The 17 trillion US gallons of rain, roughly 26m Olympic swimming pools, dumpe

游客2024-04-05 15

问题 The 17 trillion US gallons of rain, roughly 26m Olympic swimming pools, dumped on Texas by Hurricane Harvey has set a new high for a tropical system in the US, but it is unlikely to last long as rising man-made emissions push the global climate deeper into uncharted territory.
Images of flooded streets in Texas are mirrored by scenes of inundated(洪泛的)communities in India and Bangladesh, the recent mudslides in Sierra Leone and last month’s deadly overflow of a Yangtze tributary(支流)in China. In part, these calamities are seasonal. In part, the impact depends on local factors. But scientists tell us such extremes are likely to become more common and more devastating as a result of rising global temperatures and increasingly intense rainfall.
Our planet is in an era of unwelcome records. For each of the past three years, temperatures have hit peaks not seen since the birth of meteorology(气象学), and probably not for more than 110,000 years. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air is at its highest level in 4m years. This does not cause storms like Harvey—there have always been storms and hurricanes at this time of year along the Gulf of Mexico—but it makes them wetter and more powerful.
" For large countries like the United States, we can expect further rainfall records—and not just for hurricanes," said Friederike Otto, deputy director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. This is part of a wider trend. "For the globe, we’ll see heat and extreme rainfall records fall for the foreseeable future," she predicted. She cautioned that the situation is likely to be different from country to country. Many factors are involved, but human impact on the climate has added to the tendency for more severe droughts and fiercer storms.
A key focus now is whether climate change is connected to the " stalling" of storms. In the US, hurricanes usually move inland and diminish in power as they get further from the sea. Harvey, however, was stationary for several days—which is the main factor in its rainfall record.
Scientists have said this may be the single biggest question posed by Harvey. Researchers have recently identified a slowdown of atmospheric summer circulation in the mid-latitudes as a result of strong warming in the Arctic. But such studies of pressure patterns need more powerful analytical tools, including supercomputers.
In the US, however, such research has become highly politicised. President Donald Trump has announced that the US will pull out of the Paris climate treaty and cut funding for related research. " It shouldn’t be a political matter to try to understand how much more frequent events like Harvey will become in the future," said Tim Palmer, a professor at the University of Oxford. "It appalls me how basic science has become involved in politics like this. " [br] The disasters mentioned in Para. 2 serve as examples to show that______.

选项 A、disasters in different areas share high similarity
B、most of the worldwide calamities are seasonal
C、extreme weathers are becoming more common
D、rising temperatures cause more intense rainfall

答案 C

解析推理判断题。本题考查作者列举近期一些重大灾害的目的。作者在第一段中着重介绍了哈维的强度和破纪录的雨量，而定位段中转而介绍了近期其他地区的同类灾害，并在定位段末句中指出，科学家警告人们这样的极端天气可能会变得更加普遍且破坏性更强，可推知作者列举之前的例子就是为了给这个论断提供佐证，故答案为C)。A)“不同地区的灾害具有高度的相似性”，作者在文中并没有进行比较，也没有说明这些灾害之间相似性是否很高，故排除；B)“世界范围内的大多数灾害都是季节性的”，作者在列举这些灾害后指出，这些灾害是季节性的，其影响取决于当地因素，但在这两句话之前都加上了“某种程度上讲”，说明作者要陈述的观点并不在此，故排除；D)“温度升高引起降水增强”是对定位段末句的曲解，原文是指气温升高和降雨量不断增大是极端天气增多的原因，并没有说这两者之间是否存在因果关系，故排除。

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