双语美文:对全球变暖的不同思考
A changing climate of opinion?
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.
对全球变暖的不同思考?
一些科学家认为有必要采用更为激进的方法处理气候变化。除了试图减少温室气体(二氧化碳)的排放，科学家们计划改造地球。
有一类科幻小说关注地球的邻居——火星和金星，并设想如何使这些星球变得适合人类居住。答案就是星球工程。金星的大气层太厚了。这造成了巨大的温室效应，并使得离太阳更近的金星的温度越发的高。火星离太阳更远，那里的温度非常低。比地球离太阳更远的星球其大气层同样太稀薄，以至于不能存贮太阳提供的少量热量。所以，对我们这些邻居星球的大气层做文章看起来开辟了人类居住的崭新领域，同时也为科幻小说提供了新的题材。
这是个有趣的想法。甚至这个想法有可能实现，不过任何现在正在阅读这些故事的读者在其有生之年很可能不能看到这个想法的实现了。但是更让人担心的——同时也是更现实的-——就是人类需要星球工程这样的想法来使地球本身适合居住，而且这种需要可能就在不久的将来。现实总是迫使人们使出最后的手段，而且人类导致的气候变化已经的确非常现实了。面对如此真实的现实，有人禁不住要问：能否把科幻故事变为科学事实。
通过对大气层或者海洋进行大规模的改造来改变气候，这样的风险将会非常高，过程也超乎寻常的复杂。但是另外的一个途径——即让全球的人口放弃化石燃料—证明也是极度困难。地球工程，就如它被人们所知的'一样，可能会为向低碳经济顺利过渡赢得一些时间。
在过去，地球工程是个禁忌的话题，因为许多人担心正是因为有改变气候的可能性的存在，这样人们反而有了借口来回避一些低碳经济所要求的困难选择。但是，现在人们有一种感觉，如果政客们家向科学家们在这个问题上征求建议的话，能给政客提供一些选择总不是坏事。为了这个目的，英国最古老的科学院——皇家协会——在《自然科学会报》(Philosophical Transactions)杂志上发表了一些列文章，在这些文章中，科学家们列出了一些解决问题的选择方案并建议尝试一些实验来检验这些方案的可行性。
Vocabulary:
Radical:激进的
Curb: 控制
Fiction: 小说
Mars: 火星
Venus: 金星
Habitable: 适合居住的
Planetary: 行星的
Fiddle: (动词)虚度光阴;鬼混
Far-fetched: 夸张的;
Trump: 王牌;最后的手段
Intriguing: 令人好奇的;
Convert: 转化
Tinker: 修补
Taboo: 禁忌