1 . Global surface temperatures last month were 2.25 degrees warmer than the 20th century average of 60.1 degrees, breaking previous records, from August 2016, by more than half a degree, according to NOAA researchers. “That to me is a really huge _______ from one record to the next,” said Ellen Bartow, a physical scientist with NOAA’S National Centers for Environmental Information.

The report _______ what millions of people have experienced in recent months, including record-breaking heatwaves that have touched almost every corner of the globe. Asia, Africa, North America and South America had their warmest August on record, as did the Arctic, Europe and Oceania — a region that _______ Australia - had their second-warmest August on record, the report said.

It wasn’t just the land that _______ : August set a record for the highest monthly sea surface temperature abnormally—1.85 degrees above average. The warming oceans _______experiencing its fourth continuous month with the _______ shrinking sea ice, with Antarctica sea ice extent on record. Globally, sea ice extent in August was about 550,000 square miles less than the previous record low, set in August 2019.

“We’ve seen unheard-of warmth in the global ocean, and that’s definitely alarming because its effects _______ beyond just the scope of the ocean,” Bartow-Gillies said. “Not only are you _______ marine habitats, but you’re affecting storm creation, you’re creating more instability in some areas, and you’re creating flooding events in other areas. There’s a whole host of _______ that come along with these warmer ocean surface temperatures that we’re seeing.”

In fact, the report comes after a series of severe natural ________ that span the globe. This week, a Mediterranean storm caused serious flooding in Libya, killing more than 11,000 people. In Canada, wildfires burned through more than 42 million acres of forests this summer, and several are still burning. ________ global warming was not the singular cause of any of these disasters, heating of the Earth continues to ________ the likelihood of extreme weather events and wildfire worldwide.

“The scientific evidence is ________ —we will continue to see more climate records and more intense and frequent extreme weather events impacting society and ecosystems, until we stop ________ greenhouse gases,” read a statement from Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, which also ________ that this summer was the hottest on record.

Fresh warning sounded on plastics problem

Walk along any beach in the world, no matter how isolated, and you will see plastic of some kind washed up on the shoreline,     1    (offer) a reminder of the reckless throwaway culture of the present-day world.

Lately, a study     2     (sound) a fresh warning on the damage caused to the marine ecosystem due to discarded plastics, which eventually has a bearing on human health due to the seafood we consume.

In a paper     3    (title) “A Growing Plastic Smog” published on March 8, 2023 in the peer-reviewed research journal Plos One, researchers called on governments around the world     4    (take) sweeping action to address the “unprecedented plastic pollution” of the world’s oceans.

The plastics break down over time into minute particles that cannot be detected by the naked eye, but find their way into the marine ecosystem and into the seafood humans consume. No one knows for certain     5     the long-term damage will be to marine life and humans, but the study placed much of the blame on the plastics industry for failing to recycle or design for recyclability. “    6     eaten, microplastics can severely damage an animal’s internal tissues. Globally, we have reached a situation     7     we can no longer ignore the plastic pollution pandemic that is infecting our oceans,” he said.

“This research shows us that beach cleanups and citizen science projects that focus on the environmental fate of plastics have little impact on solving the enormity of the plastic problem. Marcus Eriksen, lead author of the study, said in a statement that the findings were a “stark warning     8     we must act now at a global scale”. “We’ve found an alarming trend of exponential growth of microplastics in the global ocean since the millennium, which     9    (expect) to reach over 170 trillion plastic particles,” said Eriksen, adding that the exponential increase in microplastics across the world’s oceans makes     10     necessary to “bring in an age of corporate responsibility for the entire life of the things they make”.

American authorities arrested Masphal Kry, an official in Cambodia’s forestry administration, last November when he was heading to an international meeting about trade regulations for endangered species in Panama. Prosecutors accused him of conspiring with a smuggling ring. The contraband (违禁品): monkeys,     1     long-tailed macaques. His     2     allegedly grabbed wild macaques in Cambodia’s national parks and bribed officials to label them as captive-bred. Fake papers allowed Vanny Bio Research, a Cambodian pharma company, to ship these unfortunate primates (灵长类动物) to America for use in research. Mr Kry is facing trial in Florida’s Southern District Court. The federal government funds seven National Primate Research Centres (NPRCs), which     3     in total around 20,000 primates, not only macaques but also baboons and marmosets. These centres then     4     primates to labs across America. NPRCs have fulfilled only a third of requests for untested-on macaques in 2021 and prices have soared. Before the covid-19 pandemic a rhesus macaque cost $8,000; by 2022 they had     5     $24,000. Another species, long-tail macaques, is probably per pound currently the most expensive     6     wildlife, says Lisa Jones-Engel, a science adviser at PETA, an animal-rights group.

Getting lab monkeys from abroad became harder during the pandemic. Chinese authorities banned the export of all primates in early 2020. The Chinese government wanted to     7     the country’s wildlife trade, which is thought to encourage the     8     of pathogens—like sars-cov-2—from animals to humans.

That forced American companies to rely on less     9     South-East Asian suppliers. Many scientists believe poaching is prevalent across Cambodia. In February, the Department of Justice subpoenaed Charles River over 1,000 juvenile macaques the pharmaceutical company had bought from Cambodia; the DoJ suspected they were     10     in the wild then exported. These primates are now in Texas and Maryland but also in dilemma: they cannot be tested on, nor can they be flown back to Cambodia.

Throughout the world, only 15% of the material that are used to make clothing is properly recycled, according to the Alle SacUrthur Club, an organization in Liverpool, UK, that boosts the circular economy. Most clothing waste—an     1    (estimate) 82 million tonnes from the fashion industry alone-produced every year ends up buried or burnt.

    2    (handle) all that waste, methods to recover and reuse the material are intended as an active response to the future risks by researchers and start-up companies. Much of their focus is on chemical recycling,     3     the material is broken down into its building blocks and applied to create new materials, including fibres that     4     (weave) into new clothes. The challenges lie in     5     (develop) the processes for such treatment. They have to be practical, but they also have to be at least as cost-effective as simply making new fibres.

    6     the natural cellulose fibres from cotton, some other materials include human-made cellulosic fibres. They are derived from wood-pulp cellulose and may be used to produce materials such as viscose (rayon) and a similar material called lyocell.

A change in the manufacturing process is being applied to the textile-waste problem by Essen, a start-up in Seattle, Washington.     7     the company has fundamentally devoted to the process is that it uses discarded textiles, instead of wood, as the source of its cellulose. It has also adjusted the process to produce a fibre that the firm’s co-founder and president Christo Stan says is superior to     8     other cellulosics and cotton, and that can be recycled more times.

Although there are abundant technical challenges, the main barrier     9     widespread textile recycling could be economic, says materials engineer Lijiang Jiang at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “Most of the materials are not that invaluable,” Jiang says. So cheap it is to produce polyester, cotton and other fabrics     10     there’s little profit margin unless the recycling processes themselves are very inexpensive.

7 . Building good transportation is a good idea. To have environmental value, new transportation has to sufficiently replace or eliminate driving to cut energy consumption overall. That means that a new traffic system has to be supported by reduction in car use. Traffic lanes should be eliminated or converted into bike or bus lanes. Ideally, these should be combined with higher fuel taxes, and parking fees. Needless to say, I have to struggle to make myself extensively understood. But they’re necessary, because you can’t make people drive less, in the long run, by taking steps that make driving more pleasant, economical, and productive.

Lengthy commuting (通勤) time is a forceful factor which can slow the growth of suburbs. The farther people live away from cities, the longer commuting time they need, which means more pollution their cars produce. If, in a misguided effort to do something of environmental value, governments take steps that make long-distance car commuting faster or more convenient—by adding lanes, building bypass, employing traffic-control measures that make it possible for existing roads to accommodate more cars with fewer delays—we are actually encouraging people to live still farther from their jobs, stores, and schools. As a result, governments are forced to further extend road networks, water lines, and other facilities. If you cut commuting time by 10 percent, people who now drive fifty miles each way to work can find reason to move five miles farther out, because their travel time won’t change.

Traffic congestion (拥堵) isn’t an environmental problem; traffic is. Relieving congestion without doing anything to reduce the total volume of cars can only make the real problem worse. Highway engineers have known for a long time that building new car lanes only temporarily reduces congestion, because the new lanes add additional driving. Widening roads makes traffic move faster in the short term, but the improved conditions eventually attract additional drivers, and congestion reappears. With more car on the roads, people think about widening roads again. Moving drivers out of cars and into other forms of transportation can have the same effect, if existing traffic lanes are kept in service: road space stimulates road use.

One of the arguments that cities inevitably make in promoting transportation plans is that the new system, by relieving automobile congestion, will improve the lives of those who continue to drive. No one ever promotes a transportation system by arguing that it would make travelling less convenient—even though, from an environmental perspective, inconvenient travel is a worthy goal.

Satellites Can Help Us Fight Climate Change

At the beginning of 2021, President Joe Biden exclaimed that “science is back” as we continued our efforts to     1     the COVID emergency. That phrase continues to ring true across the federal government. Science and its applications are being used at every agency to deal with public health     2    , build new transportation infrastructure, inform policy decisions and tackle the climate crisis.

Recently the Interior Department’s U.S. Geological Survey assumed     3     of Landsat 9 from NASA, which built and launched it in 2021.This satellite is designed to     4     Earth’s land, water and other natural resources. Landsat missions support environmental sustainability and climate resilience. The Landsat program, which launched in July 1972, has helped us understand our planet and the changes that are occurring on it. That partnership has propelled research and observation forward through the launch of     5     Landsat satellites, each replacing its predecessors and working in tandem with new capabilities and strengths.

I attended the historic launch of Landsat 9 in California. It was nothing     6     of amazing. I toured the mission control center and met a young scientist from the Navajo Nation living far away from home. She uses Landsat     7     to see her home from many miles away, and with such data, she enables her community to manage water resources in the face of a changing climate. This is the power and beauty of science at work.

All around the globe, scientists are using Landsat and other imagery to interpret what is happening on Earth today and to compare it with the 50 years’     8     of data the Landsat program has collected.

This science-based program and those like it across federal agencies are powerful tools in our efforts to responsibly manage our resources. Their prioritization helps to demonstrate the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to lead with science. So, too, the resources provided through the president’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act will be key to the development of longer-term sustainability measures as we     9     to climate change, including building more resilient communities and protecting our natural environment.

Landsat NEXT is the upcoming mission we will develop with NASA to power better science and decision-making for the next 50 years. Science is indeed     10     us on a path to a brighter future.