Water Marketing as an Adaptive Response to the Threat of Climate Change

Demographic changes and existing water use patterns have placed tremendous pressures upon water supplies, particularly in the West. Global climate change will exacerbate pressures on water resources. The gradual warming of the atmosphere is certain to change the distribution and availability of water supplies, with potentially severe consequences for freshwater supplies. While climate change will have a significant impact on water resources through changes in the timing and volume of precipitation, altered evaporation rates, and the like, the precise nature, magnitude, timing, and distribution of such climate-induced changes are unknown. This uncertainty complicates the task of water managers who are already faced with escalating demands. This article argues that climate change, and its projected effects on water use and supply, calls for a fundamental reexamination of water institutions. In particular, this article suggests that market-based institutions are well suited to address the additional pressures on water supplies due to climate change. Many aspects of water markets, including their flexibility, decentralized nature, and ability to create and harness economic incentives, make them particularly well suited to address the uncertain water forecast. A gradual shift toward water marketing and market pricing will improve the management of water supplies, ensure more efficient allocation of available water supplies and encourage cost-effective conservation measures

Conservative Principles for Environmental Reform

Major environmental policy reform is long overdue. The current regulatory architecture was erected in the 1970s. Since then meaningful reforms have been few and far between. A few reforms and regulatory expansions were adopted in the 1980s, and Congress enacted significant reforms to the Clean Air Act in 1990. Only the most minor environmental bills have been enacted since then

Legal Obstacles to Private Ordering in Marine Fisheries

Part II of this Article surveys the challenges of marine conservation, the failures of existing regulatory regimes, and the potential for property rights in marine resources. Part III discusses the nature of private ordering, providing examples that arise from the fisheries context. Part IV discusses how legal rules can inhibit private ordering. That section focuses in particular on how antitrust law has impeded cooperative fishery management. Part V then explores possibilities for overcoming antitrust obstacles to private ordering. This Article concludes with some broader thoughts about the implications of this research for resource conservation

The local character expansion near a tame, semisimple element

Consider the character of an irreducible admissible representation of a p-adic reductive group. The Harish-Chandra-Howe local expansion expresses this character near a semisimple element as a linear combination of Fourier transforms of nilpotent orbital integrals. Under mild hypotheses, we describe an explicit region on which the local character expansion is valid. We assume neither that the group is connected nor that the underlying field has characteristic zero.Comment: 20 pages; final version; reference and comments updated; section and bibliography order changed; one typo correcte

Gaussian processes, kinematic formulae and Poincar\'e's limit

We consider vector valued, unit variance Gaussian processes defined over stratified manifolds and the geometry of their excursion sets. In particular, we develop an explicit formula for the expectation of all the Lipschitz--Killing curvatures of these sets. Whereas our motivation is primarily probabilistic, with statistical applications in the background, this formula has also an interpretation as a version of the classic kinematic fundamental formula of integral geometry. All of these aspects are developed in the paper. Particularly novel is the method of proof, which is based on a an approximation to the canonical Gaussian process on the $n$-sphere. The $n\to\infty$ limit, which gives the final result, is handled via recent extensions of the classic Poincar\'e limit theorem.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AOP439 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Validity of the expected Euler characteristic heuristic

We study the accuracy of the expected Euler characteristic approximation to the distribution of the maximum of a smooth, centered, unit variance Gaussian process f. Using a point process representation of the error, valid for arbitrary smooth processes, we show that the error is in general exponentially smaller than any of the terms in the approximation. We also give a lower bound on this exponential rate of decay in terms of the maximal variance of a family of Gaussian processes f^x, derived from the original process f.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009117905000000099 in the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Dyson's non-intersecting Brownian motions with a few outliers

Consider n non-intersecting particles on the real line (Dyson Brownian motions), all starting from the origin at time=0, and forced to return to x=0 at time=1. For large n, the average mean density of particles has its support, for each 0<t<1, within the interior of an ellipse. The Airy process is defined as the motion of these non-intersecting Brownian motions for large n, but viewed from an arbitrary point on the ellipse with an appropriate space-time rescaling. Assume now a finite number r of these particles are forced to a different target point. Does it affect the Brownian fluctuations along the ellipse for large n? In this paper, we show that no new process appears as long as one considers points on the ellipse, for which the t-coordinate is smaller than the t-coordinate of the point of tangency of the tangent to the curve passing through the target point. At this point of tangency the fluctuations obey a new statistics: the Airy process with r outliers (in short: {\bf r-Airy process}). The log of the transition probability of this new process is given by the Fredholm determinant of a new kernel (extending the Airy kernel) and it satisfies a non-linear PDE in x and the time.Comment: 66 pages. This new version contains an improved statement of Theorem 0.1. It also corrects a number of minor misprint

Arguing from Ignorance

Arguments from ignorance should be schematized: It has not been proven false that p. So it is possible that p. So, it is reasonable to believe p. Also, in opposition to standard views they should be distinguished from burden of proof and absence of evidence arguments. Much of the persuasiveness of such arguments can be located in the slippery uses of possible. Besides equivocations on possible the argument is a fallacy for two reasons. First, the possibility implied by the first premise does not yield the serious possibility that is needed for establishing the conclusion. Second, ignorance is never sufficient reason for belief, only adequate evidence