【推荐2】Most people can't wait for spring to arrive. It means flowers and warmer weather, all welcome changes from the dark winter days. Now we know that spring is arriving sooner in the Northern Hemisphere   (北半球）than it was in the past, thanks to a study published in Scientific Reports.

For example, Los Angeles may experience spring only a day earlier than it did 10 years ago, but further north, in Seattle or Chicago, spring will arrive four days earlier. If you lived in the Arctic, spring could arrive 16 days earlier than it used to.

To determine how springtime is starting earlier, researchers looked at temperature records and 743 earlier studies over 86 years. These studies were about various biological indicators of spring, including birds migrating, plants flowering and amphibians（两栖动物）sounding their mating calls. Researchers then studied these data to see if they were occurring earlier. The result showed that not only is spring making itself known sooner but it's warmer, too.

Before you go out in a happy springtime hike, spring arriving sooner isn't so good. The livelihood of migratory birds, for instance, may be concerned.

“The food that birds rely on when they move to the north might not be reliable if the beginning of spring at these higher latitudes（维度）is expanded by future warming." said Eric Post. He is a fellow of the John Muir Institute and a polar ecologist.

Animals relying on Arctic sea ice, like polar bears, probably aren't crazy about things warming up sooner, either, because it impacts on their ability to hunt. Spring's early arrival could cause disorder in the delicate balance of various ecosystems~~not to mention how soon you'll need to buy allergy medicine.

【推荐3】Climate change is an ongoing and ever-present threat to the Earth and all living things upon it. Unchecked industrialism and the burning of fossil fuels have resulted in the creation of harmful greenhouse gases. Human greed has led to massive deforestation and clear-cutting of forests to make way for farmland. Pollution blocks our rivers, lakes, and oceans. The point of no return may be fast approaching.

After decades of harmful actions, many governments and businesses are now struggling to find ways to lessen some of their destructive effects and reach net-zero, which means not adding to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. One of the ways they proposed was the extensive tree-planting. The UK government, for example, has set out its plan to plant 30,000 hectares of trees annually so as to absorb carbon dioxide.

However, according to Oxfam, a British charity devoted to helping people in poor countries, those plans never bore fruit. It issued clear and strong warnings against them-the area needed for a tree-planting project of this scale to successfully lower carbon emissions to net-zero is estimated at 1. 6 billion hectares, which is an area five times the size of India. That means the project would intrude (侵占) on the land presently needed to grow enough crops to feed the world’s expanding population.

Such a massive campaign of turning farmland into forest could give rise to a global interruption to agriculture, and cause food prices to rise by as much as 80% by 2050. In a world where millions of people are already going hungry, this could have disastrous results. By trying to save the planet, governments and businesses may cause many millions of people to die of starvation. This paradox (悖论) perfectly illustrates the phrase “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. ”