The tipping point?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

The tipping point?

It changes the nature of a situation.

Smoking a cigarette, to use the above example, can be perfectly harmless if you only puff, say, one cigarette a day. Still a negligible problem, I think if you smoke two or three per day. However, if you keep puffing on, say, smoking two packs a day, its effect will soon show. Somewhere along the line, you’re going to feel its effect on the lungs – you begin to cough, for instance, and your lungs are going to hurt – and that is a tipping point, after which things are going to turn really bad, and from bad to worse, and ugly.

Alright, let’s get a better feel of the tipping point via these media examples:

1. An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.

Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by the Associated Press.

“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo.

Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.