The continuous presentation of scary stories about global warming in the popular media makes us unnecessarily frightened. Even worse, it【C1】______our kids.

Al Gore famously【C2】___how a sea-level rise of 20 feet would almost completely flood Florida, New York, Holland, and Shanghai, 【C3】the United Nations says that such a thing will not even happen,【C4】___that sea levels will rise 20 times less than that.

When【C5】___with these exaggerations, some of us say that they are for a good cause, and surely【C6】___is no harm done if the result is that we focus even more on tackling climate change.

This【C7】___is astonishingly wrong. Such exaggerations do plenty of harm. Worrying【C8】about global warming means that we worry less about other things, where we could do so much more good. We focus,【C9】, on global warming’s impact on malaria(疟疾)—which will put slightly more people at【C10】in 100 years—instead of tackling the half a billion people【C11】___from malaria today with prevention and treatment policies that are much cheaper and dramatically more effective than carbon reduction would be.

【C12】___also wears out the public’s willingness to tackle global warming. If the planet is【C13】, people wonder, why do anything? A record 54% of American voters now believe the news media make global warming appear worse than it really is. A【C14】___of people now believe—incorrectly—that global warming is not even caused by humans.

But the【C15】___cost of exaggeration, I believe, is the unnecessary alarm that it causes—particularly【C16】children. An article in The Washington Post cited nine-year-old Alyssa, who cries about the possibility of mass animal【C17】___from global warming.

The newspaper also reported that parents are【C18】___“productive” outlets for their eight-year-olds’ obsessions(忧心忡忡)with dying polar bears. They might be better off educating them and letting them know that, contrary【C19】common belief, the global polar bear population has doubled and perhaps even quadrupled(成为四倍)over the past half-century, to about 22 000.【C20】___diminishing—and eventually disappearing—summer Arctic ice, polar bears will not become extinct.

【C2】