Question

Climatologists observed in 1964 that a slow warming of the surface of the North Atlantic in the 1910s and 1920s could well have been driven by a surge of warm water up the Gulf Stream. This Atlantic warming accompanied a global warming that by the 1940s had produced the highest global temperatures to that point in the records. It was so warm that statistical techniques used in the 1990s to detect the "fingerprint" of greenhouse warming in climate records also show the 1940s having greenhouse warming. However, no one believes enough greenhouse gases had reached the atmosphere by then to cause much of a human-induced warming. That inconsistency has led greenhouse contrariansto claim that any recent warming could be natural rather than anthropogenic.1. It can be inferred that the "contrarians" mentioned in the passage would agree with which of the A. The extent of the global warming that occurred between the 1940s and the 1990s has been exaggerated by some climatologists.B. Changes in global temperatures in the 1990s are a part of a trend that is distinct from any trend that may have existed in the 1910s and 1920s.C. Recent changes in global temperature may not be the direct result of human activity.

Answer 1

The "contrarians" mentioned in the passage would probably agree with the idea that recent changes in global temperature may not be the direct result of human activity (C).

This sentence is a paraphrase of this claim from the text: "recent warming could be natural rather than anthropogenic." Anthropogenic means of human origin, or resulting from humans' influence on their environment.

Earlier in the text, we are told that the ocean had started warming in the early twentieth century because of possible natural reasons ("a surge of warm water up the Gulf Stream"), well before mankind alone was able to produce as much greenhouse gases as was reported by the instruments of measurement. This is why contrarians argue that perhaps the origins of the last century's rise in global temperatures were not human.