新冰河期要發生了嗎？
A New Ice Age

An oarsman is someone who rows a boat.
槳手是划船的人。

The weather there continues to be temperate.
那裡的氣候將持續溫和。

The old man looked down on the peaceful landscape from the mountaintop.
那位老人站在山上眺望下面的寧靜景色。

No plants can grow in such a frigid climate.
沒有植物能夠在如此寒冷的氣候下生長。

Bicycle thefts are commonplace in this city.
腳踏車被偷在這個城市是司空見慣的事。

The patient is in the throes of death.
這名病患處於臨終痛苦中。

The country suffered a prolonged drought.
這個國家遭受長期乾旱的苦難。

A glacier is a large mass of ice that moves slowly.
冰河就是一大片緩慢移動的冰。

Oceanography is the scientific study of the sea.
海洋學是研究海洋的科學。

The new CEO hoped to reverse the decline in the company's fortunes.
新總裁希望能夠扭轉公司江河日下的狀況。

A New Ice Age

William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting “George Washington Crossing the Delaware”, which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. “Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,” says Curry, tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. “I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.”

But it may happen again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the 16th- century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece “Hunters in the Snow”, make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cooldown, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago, the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.

“It could happen in 10 years,” says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. “Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.” And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.

A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled “Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises”, produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling fresh water, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.