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TEXT B Meteorologists routinely tell us what next week’s weather is likely to he, and climate scientists discuss what might happen in 100 years. Christoph Schar, though, ventures dangerously close to that middle realm, where previously only the Farmer’s Almanac dared go: what will next summer’s weather be like Following last year’s tragic heat wave, which directly caused the death of tens of thousands of people, the question is of burning interest to Europeans. Schar asserts that last summer’s sweltering temperatures should no longer be thought of as extraordinary. "The situation in 2002 and 2003 in Europe, where we had a summer with extreme rainfall and record flooding followed by the hottest summer in hundreds of years, is going to be typical for future weather patterns," he says. Most Europeans have probably never read Schar’s report (not least because it was published in the scientific journal Nature in the dead of winter) but they seem to be bracing themselves for the worst. As part of its new national "heat-wave plan", France issued a level-three alert when temperatures in Provence reached 34 degrees Celsius three days in a row; hospital and rescue workers were asked to prepare for an influx of patients. Italian government officials have proposed creating a national registry of people over 65 so they can be herded into air-conditioned supermarkets in the event of another heat wave. London’s mayor has offered a 100,000 pound reward for anybody who can come up with a practical way of cooling the city’s underground trains, where temperatures have lately reached nearly 40 degrees Celsius. (The money hasn’t been claimed.) Global warming seems to have permanently entered the European psyche. If the public is more aware, though, experts are more confused. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change hammered out its last assessment in 2001, scientists pulled together the latest research and made their best estimate of how much the Earth’s atmosphere would warm during the next century. There was a lot they didn’t know, but they were confident they’d be able to plug the gaps in time for the next report, due out in 2007. When they explored the fundamental physics and chemistry of the atmosphere, though, they found something unexpected: the way the atmosphere—and, in particular, clouds—respond to increasing levels of carbon is far more complex and difficult to predict than they had expected. "We thought we’d reduce the uncertainty, but that hasn’t happened," says Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of the next IPCC report. "As we delve further and further into the science and gain a better understanding of the true complexity of the atmosphere, the uncertainties have gotten deeper." This doesn’t mean, of course, that the world isn’t warming. Only the biased or the deluded deny that temperatures have risen, and that human activity has something to do with it. The big question that scientists have struggled with is how much warming will occur over the next century With so much still unknown in the climate equation, there’s no way of telling whether warnings of catastrophe are overblown or if things are even more dire than we thought. Why do scientists like Schar make predictions Because, like economists, it’s their job to hazard a best guess with the resources at hand-namely, vast computer programs that simulate what the Earth’s atmosphere will do in certain circumstances. These models incorporate all the latest research into how the Earth’s atmosphere behaves. But there are problems with the computer models. The atmosphere is very big, but also consists of a multitude of tiny interactions among particles of dust, soot, cloud droplets and trace gases that cannot be safely ignored. Current models don’t have nearly the resolution they need to capture what goes on at such small scales. Scientists got an inkling that something was missing from the models in the early 1990s when they ran a peculiar experiment. They had the leading models simulate warming over the next century and got a similar answer from each. Then they ran the models again-this time accounting for what was then known about cloud physics. All of the following statements are true of climate scientists EXCEPT that
Passage ThreeQuestions 32 to 35 are based on the passage you have just heard.
TEXT C The United Nations was founded to promote peace, prosperity and human rights. It is doing somewhat better on the first two counts than its critics sometimes make out. The last, however, has been such a failure that it is threatening to bring the whole edifice down. Once revered as the creator of all the great universal human-rights rules and instruments, the 53-member Commission on Human Rights has been thoroughly discredited. If it cannot be fixed it needs to be scrapped. In its present form it serves only to make a mockery of the cause. The reason for this is simple enough. The present committee is packed with members who are themselves serial abusers of human rights. Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, admits that their main purpose in being on the committee is not to strengthen human rights but to protect themselves from criticism. At present, these members include exemplars of virtue such as Zimbabwe, Sudan, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Nepal and Russia—a veritable roll call of the worst offenders. A plan of sorts exists to reform this mess. Mr. Annan called for the replacement of the commission, which at present meets for just six weeks once a year, by a leaner, tougher, year-round Human Rights Council, which would he ready to act whenever serious abuse was discovered, and whose members should have a solid record on human rights. America and the other leading democracies backed the idea. The serial abusers did not. In the wrangling at a summit on wider UN reforms, Mr. Annan’s baby was reduced to a skeleton. Many wondered whether it could survive. Amazingly, it has just. There is now agreement on the need for a new body, on a par with the Security Council, that would meet several times a year including, when necessary, for emergencies. But its size, powers and composition are still up for grabs. The Americans want no more than 30 members, all with solid human-rights credentials, elected by a two-thirds majority of the General Assembly, along with a routine review of human rights in all 191 UN member states. The abusers want as big a body as possible, elected by a simple majority, as at present, with no membership criteria, and no automatic peer review. Any reform must not just shrink the commission, but must also change the way in which members are elected. At present, regions usually put forward a slate of candidates corresponding to their allotted number of seats, which the General Assembly votes on to the commission as a block. Under one sensible proposal, regions would be required to put forward more contestants than their quota. Each candidate country would then stand separately for election by the General Assembly. Early peer review of all members would further reduce the temptation for thugs to try to get seats. But opposition is fierce, not only from the most notorious offenders, but also from those middle-ranking ones who fear their relatively minor abuses would be put under the spotlight. Timing is tight. The old, unreformed commission is due to hold its next annual meeting. Mr. Annan wants a new one to be ready to take over by then. That means reaching agreement on a blueprint within the next few weeks. If agreement is stymied, the next-best solution will be to wind the existing commission up altogether. Human rights matter too much for the UN to continue to shunt the subject off to a cynical talking shop that has become home to the worst violators. That just blackens the overall reputation of the UN. It can be inferred from the fourth paragraph that
Don’t Destroy the Essential Catalyst of Risk Since the spring, and most acutely this autumn, a global contagion (传染)of fear and panic has choked off the arteries of finance, compounding a broader deterioration in the global economy. Financial institutions have an obligation to the broader financial system. We depend on a healthy, well-functioning system but we failed to raise enough questions about whether some of the trends and practices that had become commonplace really served the public’s long-term interests.Seven important lessons As policymakers and regulators begin to consider the regulatory actions to be taken to address the fallings, I believe it is useful to reflect on some of the lessons from tiffs crisis. The first is that risk management should not be entirely predicated on historical data. In the past several months, we have heard the phrase" multiple standard deviation events" more than a few times. If events that were calculated to occur once in 20 years in fact occurred much more regularly, it does not take a mathematician to figure out that risk management assumptions did not reflect the distribution of the actual outcomes. Our industry must do more to enhance and improve scenario analysis and stress testing. Second, too many financial institutions and investors simply outsourced their risk management. Rather than undertake their own analysis, they relied on the rating agencies to do the essential work of risk analysis for them. This was true at the inception(初期)and over the period of the investment, during which time they did not consider other indicators of financial deterioration. This over-dependence on credit ratings coincided with the dilution of the desired triple A-rating. In January 2008, there were 12 triple A-rated companies in the world. At the same time, there were 64, 000 structured finance instruments, such as collateralized debt obligations, rated triple A. It is easy and appropriate to blame the rating agencies for lapses in their credit judgments. But the blame for the result is not theirs ’alone. Every financial institution that participated in the process has to accept its share of the responsibility. Third, size matters. For example, whether you owned $5 billion or $50 billion of (supposedly) low-risk super senior debt in a CDO, the likelihood of losses was, proportionally, the same. But the consequences of a miscalculation were obviously much bigger if you had a $50 billion exposure. Fourth, many risk models incorrectly assumed that positions could be fully hedged. After the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management mid the crisis in emerging markets in 1998, new products such as various basket indices and credit default swaps were created to help offset a number of risks. However, we did not, as an industry, consider carefully enough the possibility that liquidity would dry up, making it difficult to apply effective hedges. Fifth, risk models failed to capture the risk inherent in off-balance sheet activities, such as structured investment vehicles. It seems clear now that managers of companies with large off-balance sheet exposure did not appreciate the full magnitude of the economic risks they were exposed to; equally worrying, their counterparties were unaware of the full extent of these vehicles and, therefore, could not accurately assess the risk of doing business. Sixth, complexity got the better of us. The industry let the growth in new instruments outstrip(超过)the operational capacity to manage them. As a result, operational risk increased dramatically and tiffs had a direct effect on the overall stability of the financial system. Last, and perhaps most important, financial institutions did not account for asset values accurately enough. I have heard some argue that fair value accounting -- which assigns current values to financial assets and liabilities -- is one of the main factors exacerbating(使恶化) the credit crisis. I see it differently. If more institutions had properly valued their positions and commitments at the outset, they would have been in a much better position to reduce their exposures.Fair value: a discipline for financial institutions The daily marking of positions to current market prices was a key contributor to our decision to reduce risk relatively early in markets and in instruments that were deteriorating. This process can be difficult, and sometimes painful, but I believe it is a discipline that should define financial institutions. As a result of these lessons and others that will emerge from this financial crisis, we should consider important principles for our industry, for policymakers and for regulators. For the industry, we cannot let our ability to innovate exceed our capacity to manage. Given the size and interconnected nature of markets, the growth in volumes, the global nature of trades and their cross-asset characteristics, managing operational risk will only become more important. Risk and control functions need to be completely independent from the business units. And clarity as to whom risk and control managers report to is crucial to maintaining that independence. Equally important, risk managers need to have at least equal stature with their counterparts on the trading desks: if there is a question about the value of a position or a disagreement about a risk limit, the risk manager’s view should always prevail. Understandably, compensation continues to generate a lot of anger and controversy. We recognize that having troubled asset relief programme money creates an important context for compensation. That is why, in part, our executive management team elected not to receive a bonus in 2008, even though the firm produced a profit. More generally, we should apply basic standards to how we compensate people in our industry. The percentage of the discretionary (任意的)bonus awarded in equity should increase significantly as an employee’s total compensation increases. An individual’s performance should be evaluated over time so as to avoid excessive risk-taking. To ensure this, all equity awards need to be subject to future delivery and/or deferred exercise. Senior executive officers should be required to retain most of the equity they receive at least until they retire, while equity delivery schedules should continue to apply after the individual has left the firm.Limitations of self regulation For policymakers and regulators, it should be clear that self-regulation has its limits. We rationalized and justified the downward pricing of risk on the grounds that it was different. We did so because our self-interest in preserving and expanding our market share, as competitors, sometimes blinds us -- especially when exuberance is at its peak. At the very least, fixing a system-wide problem, elevating standards or driving the industry to a collective response requires effective central regulation and the convening power of regulators. Capital, credit and underwriting standards should be subject to more" dynamic regulation". Regulators should consider the regulatory inputs and outputs needed to ensure a regime that is nimble and strong enough to identify and appropriately constrain market excesses, particularly in a sustained period of economic growth. Just as the Federal Reserve adjusts interest rates up to curb economic frenzy, various benchmarks and ratios could be appropriately calibrated. To increase overall transparency and help ensure that book value really means book value, regulators should require that, all assets across financial institutions be similarly valued. Fair value accounting gives investors more clarity with respect to balance sheet risk. The level of global supervisory co-ordination and communication should reflect the global interconnectedness of markets. Regulators should implement more robust information sharing and harmonized disclosure, coupled with a more systemic, effective reporting regime for institutions and main market participants. Without this, regulators will lack essential tools to help them understand levels of systemic vulnerability in the banking sector and in financial markets more broadly. In this vein, all pools of capital that depend on the smooth functioning of the financial system and are large enough to be a burden on it in a crisis should be subject to some degree of regulation. Before a senior executive officer retired from his company, he has an obligation to ______.
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