更現(xiàn)實(shí)的-——就是人類需要星球工程這樣的想法來使地球本身適合居住，而且這種需要可能就在不久的將來�，F(xiàn)實(shí)總是迫使人們使出最后的.手段，而且人類導(dǎo)致的氣候變化已經(jīng)的確非�，F(xiàn)實(shí)了。面對(duì)如此真實(shí)的現(xiàn)實(shí)，有人禁不住要問：能否把科幻故事變?yōu)榭茖W(xué)事實(shí)。

　　通過對(duì)大氣層或者海洋進(jìn)行大規(guī)模的改造來改變氣候，這樣的風(fēng)險(xiǎn)將會(huì)非常高，過程也超乎尋常的復(fù)雜。但是另外的一個(gè)途徑——即讓全球的人口放棄化石燃料—證明也是極度困難。地球工程，就如它被人們所知的一樣，可能會(huì)為向低碳經(jīng)濟(jì)順利過渡贏得一些時(shí)間。

　　在過去，地球工程是個(gè)禁忌的話題，因?yàn)樵S多人擔(dān)心正是因?yàn)橛懈淖儦夂虻目赡苄缘拇嬖冢@樣人們反而有了借口來回避一些低碳經(jīng)濟(jì)所要求的困難選擇。但是，現(xiàn)在人們有一種感覺，如果政客們家向科學(xué)家們?cè)谶@個(gè)問題上征求建議的話，能給政客提供一些選擇總不是壞事。為了這個(gè)目的，英國最古老的科學(xué)院——皇家協(xié)會(huì)——在《自然科學(xué)會(huì)報(bào)》(Philosophical Transactions)雜志上發(fā)表了一些列文章，在這些文章中，科學(xué)家們列出了一些解決問題的選擇方案并建議嘗試一些實(shí)驗(yàn)來檢驗(yàn)這些方案的可行性。

　　Vocabulary:

　　Radical:激進(jìn)的

　　Curb: 控制

　　Fiction: 小說

　　Mars: 火星

　　Venus: 金星

　　Habitable: 適合居住的

　　Planetary: 行星的

　　Fiddle: (動(dòng)詞)虛度光陰;鬼混

　　Far-fetched: 夸張的;

　　Trump: 王牌;最后的手段

　　Intriguing: 令人好奇的;