英国卫报:60年来的气候变化警告:那些被忽视的迹象(2)(在线收听

But few people seemed willing to see a pattern: “The headlines from around the world told a story still not fully understood or one we don’t want to face,” the report said.

但似乎很少有人愿意看到这种模式。”报告说:“来自世界各地的头条新闻讲述了一种人类还没有完全弄明白的现象,或者一个我们不愿面对的故事。

This claim that no one was paying attention was not entirely fair.

说没有人关注到这一现象也有失公允。

Some scientists had been talking about the issue for a while.

一段时间以来,一些科学家一直在谈论这个问题。

It had been in newspapers and on television, and was even mentioned in a speech by US president Lyndon Johnson in 1965.

它已经出现在报纸和电视上,甚至在美国总统林登-约翰逊1965年的一次演讲中也提到过。

A few months before the CIA report was issued, the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had addressed the UN under a banner of applying science to “the problems that science has helped to create”,

在中情局报告发布的几个月前,美国国务卿亨利-基辛格在联合国发表讲话,打着应用科学解决 “科学帮助造成的问题 ”的旗号,

including his worry that the poorest nations were now threatened with “the possibility of climatic changes in the monsoon belt and perhaps throughout the world”.

包括他担心最贫穷的国家现在受到 “季风带乃至整个世界气候变化的威胁”。

Still, the report’s authors had a point: climate change wasn’t getting the attention it could have, and there was a lack of urgency in discussions.

然而,报告的作者有一个观点:气候变化并没有得到应有的关注,而且在讨论中缺乏紧迫性。

There was no large public outcry, nor did anyone seem to be trying to generate one.

没有大规模的公众呼声,似乎也没有人试图产生这样的呼声。

Although initially prepared as a classified working paper, the report ended up in the New York Times a few years later.

虽然最初是作为机密工作文件准备的,但该报告几年后出现在《纽约时报》上。

By this point, February 1977, the problem of burning fossil fuels was seen more through the lens of the domestic oil crisis rather than overseas famine.

那时候,即1977年2月,人们从燃烧化石燃料上看到的更多是国内的石油危机,而不是海外的饥荒。

The climate crisis might still feel remote, the New York Times mused, but as Americans feel the difficulties of unusual weather combined with shortages of oil, perhaps this might unlock some change?

《纽约时报》认为,气候危机可能仍然感觉很遥远,但当美国人感受到异常天气和石油短缺的困难时,也许这可能引发一些改变?

The paper reported that both energy and climate experts shared the hope “that the current crisis is severe enough and close enough to home to encourage the interest and planning required to deal with these long-range issues before the problems get too much worse”.

该报报道说,能源和气候专家都希望目前的危机足够严重,而且和每个人密切相关,以引起人们的兴趣和规划,在情况恶化之前处理这些长期问题。

And yet, if anything, debate about climate change in the last third of the 20th century would be characterised as much by delay as concern, not least because of something the political analysts at the CIA seem to have missed: fightback from the fossil fuel industries.

然而,如果有的话,在20世纪最后三分之一的时间里,关于气候变化的辩论的特点是拖延,而不是关注它,特别是由于中央情报局的政治分析家们似乎忽略了一些东西:来自化石燃料行业的反击。

  原文地址:http://www.tingroom.com/lesson/ygwb/547743.html