完整word版高级英语第三课ShipsintheDesert.docx

1、完整word版高级英语第三课ShipsintheDesertLesson 3 Ships in the DesertAL Gore1. I was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasnt a good day. We were anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all of central

2、 Asia, but as I looked out over the bow, the prospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sandas far as I could see in all directions. The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in

3、 the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon. Ten years ago the Aral was the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North Americas Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-consi

4、dered irrigation scheme to grow cotton in the desert. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fishbrought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail thr

5、ough Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.2. My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountai

6、ns, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to th

7、e annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. “Heres where the U.S Congress passed the Clean Air Act,” he said. At the bottom of the world, two continents away from Washington, D.C., even a smal

8、l reduction in one countrys emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.3. But the most significant change thus far in the earths atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial revolution early in the last century and has picked up sp

9、eed ever since. Industry meant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of itbringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth. Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski

10、 plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together, scientists monitor the air several times every day to chart the course of that inexorable change. During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that days measurements, pushing the end o

11、f a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it isthere at the end of the earthto see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.4. Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in a small tent pitched on

12、a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was thinneronly three and a half feet thickand a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below. Afte

13、r it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resub merged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately the thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a result of global warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists

14、and the U.S. Navy to secure the release of previously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surf

15、acing, and then I was standing in an eerily beautiful snowscape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or “pressure ridges” of ice that are pushed up like tiny mountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CO2, levels are rising just as rapidly, an

16、d ultimately temperature will rise with themindeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice here will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the worlds weather system,

17、 the consequences of a thinning cap could be disastrous.5. Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise. Six months after I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientists reported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distribution in the Arctic, and a second team reported a s

18、till controversial claim (which a variety of data now suggest) that, over all, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 percent in just the last decade. Moreover, scientists established several years ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle, the spring snowmelt now comes earlier every year

19、, and deep in the tundra below, the temperature of the earth is steadily rising.*6. As it happens, some of the most disturbing images of environmental destruction can be found exactly halfway between the North and South polesprecisely at the equator in Brazil where billowing clouds of smoke regularl

20、y blacken the sky above the immense but now threatened Amazon rain forest. Acre by acre, the rain forest is being burned to create fast pasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when I went there in early 1989, the fires are set earlier and earlier in the dry season now, with more than one Tennessees

21、 worth of rain forest being slashed and burned each year. According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North Americawhich means we are silencing thousands of songs we have never even heard.*7. But

22、one doesnt have to travel around the world to witness humankinds assault on the earth. Images that signal the distress of our global environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere. On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signals the loss of eco

23、logical balance now in progress. If the sky is clear after sunsetand it you are watching from a place where pollution hasnt blotted out the night sky altogetheryou can sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky. This “noctilucent cloud” occasionally appears when the earth is first cloaked

24、 in the evening darkness; shimmering above us with a translucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds have begun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere. (Also called natural gas, methane is released from landfills,

25、 from coal mines and rice paddies, from billions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut forestland, from the burning of biomass and from a variety of other human activities. ) Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in the past, all this extra methane carries more water vapor into

26、 the upper atmosphere, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the suns rays still strike long after sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.8. What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix of emotions we f

27、eel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feel awe for our own power: just as men tear tusks from elephants heads in such quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are ripping matter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness. In the process,

28、 we are once again adding to the threat of global warming, because methane has been one of the fastest-growing green-house gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vapor in total volume, changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. But, without even considering that threat, shouldnt i

29、t startle us that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky which glisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we cant see these clouds for what they area physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilizat

30、ion and the earth?*9. Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by now all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environmentwhether its the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the sun

31、burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why havent we launched a massive effort to save our environment? To come at the question another way: Why do some images startle us into immediate act

32、ion and focus our attention or ways to respond effectively? And why do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a Kin. of paralysis, focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some convenient, less painful distraction?10. Still, there are so many distressing

33、images of environmental destruction that sometimes it seems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them. Before considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respond appropriately.11. A useful system comes fro