考研翻译长难句练习42-46原文


原文来自《时代》杂志，没有很大的改动。只动了两个小地方，一个是原文的语法错，改了；一个是原文的一句话太长，不适合做考研翻译练习，我稍微去了一点内容，没有改变意思，不影响理解和翻译。


http://time.blogs.com/eye_on_science/2006/06/the_hottest_ear.html


Whenever I
hear a weather report declaring it's the hottest June 10 on record
or whatever, I can't take it too seriously, because "ever" really
means "as long as the records go back," which is only as far as the
late 1800s. Scientists
have other ways of measuring temperatures before that, though--not
for individual dates, but they can tell the average temperature of
a given year by such proxy measurements as growth marks in corals,
deposits in ocean and lake sediments, and cores drilled into
glacial ice. They can even use drawings of glaciers as they were
hundreds of years ago compared with today.

And in the most comprehensive compilation of such
data to date, says a new report from the National Research Council,
it looks pretty certain that the last few decades have been hotter
than any comparable period in the last 400 years. That's a blow
to those who claim the current warm spell is just part of the
natural up and down of average temperatures--a frequent assertion
of the global-warming-doubters crowd.
The report was triggered by doubts about
past-climate claims made last year by climatologist Michael Mann,
of the

University of
Virginia (he's the
creator of the "hockey
stick" graph Al Gore used in "An Inconvenient
Truth" to dramatize the rise in carbondioxide in recent years).
Mann claimed that the recent warming was unprecedented in the past
thousand years--that led Congress to order up an assessment by the
prestigious Research Council. Their conclusion was that a thousand
years was reasonable, but not overwhelmingly supported by the data.
But the past 400 was--so resoundingly that it fully supports the
claim that today's temperatures are unnaturally warm, just as
global warming theory has been predicting for a hundred
years. And if there's any doubt about
whether these proxy measurements are really legitimate, the NRC
scientists compared them with actual temperature data from the most
recent century, when real thermometers were in widespread use. The
match was more or less right on.
In the past nearly two decades since TIME first
put global warming on the
cover, then, the
argument against it has gone from "it isn't happening" to "it's
happening, but it's natural," to "it's mostly natural"--and now, it
seems, that assertion too is going to have to drop away. Indeed,
Sherwood Boehlert, who chairs the House Science Committee and who
asked for the report declared that it did nothing to support the
notion of a controversy over global warming science--a controversy
that opponents keep insisting is alive. Whether President Bush
will finally take serious action to deal with the warming, however,
is a much less settled question.

• whatever [wɔt´evə] pron.&a.无论什么 (初中英语单词)
• seriously [´siəriəsli] ad.严肃；严重，重大 (初中英语单词)
• research [ri´sə:tʃ] n.&vi.调查；探究；研究 (初中英语单词)
• frequent [´fri:kwənt] a.常见的，频繁的 (初中英语单词)
• carbon [´kɑ:bən] n.碳；(一张)复写纸 (初中英语单词)
• conclusion [kən´klu:ʒən] n.结束；结论；推论 (初中英语单词)
• reasonable [´rizənəbəl] a.合理的；有理智的 (初中英语单词)
• actual [´æktʃuəl] a.现实的；实际的 (初中英语单词)
• mostly [´məustli] ad.主要地；多半；通常 (初中英语单词)
• comprehensive [,kɔmpri´hensiv] a.综合的；理解的 (高中英语单词)
• legitimate [li´dʒitimit] a.合法的 vt.使合法 (高中英语单词)
• controversy [´kɔntrəvə:si] n.争论；争吵 (高中英语单词)
• comparable [´kɔmpərəbəl] a.可比较的；类似的 (英语四级单词)
• warming [´wɔ:miŋ] n.暖和；加温 (英语四级单词)
• widespread [´waidspred] a.广布的；普遍的 (英语四级单词)
• assertion [ə´sə:ʃən] n.断言；主张；论述 (英语四级单词)
• dioxide [dai´ɔksaid] n.二氧化物 (英语六级单词)
• unprecedented [ʌn´presidentid] a.空前的 (英语六级单词)