American Language Programm (стр. 1 )

TIMELY TOPICS

An advanced reading, Grammar and Vocabulary Book

Patrick J. Aquilina

American Language Programm

Columbia University

CHAPTER 10: The Environment

Reading 1: "The Warming Globe'

Prereading Questions

Have you personally noticed any change in weather patterns in your country in recent years? What are these changes? Is the weather any different now from the way you remember it as a child? What are the major sources of energy in your country? Are there any problems with these energy sources? Are any alternative sources of energy being tried? What environmental problems does your country have? Is anything being done about these problems? Is there a "green" movement in your country? If so, what actions have they taken, and what effects do you think they have had—on the environment, on the policies of the country, or on the consciousness of the people? What specific words would you expect to see in an article about global warming? Brainstorm with other students to make a list of as many words as possible that deal with this topic. Be sure that all students in your group have a basic understanding of the terms on your list.

Vocabulary Practice p.278

Circle the cornet synonym or definition for each of the italicized words in the sentences below. Use the context of the sentences to help you guess the meaning.

1.  The evidence for global warming is still largely conjectural. True the temperature has risen since the start of the century, but most meteorologists are not sure that the globe is already warming.

a.  believed

b.  based on a guess

c.  disbelieved

2.  Untangling the greenhouse effect from other broad movements in the earth's temperature is extremely difficult.

a.  separating

b.  understanding

c.  interpreting

3.  Besides, warming will be (A.) enhanced or (B.) offset in some highly uncertain ways.

(A.) a. stopped

b. started

c. made greater, better

(B.) a. counterbalanced

b. stopped

c. started

4.  Think of the vast alterations in the earth's geography caused by the last ice age.

a.  changes

b.  time sequence

c.  interest

5.  The Soviet Union has been intrigued by the idea of being able to cultivate regions which previously it had been unable to cultivate.

a.  has lost its interest

b.  has had its interest aroused

c.  has been considering

c.

6.  A rise in the sea level could drive over 60 million people from their homes. Just the numbers could swamp most efforts at control.

a.  increase

b.  put under water

c.  overwhelm

7.  By the time scientists know more about the size and timing of global warming, it will have become more difficult and expensive to tackle.

a.  work with and try to resolve

b.  forget about

c.  understand the nature of

8.  Curbing the use of some gases will be relatively easy.

a.  Increasing

b.  Penalizing

c.  Controlling

9.  Mr. Irving Mintzer of the World Resources Institute made several crucial assumptions when he tried to show how future warming might be stabilized.

a.  unimportant

b.  improvable

c.  extremely important

10.  Governments are showing a wary but growing interest in the concept of putting a tax on fuels depending on the amount of-carbon they contain.

a.  superficial

b.  worried

c.  cautious

11.  Only one way of generating electricity is now commercially viable.

a.  not acceptable

b.  possible but not probable

c.  capable of success, life

12.  But any program to stop global warming will have to include a large expansion of nuclear power. This is awkward for many environmentalists, whose first and deepest sentiment is a hatred of nuclear power.

a.  acceptable

b.  uncomfortable

c.  comfortable

13.  Many developing countries, having embarked hopefully on nuclear programs in the early 1970s, have found them plagued by delays and cost over-runs.

a.  closed down

b.  continued

c.  started

14.  Just the size of investment needed to build even one plant makes nuclear power intimidating for countries with little foreign-borrowing capacity.

possible frightening interesting

15.  Above all, developed countries will worry about the security implications of putting more nuclear capacity in countries which may turn out to be hostile, irresponsible, or simply inept.

incompetent friendly unfriendly

The Warming Globe p.280

By Prances Craincross

"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it," said Charles Dudley Warner.1 He spoke too soon. Some of the gases that have built up in the atmosphere since the Industrial revolution—carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane and CFCs2—have the ability to trap some of the sun's returning rays like the glass of a greenhouse. As a result, many scientists believe, the planet's surface may warm up far more rapidly than at any time in the past. If that happens, the world may eventually be able to support fewer people than it can today.

The evidence for global warming is SOD largely conjectural. True, the global temperature has risen by about 0.5°C since the start of this century, and the six warmest year» on record have fallen in the 1980s. But most meteorologists are not yet sure that the globe is already warming. Untangling the greenhouse effect from other broad movements to the earth's temperature is extremely difficult.

Besides, warming will be enhanced or offset In some highly uncertain ways. For Instance, a warmer atmosphere will hold more water vapour.3 Low clouds reflect sunlight, and so help to cool the earth; high clouds let sunlight through but trap returning radiation, so helping to warm the earth. The ocean mops up4 much of the world's output of carbon, but warm water holds less carbon than cool. As the sea will heat up more slowly than the land, will it become a carbon source, not a sink?

The pace of warming is almost impossible to predict. But at any given time, the actual warming that has taken place will be less than the warming to which the planet is eventually committed. Even if man stopped producing greenhouse gases tomorrow, some warming would still take place. The conventional wisdom5 is that the global mean temperature will rise by between 1° and 2°C by 2030, and a further 0.5° by mid-century. In 60 years. In other words, the temperature could rise by half as much as the rise of 5°C since the last ice age, 18,000 years ago. Think of the vast alterations in the earth's geography caused by that infinitely slower change. For many of earth's plants and animals, a few degrees make the difference between survival and extinction. "Global warming", thinks Mr. Norman Myers, a British environment consultant, "may prove to be the single greatest threat to our fellow species."

Those who live in cold climates may rather like the thought of warmer winters, and the Soviet Union has been intrigued by the idea of being able to cultivate its uninhabitable steppes.6 But climate models find it hard to predict the way the weather will change in particular regions. For Instance, latitudes nearer the poles may heat up more than those nearer the equator. That will probably change the pattern of ocean currents. A shift in the Gulf Stream could alter the climate of Western Europe or America by more than the greenhouse effect alone.

People, too, will find it hard to adapt. As warm water expands, the sea level might rise. One estimate says that a rise of 1-2°C might cause a 30- to 40-cm rise in sea level. Some of the world's most densely populated areas are most vulnerable to flooding. Nearly one third of mankind lives within 40 miles of the sea, where land tends to be richest— In Bangladesh, the Nile delta, China, Japan, and the Netherlands. Quite a small rise in sea level might cause a growing tide of environmental refugees. Sir Crispin Tlckell, Britain's ambassador to the United Nation», draws a hair-raising7 picture of a world in which changing climate might, at a cautious guess, drive over 60m8 people from their homes. "Desperation could push Africans Into Europe, Chinese into the relatively empty parts of the Soviet Union, and Indonesians Into northern Australia. Sheer9 numbers could swamp most efforts at control."

By the time scientists know more about the size and timing of global warming, it will have become more difficult and expensive to tackle. A vast study of the ocean, that clue to many of the unknowns, will not be complete for a decade; but with every year that passes, the earth may be committing itself to faster warming.

How to cool it

Several countries have already decided to end their use of the most potent group of greenhouse gases, CFCs. Quite apart from trapping heat. CFCs also destroy the layer of stratospheric ozone that shields the world from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.

Curbing the use of CFCs will be relatively easy. Production has dropped from its peak in 1974, thanks to bans on most aerosol use in America, Canada, and Sweden. They are produced by few firms in few countries (Du Pont and Allied-Signal accounted for three quarters of America's output in 1986). For the biggest uses of CFCs—as refrigerants, aerosol propellants and bubbles in insulating foam—there are possible substitutes. Even so, It Is still not at all clear that developing countries can be persuaded to use them.

At least it is clear where CFCs come from. Not so with two other greenhouse gases—both, molecule for molecule, much more Important than carbon dioxide. Methane probably comes from rotting waste, flatulent10 animals, leaking natural-gas pipelines, fermenting11 rice paddy fields. Nitrous oxide comes partly from the engines of cars and the chimneys of coal-fired power stations, but also from fertilisers12 and land clearing. Both gases are likely to be far harder to curb, for both technical and economic reason, than emissions of carbon dioxide.

And that will be hard enough. Carbon-dioxide emissions come partly from deforestation,13 which accounts for 10-30% of man's annual carbon-dioxide emissions to the atmosphere. Almost all the rest comes from the burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—which, on combustion,14 release their stored carbon into the skies. So the main way that global warming can be slowed down is by reducing the combustion of carbon-rich fossil fuels.

A meeting of scientists, conservationists, and politicians in Toronto In June 1988 ended with a call for a 20% cut in emissions of carbon-dioxide by 2005, and a 50% cut by 2025. Most people think that cannot be done. Emissions of carbon dioxide by OECD15 countries grew by about 4% a year between 1960 and 1973. Thereafter, in spite of the massive oil-price rise and the spread of nuclear power stations, carbon emissions still grew by 1.5% a year. Conventional estimates predict a growth of about 0.75% a year from now on. And while the OECD countries consume just over half of the world's commercial energy, that share is falling fast. The growth in energy use In the future will come almost entirely from developing and eastern-bloc countries.

One attempt to sketch out how the world might stop warming was presented recently by Mr. Irving Mintzer of the World Resources Institute to a meeting at the East-West Centre in Hawaii. The WRI will publish it this autumn. He used a computer model to show how the commitment to future warming might be stabilised16 by 2060. He made several crucial assumptions:

·  World population stabilises at about 8 billion in 2075. This Is the United Nations's "low" guess; its central guess is much higher.

·  Economic growth per head in is about 3% globally; for today's developing countries, between 1975 and 2025, real Income per head grows at 4.6% a 2025 tills raises real incomes in these countries to about the level of Denmark's in 1975.

·  An annual improvement in efficiency of energy use of 1.7-2.4% in today's industrial countries, and 1.4-2.3% in the developing world. In the past decade the improvement has averaged just over 1% a year. It could be done with existing best technology, but it will require sharp price increases for fossil fuels. Gas and oil prices quadruple17 in real terms; coal prices triple by 2025 and then decline, as coal demand falls.

·  Coal is largely replaced by 2025 by natural gas, solar, nuclear, and renewable fuels.

·  Use of CFCs stops by 2020 in the industrial world, and by 2050 in the developing countries.

"It's technically feasible but politically impossible," Mr. Mintzer believes. His study shows that energy conservation is, beyond a doubt, the most fruitful and cost-effective way to slow global warming. But persuading people to use energy more efficiently will need economic incentives. For the more expensive that carbon-rich energy becomes, the greater the incentive to Introduce technologies to save it. If governments rely on information alone to persuade people to buy more efficient cars or insulate their homes, people may well use their savings to drive their efficient cars more often, or to turn up the central-heating thermostat.18 If so, their demand for energy will not decline.

Rich countries shelter energy prices in various ways. ("Look at the cost of sending a 200-shlp flotilla to the Persian Gulf to keep the oilways open," grumbles19 Mr. Mintzer. "That doesn't show up In oil price. It's buried in the defence20 budget.") Most Third World countries subsidise the consumption of electricity, natural gas, and coal. Countries with subsidised energy use it less efficiently than those where It Is expensive. Indeed, Third World countries account for some of the most appalling examples of energy waste. Like Egypt, which uses a quarter of its electricity (subsidised, inevitably) to drive one vast aluminium plant, in a land that produces no bauxite.21

The best way to make sure that the price of energy reflects the damage it does to the environment is to tax it. Governments are showing a wary but growing Interest in the concept of a carbon fee: a tax that would be levied on fossil-based fuels proportionately to the amount of carbon they contain. The effect would be to make coal dearer22 than oil, and oil dearer than natural gas. Even in the United States, the administration is worrying increasingly about the effects of allowing the price of petrol23 to fall to its lowest level In real terms since the Korean war. Next year the United States will again be dependent for more than half its energy on imported oil. It would not be surprising if something called, perhaps, an "atmospheric users fee" were prepared for next year's budget.

The scope for saving: energy from existing technology is clearly enormous. A switch to greater efficiency could be speeded up by rules to set minimum standards for cars, domestic equipment and the Insulation of new buildings, as well as by insisting on the labelling of domestic appliances to show how much energy they use. The more industry and domestic users get clear information on the amount of energy they are using and how they might reduce it, the faster they are likely to respond.

[. . .]

Quite apart from using energy more efficiently, people will need to use different fuels. In particular, they will need to switch away from coal, even though the world's proven reserves of that fuel vastly exceed those of oil and natural gas. But burning oil releases 70% as much carbon dioxide as coal, natural gas, 50% as much.

Only one way of generating electricity is now commercially viable and produces no carbon dioxide: nuclear power. Plenty of evidence suggests that nuclear power is a worse buy in terms of energy efficiency, if only because of its huge capital cost and lengthy payback period. But any programme24 to stop global warming will almost certainly have to include a large expansion of nuclear power. This is awkward for many greens, whose first and deepest sentiment is a hatred of nuclear power. Several countries now have a moratorium25 on new nuclear plants. In Sweden the government has even committed itself to phasing out its nuclear stations by 2010.

Many developing countries, having embarked hopefully on nuclear programmes in the early 1970s, have found them plagued by delays and cost over-runs. The sheer size of investment needed to build even one plant makes nuclear power intimidating for countries with little foreign-borrowing capacity. The World Bank refuses to lend for nuclear programmes. Above all, developed countries will worry about the security implications of putting more nuclear capacity in countries which may turn out to be hostile, or irresponsible, or simply inept. With China sitting on one-third of the world's known coal reserves, it will be hard choice.

Comprehension and Discussion

A. Circle the correct answer. If the answer is false, tell why.

1.  The process of global warming is irreversible.

True False

The increase in oil prices had a major effect on the level of carbon emissions. .

True False

The assumptions that Mintzer made about the possible stabilization of global warming were unrealistic.

True False

Although gasoline is cheap in the United States, the price has gone up a great deal from what it used to be.

True False

B. Answer the following questions as completely as possible.

1.  How does the cost of gasoline in your country compare with that of the United States? Do you think the cost has anything to do with how much gas people use?

2.  Briefly explain why it may be difficult to predict how the greenhouse effect will affect the planet. Explain first in general terms, and then give specific examples.

3.  The article gives a number of factors which contribute to global warming and both the possibilities of and problems with trying to do anything about them. Tell how the following are produced and what can and cannot be done (or would be very difficult to do) about them and why:

a.  CFCs

b.  methane

c.  nitrous oxide

d.  carbon dioxide emissions

4.  What is the problem with energy conservation as a means of slowing down global warning?

5.  Explain how taxes and the use of existing technology could be helpful in the fight against global warming.

6.  What are the problems with the use of nuclear energy?

7.  What do you feel can and should be done about energy use and global warming?

Vocabulary Practice p.285

Complete the sentences below with the correct words from the following list. You may have to use different word forms and tenses. Do not use a word more than once.

Sentences 1-6	Sentences 7-13
awkward tackle embark viable alter conjectural enhance swamp	offset intrigue wary crucial inept intimidate curb untangle

Many industrialized countries have ________ on a variety of efforts, such as taxes, bans, financial incentives, etc., to cut down on the use of energy. Most Third World countries are too (a.) ______ with the problem of how to feed their people to think about (b.) ________ or cutting down on the type of fuel they use. They are more worried about (c.) ________ the life of their people now than doing something about a problem that may or may not occur in 50 years. Developed countries might feel a certain degree of ______ in asking developing countries to give up or cut down on using fuels which they have plenty of and which are cheap for them. Disagreements in international conferences can be difficult __________ because of the different interests, politics, and resources of each country. Some scientists ________ that by the year 2030, the mean temperature of the world will have risen by almost 2° C. If global warming and population growth continue according to some of the worst-case scenarios, the ________ of the planet could be in question. Because so many unpredictable factors are involved, sometimes it can be difficult to ________ facts from guesses. One of the fears of nuclear power is that great danger could be caused simply by the (a.) _________ of a worker in a nuclear power station. Government and company officials say that this danger is (b.) ________ by controls built into the system to override human error. Although coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel, _________ on its use would be virtually impossible because it is also the most abundant. Since some developing countries have great reserves of coal, they will need financial incentives, not threats or ________, to cut down or eliminate the use of this highly polluting fuel. Even though environmentalists have been ________ by the use of solar power for many years, it is still considered experimental and has some problems to be worked out. The developed countries are ________ about giving developing countries the ability to have nuclear power. Whether one believes in the negative effects of global warming or not, most people would agree it is _________ that something be done to help tine environment.

Reading 2: "How Hard Will It Be?'

Prereading Questions

1.  Imagine three simple, everyday changes that people can make in their lives, particularly in what they buy and how they use products, that might help the environment. If everyone, or even the majority of people, were to follow these changes, can you imagine any negative consequences that might result?

2.  Why might a government hesitate to pass legislation that would be benefit to the environment?

3.  What problems might occur if all of the nations of the world try to sign treaty to protect the environment?

Vocabulary Practice p.295

Match the italicized words in the following sentences with the synonyms or definitions in the lists below. Use the context of the sentence to help you guess the meaning.

Sentence 1 - 10	Sentence
____spread out investments or business activities; vary	____a superficial story to show or il lustrate a deeper point
____made impure; polluted	____difficult position
____basic installations for the functioning of a government, national or local	____move without any additional effort or acceleration; do the same as before
____a very large, indefinite number	____obvious; noticeable
____very wasteful; extravagant	____abundant; large in number
____promise to give up or not to do something	____amount produced; profit on an investment
____be successful; grow well	____stimulate; urge
____the process of exhausting; using up and taking away	____eliminate gradually; one step at a time
____lessen in relative importance	____widely and unfavorably known
____complete display	____miserably

1.  It's because our profligate ways have done so much harm that large-scale change is inevitable.

2.  Unemployment anywhere is a drain on the country's resources everywhere.

3.  If the car company's managers deserve their opulent salaries, they probably will have diversified in those directions before the car market dries up entirely.

4.  The major manufacturers who convert to new products or technologies, in time, will flourish.

5.  There's all that national infrastructure—the decaying water and sewage systems, the rusted and worn bridges, tunnels and public buildings, which need to be rebuilt.

6.  Some of the myriad new jobs that open up will not attract the skilled worker who has lost his job.

7.  The water will soon be contaminated again by airborne pollution.

8.  Even the Great Crash of October 1929, might pale alongside that sudden fall that might occur in the future.

9.  For example, the effects of global warmup—even severe warmup accompanied with the whole panoply of ills like high sea-level rise and violent weather—aren't going to affect everybody in the world to the same degree.

10.  Do we Americans have any right to ask an African, Asian, or Latin American peasant to foreswear any hope of ever owning a car or a dishwasher, or of flying in a jet plane?

11.  Few Third World people are going to be willing to abandon their hopes of making their own lives better for the prospect of some abstract future good; not while they can see every day, on their little black-and-white village television sets, that the rest of us are enjoying copious quantities of these things already.

12.  It is not merely peasants who will be less than overjoyed at the prospect of making economic sacrifices. Some highly industrialized societies are in similar straits, if not worse ones.

13.  The most conspicuous of these industrialized societies that will have to make economic sacrifices are the nations of Eastern Europe.

14.  But most of all, the driving force was simply a hunger for a better life, for the good life of material well-being that Communism had promised and so abjectly failed to provide.

15.  We have already seen that the industries of the countries of the former Warsaw Pact are notoriously the dirtiest and most destructive in the world.

16.  Hardin expresses the "tragedy of the commons" in an allegory, which goes like this: In a certain village twenty families live...

17.  And the ultimate effect is that now there are forty cows on a pasture that can't support more than twenty. It isn't just a matter of lowered milk yields now.

18.  Let's say that in the first legislative bundle are such relatively moderate, preliminary measures as a total ban on CFCs,..., phasing out many bombers, missiles, tanks, and warships, reducing troop levels and closing many military bases.

19.  Therefore X can coast along in the good old-fashioned, high-polluting way.

20.  The only thing that spurs us on to try to solve the problems is that we don't have a choice.

How Hard Will It Be? p.297

By Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl

Make no mistake about It. our environmental problems mean that large-scale changes lie ahead. Businesses will be harmed, people will have to change their jobs. The reason for this isn't that do-gooder1 environmentalists like ourselves insist on it because of some idealistic devotion to "nature" or the spotted owl.2 It's because our profligate ways have done so much harm that large-scale change is inevitable. The only choice we have—the only future we can invent—lies in deciding which kinds of change will be best in the long run, the ones that will come about because we try to clean the world up, or the worse ones that will come about on their own if we don't.

The fact that many people will lose their jobs is bad news for them. It isn't good news for anybody else, either. Unemployment anywhere is a drain on the country's resources everywhere. Adding to it is not a plus. This growth in joblessness won't happen because anyone wishes it to. It will happen inevitably, simply because there is no way to avoid it. If we drive our cars less, they will wear out more slowly and fewer cars will have to be built to replace them; therefore jobs will be lost in Detroit (and in Osaka and many other places around the world). If we recycle paper, fewer trees will have to be cut down to make new pulp;3 whereupon many of the men and women whose jobs depend on lumbering will lose them. If we cut down on the burning of fossil fuel, oil workers and coal miners will be laid off.

But if we don't do those things, we face a future of disease, scarcity, and discomfort... at best.

Those of us who are not directly personally affected by the changes environmental dislocations will bring about can take some philosophical comfort from reflecting that all these things are going to be happening in a good cause. That isn't likely to cheer a newly unemployed person up, but there's a bright side here, too. Although many Jobs will disappear, many new ones will be created and more often than not the new Jobs will be better than the old.

Does the local automobile factory close down because no one's buying new cars right now? Too bad; but the fact that people don't want to drive cars very much any more doesn't mean they're willing to quit traveling entirely. They'll be customers for the trains, perhaps the magnetic levitation trains4 we talked about earlier. Somebody is going to have to build those maglev trains, as well as the light street rail systems and the monorails and the new fuel-stingy5 aircraft. If the car company's managers deserve their opulent salaries, they probably will have diversified in those directions before the car market dries up entirely. After all, they did so very well once before when, under the stresses of World War II, they switched over to a completely new product line of tanks and Army trucks and bombers as easily and successfully as they had made cars before. The major manufacturers who convert, in time will flourish. The ones who don't, won't.

Then there are all those homes to retrofit6 and the new ones to build. There's all that national Infrastructure—the decaying water and sewage systems, the rusted and worn bridges, tunnels and public buildings—which need to be rebuilt before they collapse entirely from their present decades of neglect. If lumbering7 slows down to a crawl,8 there are whole huge new industries to create in the Pacific Northwest, like fish farming in the mouths of the great rivers, or building and tending power-generating windmill farms, or even "agriforestry" to provide food from clear-cut lands. There is a great need, which will surely become a greater one as our population ages, for health workers of every kind, from paramedics to RNs or even MDs.

Some of the myriad new Jobs will not attract the skilled worker, but we have all those unskilled workers who are now cut out of the job market entirely. For them there will be service jobs, some traditional, like working in fast-food stores, and some relatively new, like sorting trash for recycling. The social value of creating Jobs of tills sort is immense; it can convert welfare clients into productive wage-earners. But probably most of the new jobs will actually be better ones than the old, at least in the sense that they are less damaging to the health and the spirit than mining coal or working on a heavy-industry assembly line.