【Native Speaker每日综合训练—46系列】【46-03】科技 Modify the Climate

伊蔓达 · 发表于 2014-12-15 22:15:39

内容：伊蔓达编辑：伊蔓达

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今天Obstacle文章带大家看的是Modify the climate.科学家声称技术可以改变气候，这到底是fact呢还是fiction呢，读完即知。作为背景了解和铺垫，Speaker和Speed的文章选了有关Climate Change的内容，这两部分的文章均来自David Biello ，一位Environment & Energy editor，经常听60-second听力的童鞋对他的名字会比较熟悉。

今天的文章信息量比较大，认真读噢！

Part I: Speaker

Clock Ticking on Climate Change Prevention
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's new synthesis report adds urgency to the need to cut additional greenhouse gas pollution
November 2, 2014 |By David Biello

Climate change is real. Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and clearing forests, among other human activities, is to blame. And more and more of that global warming pollution is being dumped in the atmosphere each year.

So says the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's new synthesis report released on November 2. The synthesis reduces thousands of pages of scientific knowledge to their essence. That essence, however, has hardly changed since the last synthesis report in 2007.

What has changed is the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have now touched 400 parts per million. Pollution in the first decade of the 21st century grew twice as fast as it did in the last few decades of the 20th century. The resulting global warming poses risks ranging from rising sea levels that drown inhabited coasts to crop failures from stronger heat waves and drought.

The IPCC has now offered a budget for how much pollution people can add to the atmosphere without too much climate change. Unfortunately, humanity has already used more than half of that budget.

The world's nations are meeting in Lima this year in hopes of hammering out a global deal to combat climate change to be agreed upon in Paris in 2015. The new report is a reminder to world leaders that the stakes, like the seas, are high.

Source:Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/clock-ticking-on-climate-change-prevention/

[Rephrase 1, 1:32]

伊蔓达 · 发表于 2014-12-15 22:16:16

Part II: Speed

Can Geoengineering Save the World from Global Warming?
Is manipulating Earth's environment to combat climate change a good idea--and where, exactly, did the idea come from?
February 25, 2011 |By David Biello

[Warm up]
As efforts to combat climate change falter despite ever-rising concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, some scientists and other experts have begun to consider the possibility of using so-called geoengineering to fix the problem. Such "deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment" as the Royal Society of London puts it, is fraught with peril, of course.

For example, one of the first scientists to predict global warming as a result of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius—thought this might be a good way to ameliorate the winters of his native land and increase its growing season. Whereas that may come true for the human inhabitants of Scandinavia, polar plants and animals are suffering as sea ice dwindles and temperatures warm even faster than climatologists predicted.

Scientific American corresponded with science historian James Fleming of Colby College in Maine, author of Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control, about the history of geoengineering—ranging from filling the air with the artificial aftermath of a volcanic eruption to seeding the oceans with iron in order to promote plankton growth—and whether it might save humanity from the ill effects of climate change.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

[Time 2]
What is geoengineering in your view?

Geoengineering is planetary-scale intervention [in]—or tinkering with—planetary processes. Period.

As I write in my book, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control, "the term 'geoengineering' remains largely undefined," but is loosely, "the intentional large-scale manipulation of the global environment; planetary tinkering; a subset of terraforming or planetary engineering."

As of June 2010 the term has a draft entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—the modification of the global environment or the climate in order to counter or ameliorate climate change. A 2009 report issued by the Royal Society of London defines geoengineering as "the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change."

But there are significant problems with both definitions. First of all, an engineering practice defined by its scale (geo) need not be constrained by its stated purpose (environmental improvement), by any of its currently proposed techniques (stratospheric aerosols, space mirrors, etcetera) or by one of perhaps many stated goals (to ameliorate or counteract climate change). Nuclear engineers, for example, are capable of building both power plants and bombs; mechanical engineers can design components for both ambulances and tanks. So to constrain the essence of something by its stated purpose, techniques or goals is misleading at best.

Geo-scale engineering projects were conducted by both the U.S. and the Soviet Union between 1958 and 1962 that had nothing to do with countering or ameliorating climate change. Starting with the [U.S.'s] 1958 Argus A-bomb explosions in space and ending with the 1962 Starfish Prime H-bomb test, the militaries of both nations sought to modify the global environment for military purposes.

Project Argus was a top-secret military test aimed at detonating atomic bombs in space to generate an artificial radiation belt, disrupt the near-space environment, and possibly intercept enemy missiles. It, and the later tests conducted by both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, peaked with H-bomb detonations in space in 1962 that created an artificial [electro]magnetic [radiation] belt that persisted for 10 years. This is geoengineering.
[341 words]

[Time 3]
This idea of detonating bombs in near-space was proposed in 1957 by Nicholas Christofilos, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His hypothesis, which was pursued by the [U.S.] Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency [subsequently known as DARPA] and tested in Project Argus and other nuclear shots, held that the debris from a nuclear explosion, mainly highly energetic electrons, would be contained within lines of force in Earth's magnetic field and would travel almost instantly as a giant current spanning up to half a hemisphere. Thus, if a detonation occurred above a point in the South Atlantic, immense currents would flow along the magnetic lines to a point far to the north, such as Greenland, where they would severely disrupt radio communications. A shot in the Indian Ocean might, then, generate a huge electromagnetic pulse over Moscow. In addition to providing a planetary "energy ray," Christofilos thought nuclear shots in space might also disrupt military communications, destroy satellites and the electronic guidance systems of enemy [intercontinental ballistic missiles], and possibly kill any military cosmonauts participating in an attack launched from space. He proposed thousands of them to make a space shield.

So nuclear explosions in space by the U.S. and the Soviet Union constituted some of the earliest attempts at geoengineering, or intentional human intervention in planetary-scale processes.

The neologism "geoengineer" refers to one who contrives, designs or invents at the largest planetary scale possible for either military or civilian purposes. Today, geoengineering, as an unpracticed art, may be considered "geoscientific speculation". Geoengineering is a subset of terraformation, which also does not exist outside of the fantasies of some engineers.

I have recently written to the Oxford English Dictionary asking them to correct their draft definition.
[288 words]

[Time 4]
Can geoengineering save the world from climate change?

In short, I think it may be infinitely more dangerous than climate change, largely due to the suspicion and social disruption it would trigger by changing humanity's relationship to nature.

To take just one example from my book, on page 194: "Sarnoff Predicts Weather Control" read the headline on the front page of The New York Times on October 1, 1946. The previous evening, at his testimonial dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, RCA president Brig. Gen. David Sarnoff had speculated on worthy peaceful projects for the postwar era. Among them were "transformations of deserts into gardens through diversion of ocean currents," a technique that could also be reversed in time of war to turn fertile lands into deserts, and ordering "rain or sunshine by pressing radio buttons," an accomplishment that, Sarnoff declared, would require a "World Weather Bureau" in charge of global forecasting and control (much like the "Weather Distributing Administration" proposed in 1938). A commentator in The New Yorker intuited the problems with such control: "Who" in this civil service outfit, he asked, "would decide whether a day was to be sunny, rainy, overcast...or enriched by a stimulating blizzard?" It would be "some befuddled functionary," probably bedeviled by special interests such as the raincoat and galoshes manufacturers, the beachwear and sunburn lotion industries, and resort owners and farmers. Or if a storm was to be diverted—"Detour it where? Out to sea, to hit some ship with no influence in Washington?"
[250 words]

[Time 5]
How old is the idea of geoengineering? What other names has it had?

I can trace geoengineering's direct modern legacy to 1945, and have prepared a table of such proposals and efforts for the [Government Accountability Office]. Nuclear weapons, digital computers and satellites seem to be the modern technologies of choice. Geoengineering has also been called terraformation and, more restrictively, climate engineering, climate intervention or climate modification. Many have proposed abandoning the term geoengineering in favor of solar radiation management and carbon (or carbon dioxide) capture and storage. Of course, the idea of control of nature is ancient—for example, Phaeton or Archimedes.

Phaeton, the son of Helios, received permission from his father [the Greek sun god] to drive the sun chariot, but failed to control it, putting the Earth in danger of burning up. He was killed by a thunderbolt from Zeus to prevent further disaster. Recently, a prominent meteorologist has written about climate control and urged us to "take up Phaeton's reins," which is not a good idea.

Archimedes is known as an engineer who said: "Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the Earth." Some geoengineers think that this is now possible and that science and technology have given us an Archimedean set of levers with which to move the planet. But I ask: "Where will it roll if you tip it?"
[233 words]

[Time 6]
How are weather control and climate control related?

Weather and climate are intimately related: Weather is the state of the atmosphere at a given place and time, while climate is the aggregate of weather conditions over time. A vast body of scientific literature addresses these interactions. In addition, historians are revisiting the ancient but elusive term klima, seeking to recover its multiple social connotations. Weather, climate and the climate of opinion matter in complex ways that invite—some might say require or demand—the attention of both scientists and historians. Yet some may wonder how weather and climate are interrelated rather than distinct. Both, for example, are at the center of the debate over greenhouse warming and hurricane intensity. A few may claim that rainmaking, for example, has nothing to do with climate engineering, but any intervention in the Earth's radiation or heat budget (such as managing solar radiation) would affect the general circulation and thus the location of upper-level patterns, including the jet stream and storm tracks. Thus, the weather itself would be changed by such manipulation. Conversely, intervening in severe storms by changing their intensity or their tracks or modifying weather on a scale as large as a region, a continent or the Pacific Basin would obviously affect cloudiness, temperature and precipitation patterns with major consequences for monsoonal flows, and ultimately the general circulation. If repeated systematically, such interventions would influence the overall heat budget and the climate.

Both weather and climate control have long and checkered histories: My book explains [meteorologist] James Espy's proposal in the 1830s to set fire to the crest of the Appalachian Mountains every Sunday evening to generate heated updrafts that would stimulate rain and clear the air for cities of the east coast. It also examines efforts to fire cannons at the clouds in the arid Southwest in the hope of generating rain by concussion.

In the 1920s airplanes loaded with electrified sand were piloted by military aviators who "attacked" the clouds in futile attempts to both make rain and clear fog. Many others have proposed either a world weather control agency or creating a global thermostat, either by burning vast quantities of fossil fuels if an ice age threatened or sucking the CO2 out of the air if the world overheated.

After 1945 three technologies—nuclear weapons, digital computers and satellites—dominated discussions about ultimate weather and climate control, but with very little acknowledgement that unintended consequences and social disruption may be more damaging than any presumed benefit.
[417 words]

[The Rest]
What would be the ideal role for geoengineering in addressing climate change?

That it generates interest in and awareness of the impossibility of heavy-handed intervention in the climate system, since there could be no predictable outcome of such intervention, physically, politically or socially.

Why do scientists continue to pursue this then, after 200 or so years of failure?

Science fantasy is informed by science fiction and driven by hubris. One of the dictionary definitions of hubris cites Edward Teller (the godfather of modern geoengineering).

Teller's hubris knew no bounds. He was the [self-proclaimed] father of the H-bomb and promoted all things atomic, even talking about using nuclear weapons to create canals and harbors. He was also an advocate of urban sprawl to survive nuclear attack, the Star Wars [missile] defense system, and a planetary sunscreen to reduce global warming. He wanted to control nature and improve it using technology.

Throughout history rainmakers and climate engineers have typically fallen into two categories: commercial charlatans using technical language and proprietary techniques to cash in on a gullible public, and sincere but deluded scientific practitioners exhibiting a modicum of chemical and physical knowledge, a bare minimum of atmospheric insight, and an abundance of hubris. We should base our decision-making not on what we think we can do "now" and in the near future. Rather, our knowledge is shaped by what we have and have not done in the past. Such are the grounds for making informed decisions and avoiding the pitfalls of rushing forward, claiming we know how to "fix the sky."

Source:Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/geoengineering-to-save-the-world-from-global-warming/

伊蔓达 · 发表于 2014-12-15 22:17:14

Part III: Obstacle

Into the great wide open
Scientific studies of techniques for deliberately modifying the climate are getting ready to move out of the laboratory
Dec 13th 2014 | WASHINGTON, DC | From the print edition

[Paraphrase 7]
IN 1990 John Latham, a cloud physicist, published a short article in Nature under the headline “Control of Global Warming?” It argued that if low-lying maritime clouds were made a bit brighter, the Earth could be cooled enough to make up for the increased warming caused by emissions of greenhouse gases. The brightening was to be achieved by wafting tiny sea-salt particles up into the clouds from below; by acting as “cloud condensation nuclei” (CCN) they would increase the number of water droplets in the clouds, and thus the amount of sunlight they reflect out into space. Latham calculated that a square kilometre of cloud might be kept bright with just 400 grams of spray an hour. And finding out if it was really that easy might be straightforwardly tested. “It seems feasible”, Dr Latham wrote, “to conduct an experiment in which CCN are introduced in a controlled manner into marine stratus.”

A quarter of a century on, such a test may soon be on the cards. For more than ten years Dr Latham’s idea was almost entirely ignored. Then it caught the attention of an enterprising engineer, Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh, who looked at ways it might be made practicable, and a small number of researchers started to pay attention. But the question of whether anyone could actually produce ship-borne sprayers that would reliably churn out particles a ten-thousandth of a millimetre in diameter at a rate of 1,000 trillion a second remained open.

Armand Neukermans, a retired Silicon Valley engineer whose achievements include, among other things, the development of the earliest inkjet printers, has with various colleagues (also mostly retired) looked at a range of possible techniques. One that may be up to the job is “effervescent spray atomisation” in which, rather than trying to make truly tiny droplets straight away, you make larger ones in which water mixed with gas subsequently fizzes into particles of the desired size.

Dr Neukermans, Thomas Ackerman and Robert Wood, the latter two both scientists who study clouds at the University of Washington, have with colleagues put together a proposal for field tests to see if such sprayers really work, if their effects can be controlled and measured, and what happens to clouds treated in this way. They are now investigating how to get such a programme financed.

They are not the only people who want to see how ideas from geoengineering studies play out in the real world. David Keith, a professor at Harvard University, has been studying how to reflect sunlight back from an artificial layer of haze in the stratosphere similar to that created by the sulphur thrown up by large volcanic eruptions, which are known to cool the Earth. One of the risks would be that such particles can encourage chemical reactions which deplete the ozone layer. Dr Keith and his colleagues want to study how the rates of such reactions depend on the sizes of the particles and background levels of water vapour; that would help to assess the risks and perhaps find ways to limit them. They have designed a system which would hang below a large balloon 20km up in the sky. It would create a small plume of sulphate particles and then measure the physical and chemical changes.

For both the clouds and the stratosphere, the direct effects of the proposed experiments are tiny. Cloud-brightening on the scale imagined requires less than a litre of seawater a second. The amount of sulphur that might be put into the stratosphere would be about 2% of what a passenger jet crossing the Atlantic emits in an hour. These proposals are not distinguished by the scale of what is envisaged, but by the precision with which they would be carried out and the care with which their effects would be monitored.

The worried ones

Another distinction weighs more heavily. Though these experiments would provide insights useful to scientists in other areas—the physics of clouds and the chemistry of the stratosphere are big topics in their own right—they are being proposed as ways to further research into geoengineering. That concerns many people, and a number of environmental campaign groups oppose all such experiments. Academic critics such as Clive Hamilton of Charles Sturt University in Australia argue that, though the risks to health or the environment may be minor, such experiments pose “political and social risks” that are much more troubling. Experiments could create “lock-in” around a particular research path, forming a constituency that would downplay subsequently uncovered risks and obstacles. And the mere fact of experiments going ahead might lead people to assume that geoengineering could easily be made feasible, and thus to give up on reducing carbon emissions.

Following the money

Perhaps because of such concerns, financing bodies have not yet shown much appetite for geoengineering experiments. In America, most of the relatively little research money spent so far has gone to computer models. In Britain, where three interdisciplinary research programmes in the field are coming to an end, a proposed experiment that would have sprayed water from a balloon was cancelled by the team that had been planning it in 2013 because of worries about the transparency of the process by which the experiment had been set up. At a recent discussion devoted to these British programmes Alan Gadian of the University of Leeds, who works with Dr Latham, Dr Neukermans and their colleagues, made no bones about his belief that the government had a bias against financing experiments like those now proposed for cloud-brightening.

In the absence of government funding, some philanthropists have been helping out. Dr Keith is one of the administrators of the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research, through which Bill Gates and some of his former Microsoft colleagues finance research on geoengineering projects and other things. The fund has supported work by Dr Gadian and Dr Neukermans, among others, as well as by Dr Keith himself. But its position is not to fund field tests of cloud-brightening, stratospheric hazing or anything like them. Other sources of philanthropic money may be available, and the cloud-brighteners may well look into them. Dr Keith and his colleagues, though, want their stratospheric experiments to be funded mostly by the government. “I think we have the best chance to have a healthy dialogue if experiments are publicly approved,” says Dr Keith.

Geoengineering experiments carried out high-handedly or without due respect for sensible concerns would be damaging. But precedent suggests that such experimentation can be regulated. In the 1990s and 2000s there were a number of large experiments aimed at finding out if adding iron to the oceans would spur photosynthesis in such a way as to move carbon from the atmosphere to the abyss. Though they were billed as investigations of climates past—such fertilisation is thought to have contributed to low ice-age carbon-dioxide levels—the possible application of the process as a form of geoengineering aimed at stabilising future carbon dioxide levels was also an inducement.

In the late 2000s such experiments were discussed by the London Convention, which sets rules about pollution at sea. It was decided that research should be allowed, and a fairly impressive set of regulatory requirements was established. At a meeting on the regulation of geoengineering experiments held in Washington, DC at the beginning of December, some oceanographers argued that this new regulatory system was so strict as to discourage worthwhile research. Other participants argued that that was hard to substantiate, since no one had actually tried to get any such experiments approved since the new rules were drafted—and the reason for that is mostly that oceanographers are split over the value of further research. If this is any precedent, it suggests that geoengineering experiments in the atmosphere could go ahead fruitfully, bringing with them new knowledge, new regulatory frameworks and new disagreements—and no obvious risk of lock-in.
[1316 words]

Source:The Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21635983-scientific-studies-techniques-deliberately-modifying-climate-are

Alpha4Dream · 发表于 2014-12-16 01:32:12

第一次沙发耶发挥时差党优势hohoho

科技类阅读速度小有提高，继续加油~ 慢慢对科技类的文章也有了点兴趣
Warm up 00:03:33.40
Time 2 00:05:15.04
Time 3 00:03:19.50
Time 4 00:03:21.14
Time 5 00:02:24.90
Time 6 00:06:40.10
The rest 00:04:14.06
Paraphrase 7 00:14:38.18

cherry6891 · 发表于 2014-12-16 03:07:07

[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961)]46-03[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961)]Time2-5
[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961)]What is geoengineering? The deliberate,large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change.
[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961)]Can engineering save the world?
[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961)]When does the word geoengineering come? From 1954, the history of the fight with nature can track back to Achimedes and P
[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961)]The relationship of climate change and wether change.
[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961)]What we can do to the wether?we should base our decision making on not what can do now and near future and do not rush to make any decision.

cyndichiang · 发表于 2014-12-16 07:06:40

Speaker
Researcher created an evolutionary trees for bird, who have to manipulate geno rather than several genes
They can learn birds more easily
They inferred 2 adaptations by sequencing and 2 independent games supporting water adaptation
Predator birds have a common ancestor and 95% species occurred around the period when dinosaurs extincted

Obstacle: 6'31''
Scientists think it feasoble to control the global warming by introducing CCN into the marine stratus
Basic technique: sprayer--> deveplmental process
Problems: 1.social and political risk: people make no efforts to reduce emissions
2. lack of funding
Augues: an inducement for future application
regulation system: favor/oppose

HaiqingYU · 发表于 2014-12-16 09:33:24

Thanks for sharing!
[Time 2]03:06
The current definition of geoengineering by its scale and goal is misleading.
[Time 3]忘记计时了。。。
The original of geoengineering comes from US's designed attack at Soviet, differing from the current understanding.
[Time 4]01：56
The author argue that the geoengineering would stimulate suspicion and social disruption, as the case in 1946.
[Time 5]01:27
[Time 6]02:27
The relationship between whether and climate, and precious efforts attempted to modify them.
[Obstacle]08:02
Two proposed experiment about reducing the global warning.
Even though the impact seems tiny, there is uncovered risk.
Actual fund comes mainly from company. The possibility about more gnm funding is discussed.

Fanny2014 · 发表于 2014-12-16 11:36:38

第一次跟小分队，北美时间昨天晚上报名的。。
Time 2                      00:02:36.26
Time 3                      00:02:03.64
Time 4                      00:01:48.13
Time 5                      00:01:29.95
Time 6                      00:02:45.05

给位XDJM都是边读边记笔记吗？是不是归纳一下好一点呢。。。
第一次读，泛读。。。。大概意思知道。。。。有些单词不认识，大家过后都查吗？都有背吗？
求指教！

KaterinaTse · 发表于 2014-12-16 17:02:01

Speaker
New evolution trees for birds to stablish

Warm up
1'49'73 Take about we should concentrate on the effect from global warming and use the geoengineering to fix the problem.

Time 2
2'41'81 What is geoengineering?Geoengineering are largely undefined.And there are many problems about two definations.

Time 3
2'20'21 Point out the right defination about geoengineering,and the writer wrote to the Oxford English Dictionary to correct their draft defination.

Time 4
1'49'21 Geoengineering cannot truly save the world from the climate,because the climate cannot really be broadcasted.

Time 5
1'36'39 Geoengineering has other names such as climate engineering.Talk
about two ancients who wanted to control the nature.

Time 6
2'46'50 How to disdinguish wheather and climte,and what is the interraction between them.The three technologies may hurts the nature.

The rest
1'47'06 Talk about a scientist who wanted to control and reduce the global warming with nuclear weapons.We have many things to do with the nature.

Obstacle
8'46'10 The experiment of controlling global warming begun,and many scientists wanted to make it success throng all kinks of experiments.They came across many difficulties.The government didn't support them with finance.Luckily,other supports offered help but not for the central experiment. Later,their research was proscibed and London Convention showed interested in it but still doubted that.Finally ,they really believed that if the experiment could succeed then there will be many benefits.

Yvonne52585 · 发表于 2014-12-16 20:21:46

Fanny2014 发表于 2014-12-16 11:36
第一次跟小分队，北美时间昨天晚上报名的。。
Time 2 00:02:36.26
Time 3 ...

http://forum.chasedream.com/thread-790494-1-1.html
这个是我之前看到的比较好的阅读小分队怎么练的讲解

不要一个一个字去查读完之后把你觉得会影响阅读的词语查一下就好因为你平时读报读新闻也不可能每个词都认识慢慢就习惯了加油

[阅读小分队] 【Native Speaker每日综合训练—46系列】【46-03】科技 Modify the Climate

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