【名师带你背单词】TED Talk精选《难以忽视的真相背后是什么》Part1/3,曼拓教育微信公众号文章

Angela老师

今天我们一起来看看这篇在PTE中听力考试中高频出现的环境类文章。

Al Gore：What comes after an inconvenient truth？（Part1/3）

相关学科：环境类

Source：

http://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_warns_on_latest_climate_trends/transcript?language=en

Angela老师

下面带着对这些单词和短语的理解，尝试读一读下面的原文，看看是不是容易理解的多了呢？

Last year I showed these two slides so that demonstrate that the arctic ice cap, which for most of the last three million years has been the size of the lower 48 states, has shrunk by 40 percent. But this understates the seriousness of this particular problem because it doesn't show the thickness of the ice. The arctic ice cap is, in a sense, the beating heart of the global climate system. It expands in winter and contracts in summer. The next slide I show you will be a rapid fast-forward of what's happened over the last 25 years. The permanent ice is marked in red. As you see, it expands to the dark blue -- that's the annual ice in winter, and it contracts in summer. The so-called permanent ice, five years old or older, you can see is almost like blood, spilling out of the body here. In 25 years it's gone from this, to this.

This is a problem because the warming heats up the frozen ground around the Arctic Ocean, where there is a massive amount of frozen carbon which, when it thaws, is turned into methane by microbes. Compared to the total amount of global warming pollution in the atmosphere, that amount could double if we cross this tipping point. Already in some shallow lakes in Alaska, methane is actively bubbling up out of the water. The question is whether we will be.

This enormous heat sink heats up Greenland from the north. This is an annual melting river. But the volumes are much larger than ever. This is the Kangerlussuaq River in southwest Greenland. If you want to know how sea level rises from land-base ice melting this is where it reaches the sea. These flows are increasing very rapidly. At the other end of the planet, Antarctica the largest mass of ice on the planet. Last month scientists reported the entire continent is now in negative ice balance. And west Antarctica cropped up on top some under-sea islands, is particularly rapid in its melting. That's equal to 20 feet of sea level, as is Greenland.

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