2016年12月英语四级阅读长篇阅读练习(四)

　　Being Objective on Climate Change

　　A.Last week，Craig Rucker,a climate-change skeptic and the executive director of a nonprofit organization called the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow(CFACT)，tweeted a quotation supposedly taken from a 1922 edition of the Washington Post：“Within a few years it is predicted due to ice melt the sea will rise&make most coastal cities uninhabitable.”The intent，of course，was to poke fun at current headlines about climate change.

　　B.Rucker’s organization is a member ofthe Cooler Heads Coalition，an umbrella organization operated by the Competitive Enterprise Institute，a nonprofit that prides itself on its opposition to environmental ists.Rucker himself is part of a network of bloggers，op-cd writers，and policy-shop executives who argue that climate change is either a hoax or all example of left-wing hysteria.Surfacing old newspaper clips is one of their favorite games.They also make substantive arguments about climate policy,but the sniping may be more effective.There is no stronger rhetorical tool than ridicule.

　　C.In this case，Ruckcr’s ridicule seems misplaced.After spending a few minutes poking around online，1 was able to find both the Washington Post article and the longer SourCe material that it came from—a weather report issued by the U.S.consul in Bergen，Norway,and sent to the State Department on october 1 0，1 922.The report didn’t say anything about coasts being inundated.This isn’t surprising.Scientists wete smart back then，too,and they knew that melting sea ice wouldn’t appreciably raise sea levels.any more than a melting ice cube raises the level of water in a glass.

　　D.Rucker ultimately corrected his tweet once commenters pointed out the misquote.Through Twitter,he informed me that he had taken the line from a Washington Times op—ed by Richard Rahn，a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.When I contacted Rahn’s office.a press representative acknowledged that Rahn had copied the quote from other bloggers and columnists;the fabricated sentence appears in articles at reason.corn and texasgopvote.corn.The fabricated line seems to have been inserted around 2011.but the original article has been circulating online since 2007.

　　E. The statement about rising sea levels aside，1 922 really was a strange period in the Svalbard archipelago.the area described by the weather report.The islands lie halfway between Norway and the North Pole,at a latitude that puts them several hundred miles farther north than Barrow,alaska.“The Arctic seems to be warming up.”the report read.In August of that year,a geologist near the island of Spitsbergen sailed as far north as eighty-one degrees.twenty.nine minutes in ice-free water.This was highly unusual.The previous several summers had likewise been warrn.Seal populations had moved farther north，and formerly unseen stretches of coast were now accessible.

　　F.What are we to take from this historical evidence?A central tenet for Rucker and his colleagues is mat today’s sea.ice retreat。warming surface temperatures，and similar observations are short-lived anomalies of a kind that often happened in the past—and that overzealous scientists and gullible media are quick to drum up crises where none exist.Favorite examples include numerous newspaper articles from the nineteen.seventies that predicted the advent of a new ice age.In fact.it's possible to find articles from nearly every decade of the past century that seem to imply information about the climate that turned out to be premature or wrong.

　　G.The 1922 article has been quoted repeatedly by Rucker’s comrades-in-arms since its 2007 rebirth in the Washington Times.For nearly that long，scientists have been objecting.Gavin Schmidt，a climate modeler and the deputy director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies，points out that what was an anomaly in 1922 is now the norm：the waters near Spitsbergen are clear of ice at the end of every summer.More important，long-term temperature and sea-ice records indicate that the dramatic sea-ice retreat in the early nineteen.twenties was short-lived.It also occurred locally around svalbard—the unusual conditions didn’t even encompass the whole Norwegian Sea，let alone the rest of the Arctic.