Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. conclusive     B. indiscriminate     C. awe     D. favourable     E. uninhabitable     F. address G. advocating     H. agenda     I. attain     J. conventional     K. odds

The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The 【小题1】 of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, 【小题2】 the sea-level rise of several meters and abandon the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “long-term disaster”, which is now the best-case scenario. Four-degree warming will mean “short-term disaster”: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; the American Southwest largely 【小题3】.

In the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The world’s major powers came within several signatures of 【小题4】 a global framework to reduce carbon emissions — far closer than we’ve come since. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more 【小题5】. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves.

Nearly everything we understand now about global warming was understood in 1979. Human beings have altered Earth’s atmosphere through the 【小题6】 burning of fossil fuels. At the start of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that 【小题7】 evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster. A report prepared by the National Academy of Sciences advised that “the carbon-dioxide issue should appear on the international 【小题8】 in a context that will maximize cooperation and minimize political controversy and division.” If the world had adopted the proposal widely supported at the end of the ‘80s, warming could have been held to less than 1.5degrees.

But they failed, even though the world’s leading oceanographer Henry Stommel and the Harvard planetary physicist Richard Goody, whose mere presence could inspire 【小题9】, tried to warn humanity of what was coming. They risked their careers in a painful campaign to solve the problem, first in scientific reports, later through 【小题10】 avenues of political persuasion and finally with a strategy of public shaming. Their efforts were passionate and they failed. Now it is our turn.