We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred Nobel never intended that dynamite be used for waging war. He had hoped his invention would promote human progress. We shared that same worthy goal when we began burning massive quantities of coal, then oil and natural gas.
我们从未意图造成这样的破坏，就像当初阿尔弗茁德·诺贝尔也从未想过将炸药用于战争。他的初衷是他的发明有助于人类的进步。当我们开始燃烧大量的煤炭、是石油和天然气时，我们也有同样崇高的愿景。
Even in Nobel's time, there were a few warnings of the likely consequences. One of the very first winners of the Prize in chemistry worried that in his words, "We are evaporating our coal mines into the air." After performing 10,000 equations by hand, Svante Arrhenius calculated that the earth's average temperature would increase by many degrees if we doubled the amount of C02 in the atmosphere.
甚至在诺贝尔的时代，就有不少人对人类行为可能的后果发出了警告。诺贝尔化学奖的最早获奖者之一就曾在言辞间表示过忧虑：“我们正将煤矿蒸发到空气中。”斯凡特·阿伦尼斯在手工计算一万个方程式之后认为，如果我们使大气中的二氧化碳含量增加一倍，则地球的平均气温将上升好几度。
Seventy years later, my teacher, Roger Revelle and his colleague Dave Keeling began to precisely document the increasing C02 levels day by day.
七十年后，我的老师罗杰·雷维尔和他的同事迪夫·基林开始每天精确记录大气中日益上升的二氧化碳含量。
But unlike most other forms of pollution, C02 is invisible, tasteless and odorless, which has helped keep the truth about what it is doing to our climate out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, the catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented, and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.
然而，与其他形式的污染不同，二氧化碳无色无味，使我们不易看到它对我们的气候造成的危害，因而也使我们往往忽视了它的破坏性。更糟的是，正在威胁我们的灾难是前所未有的，而我们经常错误地认为是前所未有的就意味着是不可能的。
We also find it hard to imagine making the massive changes that are now necessary to solve the crisis. And when large truths are genuinely inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them. Yet as George Orwell reminds us: "Sooner or later, a false belief bumps up against a solid reality, usually on a battlefield."
我们同样发现，为了应对这场危机我们所要采取的行为规模之大超出想象。当重要的真理带来麻烦时，整个社会都可能，至少在一段时间内，对这些真理视而不见。但是乔治·奥威尔曾提醒过我们：“早晚有一天，错误的思想会迎面撞上铁铮铮的现实，但那时已是战火纷飞。”