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Hello, this is Six Minute English from BBC Learning English.
I'm Neil.
And I'm Georgina.
With no end in sight 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 two kilometers thick.
Locked inside is enough water to raise sea levels by six meters.
But global heating and melting polar ice has many scientists asking whether it's now too late to stop.
How can we reach the point of no return?