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  3. Weather in the World Becomes Warm to Exhaust with Greenhouse Gas It was time to get creative. In 2006, a head of government

Weather in the World Becomes Warm to Exhaust with Greenhouse Gas It was time to get creative. In 2006, a head of government

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问题          Weather in the World Becomes Warm to Exhaust with Greenhouse Gas
    It was time to get creative. In 2006, a head of government had signed a law requiring that greenhouse gases be cut 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. The cuts will be carried out through a cap-and-trade system, like the one passed by the House of Representatives and introduced in the Senate, due to start in 2012. In an effort to reduce the cost of those greenhouse cuts, the executive reached out to his counterparts in Brazil and Indonesia, which have more than half of the world’s remaining tropical forests. Because reducing deforestation is the cheapest way to mitigate climate change in the short term, he wanted utilities and other greenhouse emitters to be able to pay state governments in Brazil and Indonesia to preserve their forests, which ranchers and loggers keep whacking .yielding the same net gain for the atmosphere as reducing their own emissions of carbon dioxide. The details—how to measure the C02 cuts, how much to pay for pre-serving forests —will be worked out in the next few months, in time to set the rules for cap-and-trade.
    The official is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, and his bilateral agreements with counterparts from Amazonas, Papua, and six other states in Brazil and Indonesia with millions of hectares of tropical forests illustrate why the impending failure to reach a new global climate accord isn’t the disaster it might have been. Think " subnational". Although the 192 countries set to meet in Copenhagen next month will not reach a legally binding treaty setting out targets for greenhousegas reductions starting in 2012, cities, states, and provinces are on track to cut greenhouse gases. They see it as a way to retool their economies, draw high-paying jobs, and establish the industries of tomorrow, leapfrogging the sclerotic global talks. California’s partnerships, for instance, will be the first time tropical forests are corralled into an international agreement. Not even the 1997 Kyoto climate treaty which requires wealthy countries to reduce their emissions of six greenhouse gases 5.2 percent from 1990 levels, does that. "We will definitely keep moving ahead," says Anthony Brunello, California’s deputy secretary for climate and energy.
    That’s the promise not only from states and provinces but also from businesses, especially those placing big bets on renewable energy and technologies to boost energy effcie-ncy. Which raises a question that makes climate activists uneasy: why, exactly, was the Copenhagen meeting painted as the do-or-die moment—" the most important meeting since the end of the second world war", one green group called it—for averting calamitous climate change?
    Seeing the falure of Copenhagen as something short of Armageddon is not contrar-ianism for contrarianism’s sake. Just to be clear, if the world had agreed on what quantity of greenhouse-gas emissions to cut by when—on " targets and timetables" , in the prevailing argot—it would have launched us down a path that could keep global warming bel we 2 degrees Celsius, relative to pre-industrial levels, which many climate scientists see as a point of no return. The meltdown of global climate talks is therefore a setback to efforts to avert the worst consequences of global warming.
The word "mitigate" in Paragraph 1 probably means______.
选项 A、settle
B、moderate
C、suspend
D、accelerate
答案B
解析 语义理解题。根据题干提示定位到第一段。联系关键词所在句子可知，该句含义是消减森林砍伐对于气候变化的作用，联系上下文可知，消减森林砍伐有助于缓解气候变化，由此可推知mitigate含有“缓解”之意，因此可推知[B]含义与之相符，故为正确答案。[A]“解决”，[C]“暂停”和[D]“加速”均为原文不符，故都排除。
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