雙語美文:對全球變暖的不同思考

時間：2021-06-12 13:47:05 經典美文我要投稿

雙語美文:對全球變暖的不同思考

　　A changing climate of opinion?

雙語美文:對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.

　　對全球變暖的不同思考?

　　一些科學家認為有必要采用更為激進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，科學家們計劃改造地球。

　　有一類科幻小說關注地球的鄰居——火星和金星，并設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，并使得離太陽更近的金星的溫度越發的高。火星離太陽更遠，那里的溫度非常低。比地球離太陽更遠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域，同時也為科幻小說提供了新的題材。

　　這是個有趣的想法。甚至這個想法有可能實現，不過任何現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想法的實現了。但是更讓人擔心的——同時也是更現實的-——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。現實總是迫使人們使出最后的.手段，而且人類導致的氣候變化已經的確非常現實了。面對如此真實的現實，有人禁不住要問：能否把科幻故事變為科學事實。

　　通過對大氣層或者海洋進行大規模的改造來改變氣候，這樣的風險將會非常高，過程也超乎尋常的復雜。但是另外的一個途徑——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，可能會為向低碳經濟順利過渡贏得一些時間。

　　在過去，地球工程是個禁忌的話題，因為許多人擔心正是因為有改變氣候的可能性的存在，這樣人們反而有了借口來回避一些低碳經濟所要求的困難選擇。但是，現在人們有一種感覺，如果政客們家向科學家們在這個問題上征求建議的話，能給政客提供一些選擇總不是壞事。為了這個目的，英國最古老的科學院——皇家協會——在《自然科學會報》(Philosophical Transactions)雜志上發表了一些列文章，在這些文章中，科學家們列出了一些解決問題的選擇方案并建議嘗試一些實驗來檢驗這些方案的可行性。

　　Vocabulary:

　　Radical:激進的

　　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;