The continuous presentation of frightening stories about global warming in the popular media makes us unnecessarily frightened. Even worse, it ________ our kids.

Al Gore famously described how a sea-level rise of 20 feet would almost completely flood

Florida, New York, Holland, and Shanghai, even though the United Nations says that such a thing will not even happen, estimating that sea levels will rise 20 times less than that.

When faced with these exaggerations (夸大), some of us say that they are for a good cause, and surely there is no harm done if the result is that we focus even more on tacking climate change.

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

Exaggeration also wears out the public’s ________ to cope with global warming. If the planet is certain to be destroyed owing to global warming, 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 majority of people now believe –incorrectly – that global warming is not even caused by humans.

But the ________ cost of exaggeration, I believe, is the unnecessary alarm that it causes – particularly among children. An article in The Washington Post cited nine-year-old Alyssa, who cries about the possibility of mass animal extinction from global warming.

The newspaper also reported that parents are taking over effective outlets for their 8-year-olds’ concern with dying polar bears. They might be better off educating them and letting them know that,

related to common belief, the global polar bear population has doubled over the past half-century, to about 22,000. ________ the possible disappearing of summer Arctic ice, polar bears will not become extinct.