Reading Comprehension: Crocodiles and Palm Trees in the Artic?

Crocodiles and Palm Trees in the Artic?

In even the bleakest climate change scenarios for the end of this century, science has offered hope that global warming would eventually slow down. But a new study published Monday eliminates such hope, projecting temperatures that rise lockstep with carbon emissions until the last drops of oil and lumps of coal are used up. Global temperatures will increase on average by 8 degrees Celsius (14.4 degrees F) over preindustrial levels by 2300 if all of Earth’s fossil fuel resources are burned, In the Arctic, average temperatures would rise by 17 degrees C (30.6 degrees F). If these temperatures do become reality, greenhouse gases would transform Earth into a place where food is scarce, parts of the world are uninhabitable for humans, and many species of animals and plants are wiped out, experts say.

"It would be as unrecognizable to us as a fully glaciated world," says Mylles Allen, head of a climate dynamics group at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Allen was not involved in the new study, but his research has focused on carbon’s cumulative impacts on climate. It also would heat the world to a level approaching that of the early Eocene period, 52 million to 56 million years ago, when palm trees grewas far North as Alaska and crocodiles swam in the Arctic.

Mammals survived Eocene temperatures; this is when early primates appeared. Some horses, however, shrank to the size of house cats, adjusting through evolution to a diet altered either by heat or carbon. Today's organisms and ecosystems may not be able to adapt to warming over the next 200 to 300 years—an instant on the geological time scale, says Scott Wing, the Smithsonian Institution’s curator of fossil plants.
Allen says not only could tropical rain forest systems collapse, but drought in southern Europe and the United States would be "completely catastrophic for agriculture." Wealthy nations might maintain food supply, but not places like southern Africa. "A lot of people would have to leave, or a lot of people would die," Allen says.

Source: National Geographic

Reading comprehension

1. Answer the following questions:

•  What are our future expectations for the earth? 

•  What will actually happen if those expectacions become truth? What will happen to earth then?

• What's Mylles Allen's study about?

•  Were some actual animals very different in the past?

•  Which will be the final consequences of the warming of the planet?

2. Answer if this questions are true or false and justify your answer with a quotation from the text.

• Primates first appeared in the Miocene period. 
• When the climate change takes place, wealthy nations will maintain food suply. 
• Climate change would drop the global temperature. 
• If the global temperature rises, the world would become a better place for humans and animals. 
• At the beginnig, scientists thought that the global warming would slow down.