Chinese Class and Tangents

In Chinese class, we're talking some about environmental protection stuff. It's actually nice, because I can hit a lot of the questions with science (yay science!) and no one's doing the whole “climate change deniers” thing. I've got to wonder if that's a primarily USA thing, because we seem to really like conspiracy theories and we're kind of anti-intellectual as a culture. Seriously, when “he went to Harvard Law!” is getting used as a reason a person shouldn't be president, we have some anti-intellectualism problems. And the people talking about climate change as a big issue have a tendency to be scientists because science is used to test a lot of this stuff.

Oh, and yes, I do remember 2008's presidential election. I was a junior in high school, taking Honors US History and then decided I was going to take the AP exam in US History anyways because why would I limit myself to things that make sense to do? My teacher was really excited about the presidential campaign, and since students in the Honors class are primarily not taking the AP exam, he could go a bit off-syllabus when current events got interesting. We actually talked about American anti-intellectualism in class, when people started using the fact that Barack Obama went to Harvard Law and did really well there as a reason he “wouldn't be able to connect with the American people” or some other nonsense. That's... not exactly what his job is? Like, yes, there are figurehead type things that a President will do, and it's nice when they can connect to “the people,” but “the people” aren't as uniform as a lot of people like to claim and a President also needs to be able to handle complicated political and legal issues. Yes, they get advisers, but they still need enough basic understanding that the adviser's information is helpful in getting to a good decision. That doesn't require Harvard Law, certainly- people can be good Presidents by way of “common sense,” but saying that Harvard Law is bad for being the President is a sign of something not quite right here.

Point is, we've got some anti-intellectual stuff going on, and I've got to wonder if a lot of the climate change deniers are coming from there. If so, you'd probably see fewer of them in cultures that have valued intellectualism and education for a long time.

Now, have my notes about an article I read in Chinese for class. I had to figure out what a few paragraphs were doing: use Beijing as an example. (Reduced rainfall, specifically.) Explain how that relates to climate change and why it's bad. Talk about a way to make it less of a problem. Give a few examples from Europe.

举个例子：北京的降雨逐年减少。
这说明人为制造的地貌已经反作用于气候了。
在用逻辑解释不降雨引发的问题。
解决办法：绿化。不仅是美化环境，反而是保护生态。
再举例子：外国绿化的做法和结果。

Oh, and as usual, have the most recent list of words where I had to either look up the word or check how to write it by typing it.

Yes, I feel silly for always needing to look up how to write 开始. I learned this word in middle school and it gets used a lot, and yet I constantly need to look it up. Whoops.

拿

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