Green in Your Wallet or a Green Planet: Views on Government Spending and Climate Change

The scientific community is a near consensus that climate change is not only anthropogenic but is also a major threat to people around the world. Despite the alarm bells from the scientific community many people in the United States simply deny the science of climate change. Many studies have targeted level of education, party membership, and gender in their role in influencing how individuals perceive climate change. This study showed that views on government spending plays a very important role in the importance of the environment. Individuals who supported decreased government spending tend to view jobs as more important than the environment when compared to individuals who supported increased government spending, this is true among both Republicans and non-Republicans. Generally speaking, the Republican platform typically involves the economy over the environment, and the Democratic platform typically involves more environmentally friendly action. This study posits Republicans that believed the government should increase spending in 2012 were indistinguishable from non-Republicans who supported reductions in government spending. The inability to distinguish between republicans who believe in increased spending and non-republicans who believe in increased spending suggests that views on the environment may be more than simply a partisan issue they may simply have to do with willingness to spend money on the environment

Blue Sky Olympics: Satellite Observations of Air Quality During the 2008 Beijing Olympics

China has imposed short-term emission control regulations on industry and transportation to quickly improve air quality during certain events, including the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. Previous research noted reductions in NO2 vertical column density, CO emissions, CO2 emissions, and Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD). NO2 and SO2 decreased in neighboring provinces, during this time period. Using MODIS level-2 atmospheric aerosol product (MYD04_L2) data, processed by the dark target algorithm, this study observes trends in regional AOD and temporal change in AOD during the Olympic emissions reduction program. 2008 observations are referenced against AOD observations from 2003 to 2013, within 9-day intervals from June 23rd to October 24th and 40 km bands extending up to 240 km from the Beijing municipal limits. During the Olympics, median AOD values were below median AOD values from the reference period. AOD levels returned to above reference period levels in the September 12th to September 20th period, before the end of the Special Olympics in Beijing. During the Olympic period, reductions in AOD values, compared to the reference period were observed in regions within 80 km of Beijing, while an increase in AOD values was present in regions 120 km to 240 km from Beijing

Reading, writing, and raisinets: are school finances contributing to children’s obesity?

The proportion of adolescents in the United States who are obese has nearly tripled over the last two decades. At the same time, schools, often citing financial pressures, have given students greater access to “junk” foods and soda pop, using proceeds from these sales to fund school programs. We examine whether schools under financial pressure are more likely to adopt potentially unhealthful food policies. Next, we examine whether students’ Body Mass Index (BMI) is higher in counties where a greater proportion of schools are predicted to allow these food policies. Because the financial pressure variables that predict school food policies are unlikely to affect BMI directly, this two step estimation strategy addresses the potential endogeneity of school food policies. ; We find that a 10 percentage point increase in the proportion of schools in a county that allow students access to junk food leads to about a one percent increase in students’ BMI, on average. However, this average effect is entirely driven by adolescents who have an overweight parent, for whom the effect of such food policies is much larger (2.2%). This suggests that those adolescents who have a genetic or family susceptibility to obesity are most affected by the school food environment. A rough calculation suggests that the increase in availability of junk foods in schools can account for about one-fifth of the increase in average BMI among adolescents over the last decade.Overweight children ; Education ; Junk food

Localizing the Energy and Momentum of Linear Gravity

A framework is developed which quantifies the local exchange of energy and momentum between matter and the linearized gravitational field. We derive the unique gravitational energy-momentum tensor consistent with this description, and find that this tensor only exists in the harmonic gauge. Consequently, nearly all the gauge freedom of our framework is naturally and unavoidably removed. The gravitational energy-momentum tensor is then shown to have two exceptional properties: (a) it is gauge-invariant for gravitational plane-waves, (b) for arbitrary transverse-traceless fields, the energy-density is never negative, and the energy-flux is never spacelike. We analyse in detail the local gauge invariant energy-momentum transferred between the gravitational field and an infinitesimal point-source, and show that these invariants depend only on the transverse-traceless components of the field. As a result, we are led to a natural gauge-fixing program which at last renders the energy-momentum of the linear gravitational field completely unambiguous, and additionally ensures that gravitational energy is never negative nor flows faster than light. Finally, we calculate the energy-momentum content of gravitational plane-waves, the linearized Schwarzschild spacetime (extending to arbitrary static linear spacetimes) and the gravitational radiation outside two compact sources: a vibrating rod, and an equal-mass binary.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figures, published in Phys. Rev.