2011年6月英语四级阅读Section B passage 2外刊原文

文章来源——The New York Times

Forum Says Climate Shift Brings Deaths

Global warming is causing more than 300,000 deaths and about $125 billion in economic losses each year, according to a report by theGlobal Humanitarian Forum, an organization led by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general.

The report, to be released Friday, sifted data sets and existing studies of health, disaster, population and economic trends. It found that human-influenced climate change — mainly by exacerbating flooding and drought — was elevating the global death rates from illnesses including malnutrition, diarrheal disease, malaria and heat-related ailments. But even before its release, the report drew criticism from some experts on climate and risk, who questioned its methods and conclusions.

Along with the deaths, the report said that the lives of 325 million people, primarily in poor countries, were being seriously affected by climate change. It projected that the number would double by 2030.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies disaster trends, said the forum’s report was “a methodological embarrassment” because there was no way to distinguish deaths or economic losses related to human-driven global warming amid the much larger losses resulting from the growth in populations and economic development in vulnerable regions. Dr. Pielke said that “climate change is an important problem requiring our utmost attention.” But the report, he said, “will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed.”

However, Soren Peter Andreasen, a social scientist at Dalberg Global Development Partners who supervised the writing of the report, defended it, saying that it was clear that the numbers were rough estimates. The report appeared aimed at world leaders, who will meet in Copenhagen in December to negotiate a new international climate treaty.

In a press release describing the report, Mr. Annan stressed the need for the negotiations to focus on increasing the flow of money from rich to poor regions to help reduce their vulnerability to climate hazards while still curbing the emissions of the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. More than 90 percent of the human and economic losses from climate change are occurring in poor countries, according to the report.

The next round of preliminary talks leading up to the December negotiations is scheduled to begin Monday in Bonn, Germany.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, an economist, was one of 12 experts who vetted the report for the forum. He acknowledged that some of the report’s conclusions were oversimplified. Still, he said, he endorsed the report’s message. He and others who work in vulnerable regions like Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, he said, are convinced that global warming is already harming communities.

2011年6月大学英语四级考试答案汇总