Climate change

【导读】：近些年，随着气候变暖，极端天气的发生越加频繁。美国戈达德太空研究所的负责人汉森博士被尊为“气候变暖研究之父”，他与他的同事将一起揭晓六十年来气候变暖到底有多严重。

Climate change

气候变化

Bell weather

呈“钟形曲线”变化的天气

A statistical analysis shows how things really are heating up

一项统计分析显示出天气究竟是如何变热的

Aug 11th 2012 | from the print edition

ARE heatwaves more common than they used to be? That is the question addressed by James Hansen and his colleagues in a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their conclusion is that they are—and the data they draw on do not even include the current scorcher that is drying up much of North America and threatening its harvest. The team’s method of presentation, however, has caused a stir among those who feel that scientific papers should be dispassionate in their delivery of the evidence. For the paper, interesting though the evidence it delivers is, is far from

dispassionate.

热浪来袭真的比以前更加频繁了吗？詹姆斯•汉森①与他的同事试图在《美国国家科学院院报》上发表的一篇新文章中回答这一问题。他们得出的结论是，情况的确如此，而且得出这一结论的依据这还不包括最近北美的酷热天气。现在那里的大部分地区已经干旱无比，当地农作物的收成也因此受到了威胁。然而，詹姆斯•汉森与他的同事所采用的展示方案却在一群人中引起了骚动。这些人认为科技论文在表述证据时应客观公正，但有意思的是，该文章在表述证据时却远未做到不偏不倚。

Dr Hansen, who is head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a branch of NASA that is based in New York, is a polemicist of the risks of man-made global warming. Despite his job running a government laboratory, he has managed to get himself arrested on three occasions for protesting against those he thinks are causing such climate change.He clearly states in the paper’s introduction that he was looking for a way of conveying his fears to a sceptical public.

总部在纽约的戈达德太空研究所(GISS)②是美国国家航空航天局的一个分支部门，该研究所的负责人汉森博士能言善辩，他声称人为因素导致的全球变暖将给人类带来危害。尽管汉森博士主管政府实验室，他却参加过抗议活动，以此来反对那些他认为将造成此类气候变化的行为，而他也因此“如愿”被警察逮捕过三次。汉森博士在他的文章序言中明确指出，他正在寻找一种方法，以此让那些对他的观点持怀疑态度的公众体会到他的焦虑。

Some of that scepticism is connected with the fact that although changes in the climate will inev itably result in changes in the weather, ascribing any given event—such as a local heatwave—to climate change is impossible. Dr Hansen has therefore tried to go beyond the study of individual causes by demonstrating that what was once unusual is now common.

尽管气候变化将不可避免地导致天气变化，但不能将所有特定事件（如地方性的热浪）都归因于气候变化，而公众的怀疑态度中有一部分就与这一事实有关。因此，汉森博士通过论证过去人们眼中的异常天气如今已是十分常见，试图使他的研究不仅仅局限于个别原因。

Longer, hotter summers

夏天愈加漫长炎热了

To do so, he and his colleagues took 60 years’ worth of data (the period from 1951 to 2011) from the Goddard Institute’s surface air-temperature analysis. This analysis divides the planet’s surface into cells250km(about 150 miles) across and records the average temperature in each cell. The researchers broke their data into six decade-long blocks and compared those blocks’ statistical properties.

为此，汉森博士与其同事从戈达德研究所收集了60年（从1951年至2011年）地表气温分析数据。这些分析材料将地球表面分成了一个个宽250公里（约150英里）的区块，并记录了每个区域内的平均温度。研究者将这些数据按十年一组分成了六个时间段，并对这些时