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Six Minute English.

From BBC Learning English.

com.

Hello, this is six-minute English from BBC Learning English. I'm Neil and I'm

Georgina. With no end insight to the coronavirus pandemic many people can't wait for the year 2020 to end.

But with the coronavirus dominating the newspaper headlines,

attention has moved away from an equally serious global issue,

which has quietly been getting worse. Climate change.

August 2020 saw the hottest temperature recorded anywhere in modern times,

54.4 degrees Celsius in California's Death Valley.

The same month also saw record amounts of ice melting into the oceans around Greenland and the Arctic, huge icebergs breaking away from the edge of the

ice sheet, a thick layer of ice which has covered a large area for a long time.

Greenland's ice sheet is three times the size of Texas and almost 2 kilometers thick.

Locked inside is enough water to raise sea levels by 6 meters.

But global heating and melting polar ice has many

scientists asking whether it's now too late to stop. Have we reached the point

of no return? In this program we'll be looking at the effects of climate change on the

Arctic and asking if it's too late to change. And learning some of the related vocabulary too.

Now Georgina you mentioned record levels of ice melt in the North Pole

that the scale is hard to take in. The amounts are so big they're measured in

...