English Tips Self-Taught

terça-feira, 26 de outubro de 2010

NIGHTMARE SCENARIO BY TIM FLANNERY

Language Level: Intermediate

Standard accent: British

Source: Speak Up

WE MEET THE AUTHOR

Nightmare Scenario

The real Tim Flannery was also interviewed by Speak Up. We asked him to describe the worst-case scenario for the future of our planet:

Tim Flannery

(Australian Accent)

No-one can predict the future, but what I think the worst case that might happen is that the North Polar ice cap will melt and then the Greenland ice cap will start to collapse and we will have a very rapid rise in sea level and maybe 500 million people will displaced by the rising sea level and many cities around the world will disappear under the waves and all of our port facilities will cease operating, so we won’t be able to transport food around the world, or goods, and many of our airports will become unfunctional and people will start trying to protect their own little patch and we have a propensity to violence. When we are stressed we tend to react with violence and the world is full of nuclear weapons, so the worst catastrophe I can imagine is where we enter a new dark age, where law and order has broken down internationally. Most people would die in that circumstance (sic), most people living on the world will die and who knows when that might happen. It could be five years, 15 years, 30 years away, you know, but that is my nightmare scenario.

MAKING DIFFERENCE

Nevertheless Flannery believes that we can all do something to avoid this scenario:

Tim Flannery:

My house only has electricity from solar panels, from “photovoltaic,” we call them, I have a little hybrid car, a Toyota car. I offset all of my emissions from travel, my carbon emissions, so that means that I pay a company to invest in wind power or something, every time I travel by aircraft and I generally try to do things like eat local food, instead of food, instead of food that’s been transported halfway around the world, using fossil fuels. So it changes your whole lifestyle after a while, this thing, but changes it for the better.

GLOSSARY

a) The North Polar ice cap will melt: a calota polar ártica derreterá.

b) Greenland: Groelândia

c) Rise: Subida, aqui elevar o nível do mar.

d) Port facilities: Instalações portuárias.

e)To protect their own little patch: Defender seu pequeno espaço de terra

f)Nightmare scenario: Cenário de pesadelo, a hipótese mais pessimista.

g)Offset: Eu compenso (o efeito de)

segunda-feira, 25 de outubro de 2010

THE WEATHER MAKERS

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The Weather Makers

Source: Speak Up

Language Level: Advanced

According to Tim Flannery, the Planet Earth doesn’t wait for delay of Governors. In order to save the Planet (and survive ourselves) we have to act, hurry up. Here is part of the article of the Bestseller.

Tim Fannery is an Australian scientist explorer and conservationist. He is also the author of The Weather Maker: How Man is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth. This is an excerpt from the final chapter of the English Edition:

Chapter 35: Over to you

There is one thing that no CEO can afford to look away from – the melee of buyers and sellers known as the market. It is may firm belief that all the efforts of government and industry will come to naught unless the good citizen and consumer takes the initiative, and in tackling climate change the consumer it in a most fortunate position.

You can, in a few months rather than the fifty years allowed by some governments, easily attain the 70 percent reduction in emissions required to stabilize the earth’s climate. All it takes are a few changes to your personal life, none of which requires serious sacrifices. Understanding how you use electricity is the most powerful tool in your armory, for that allows you to make effective decisions about reducing your personal emissions of CO2. To begin, pick up and read carefully your electricity bill. Is your bill higher than it was at the same last year? It so, why? A phone call or e-mail inquiry to your power supply may help clarify this.

If you wish to take more decisive action the best place for most people to start is with hot water. In the developed world, roughly one-third of CO2, emissions result from domestic power, and one-third of a typical domestic power bill is spent on heating water. This is crazy, since the sun will heat your water for free if you have the right device. An initial outlay is required, but such are the benefit that it is well worth taking out a loan to do so, for in sunny climates like California or southern Europe the payback period is around two or three year, and as the devices usually carry a ten-years guarantee, that means at least seven to eight years of free hot water. Even in cloudy regions such as Germany and Britain you will get several years’ worth of how water for free.

If you wish to reduce your impact to reduce your impact even further, start with the greatest consumers of power, which of most people are air conditioning, heating, and refrigeration. If you are thinking of installing any such items, you should seek out the most energy-efficient model available. A good rule of thumb is to choose the smallest device to suit your average needs, and consider alternatives: It may be cheaper to install insulation rather than buying and running a larger heater or cooler. It can be difficult to convince children that they need to turn off appliances when they are finished with them. One way to teach them is for a family to examine its power bill together and set a target for reduction. When it’s met, give the kids the saving.

It is not feasible right now for most of us to do away with burning fossil fuels for transport, but we can greatly reduce their use. Walking wherever possible is highly effective, as is taking public transport. Hybrid fuel vehicles are twice as fuel efficient as a standard, similar-sized car, and trading in your four-wheel-drive or SUV for a medium-sized hybrid fuel car cuts your personal transport emissions by 70 percent in one fell swoop. For those who cannot or do not wish to drive a hybrid, a good rule is to buy the smallest vehicle capable of doing the job you most often require. You can always rent for the rare occasions you need something larger. A few years from now, if you have invested in solar power, you should be able to purchase a compressed-air vehicle. Then you can truly thumb your nose at all of those power and gas bills.

As you read through this list of actions to combat climate change, you might be skeptical that such steps can have such a huge impact. But not only is our global climate approaching a tipping point, our economy is as well, for the energy sector is about to experience what the Internet brought to the media – an age wherein previously discrete products are in competition with each other, and with the individual.

If enough of us buy green power, solar planet, solar hot water systems, and hybrid vehicles, the cost of these items with plummet. This will encourage the sale of yet more panels and wind domestic power will be generated by renewable technologies. This will place sufficient pressure on industry that, when combined with the pressure from Kyoto, it will compel energy-hungry enterprises to maximize efficiency and turn to clean power generation. This will make renewable even more affordable. As a result, the developing world – including China and India – will be able to afford clean power rather than filthy coal clean power rather than filthy coal.

With a little help from you, right now, the developing giants of Asia might even avoid the full carbon catastrophe in which we, in the industrialized world, find ourselves so deeply mired.

Much could go wrong with this linked lifeline to climate safety. It may be that the big power users will infiltrate governments further and stymie the renewable sector; or maybe we will act too slowly, and nations such as China and India will have already invested in fossil fuel generation before the price of renewable comes down. Or perhaps the rate of climate change will be discovered to be too great and we will have to draw CO2 from the atmosphere.

As these challenges suggest, we are the generation fated to live in the most interesting of times, for we are now the weather makers, and the future of biodiversity and civilization hangs on our actions.

I have done my best to fashion a manual on the use of Earth’s thermostat. Now it’s over to you.

Words and Their Stories: Grapevine

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Now, the VOA Special English program WORDS AND THEIR STORIES.

Some of the most exciting information comes by way of the grapevine.

That is so because reports received through the grapevine are supposed to be secret. The information is all hush hush. It is whispered into your ear with the understanding that you will not pass it on to others.

You feel honored and excited. You are one of the special few to get this information. You cannot wait. You must quickly find other ears to pour the information into. And so, the information - secret as it is – begins to spread. Nobody knows how far.

The expression by the grapevine is more than one hundred years old.

The American inventor, Samuel F. Morse, is largely responsible for the birth of the expression. Among others, he experimented with the idea of telegraphy – sending messages over a wire by electricity. When Morse finally completed his telegraphic instrument, he went before Congress to show that it worked. He sent a message over a wire from Washington to Baltimore. The message was: “What hath God wrought?” This was on May twenty-fourth, eighteen forty-four.

Quickly, companies began to build telegraph lines from one place to another. Men everywhere seemed to be putting up poles with strings of wire for carrying telegraphic messages. The workmanship was poor. And the wires were not put up straight.

Some of the results looked strange. People said they looked like a grapevine. A large number of the telegraph lines were going in all directions, as crooked as the vines that grapes grow on. So was born the expression, by the grapevine.

Some writers believe that the phrase would soon have disappeared were it not for the American Civil War.

Soon after the war began in eighteen sixty-one, military commanders started to send battlefield reports by telegraph. People began hearing the phrase by the grapevine to describe false as well as true reports from the battlefield. It was like a game. Was it true? Who says so?

Now, as in those far-off Civil War days, getting information by the grapevine remains something of a game. A friend brings you a bit of strange news. “No,” you say, “it just can’t be true! Who told you?” Comes the answer, “I got it by the grapevine.”

You really cannot know how much – if any – of the information that comes to you by the grapevine is true or false. Still, in the words of an old American saying, the person who keeps pulling the grapevine shakes down at least a few grapes.

(MUSIC)

You have been listening to the VOA Special English program WORDS AND THEIR STORIES. I’m Warren Scheer.