字神帝國英語天地

今日主題：Forests Suck Up Less Carbon after Drought
乾旱後森林碳吸收量減少

托福聽力最好的課外教材：60-Second Science
康康精選托福會考的主題，堅持每天精聽一定會進步的哦!!

​​​​​​​ 建議方法：
1. 先聽兩三遍(不看文稿)
2. 再一句一句聽寫
3. 最後check文稿，看哪聽不出來，是單字沒背過，還是單字發音不熟。
4. 堅持天天聽，就能每天進步哦。

​​​​​​​ MP3音檔：喜歡的同學，幫忙推或按讚哦~~
http://online1.tingclass.net/voas…/2015/20150813sa_earth.mp3

​​​​​​​ 只有音檔怎夠，聽不懂地方，不用怕，康康幫你準備好中英文稿了：

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ 中英文稿：

Climate scientists forecast sea levels to rise anywhere from one to four feet by the end of the century. That's a pretty big range. And there's a good reason for that: there's a lot of uncertainty baked into climate models.
氣候學家預測在本世紀末所有地方的海平面會上升1到4英呎左右。這可是一個很大的範圍了。有一個很好的理由解釋這個較大的預測範圍：研究氣候的模型中存在很多不確定的因素。

Take, for example, the way climate models predict how trees respond to drought. "Drought in these models is treated as a light switch"—either on or off—「but in the real world we know that drought can damage trees, and it can take some time for trees to repair this damage and recover."
例如，以氣候模型如何預測樹木對幹旱的反映為例，「乾旱在這些氣候模型中可以看成照明開關——或開或關——」但是在現實情境中我們知道乾旱可以損害樹木，並且樹木修復這些損傷並康復需要一段時間。

William Anderegg, an ecologist at Princeton University. He and his colleagues examined tree ring data from more than 1,300 sites around the world. And by comparing the rings with known drought records they found that trees don't simply kick back into gear as soon as rains return. Drought actually puts the trees' water transport systems under a huge amount of tension, he says, causing air bubbles to leak in, which damages or blocks those pipes. "I often compare this to a sort of a heart attack for a tree. That in some cases it can be lethal and in some cases they can repair that blockage."
威廉•安德雷格是美國普林斯頓大學的一位生態學家。他和同事們在全球1300多個地方研究了樹木的年輪。通過比較這些年輪和已知的乾旱信息，他們發現樹木 在雨水來臨後並不是簡單地立刻恢復。實際上，乾旱讓樹木的水力運輸系統承受了巨大的壓力，威廉說，乾旱讓樹木的氣孔失去水分，從而損壞或堵塞了這些通道。 「我經常將這個過程比作樹木患了心臟病。有時候這種情況是致命的，但是有時候樹木又能修復堵塞。」

That drought 'hangover' causes tree growth to lag five to ten percent below normal for several years following the dry spell. "This is a problem because forests currently take up about 25 percent of human emissions of CO2, which is an incredible break on climate change.」 And the less CO2 the trees are able to take up—the warmer it gets. The findings appears in the journal Science.
乾旱所引起的「後遺症」就是，在乾旱過後，樹木的生長要比正常時候延緩了5到10個百分點。那麼問題就來了。因為現在人們排放的CO2有25%被森林吸收，這就會使氣候出現巨大的變化。因為森林吸收的二氧化碳越少，氣候就會變得越暖。該研究成果發表在《科學》雜誌上。

The thing this study makes clear, is that predicting climate change… is hard. "It's really hard. These models have an incredibly challenging task of representing processes that occur from a leaf scale to a continent scale in space. And from several seconds to hundreds of years or at least a hundred years in time." But maybe a better understanding of how much carbon trees soak up—and how much they don't—will make climate forecasting just a little bit easier.
該研究明確地指出了，預測氣候變化是很難的。是真的很難。小到葉子層面，大到大陸範圍空間，氣候模型需將將這些過程呈現出來，則面臨著難以想像的挑戰。而 呈現的時間跨度從幾秒到至少一百年甚至成百上千年。也許更好的瞭解樹木吸收碳的多少——以及不能吸收碳的量——則更易預測氣候變化。