Commentary on "international debt and economic instability"

Debt ; Developing countries ; International finance

REDD+ and forest protection on indigenous lands in the Amazon

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) was introduced by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as a mechanism to reverse the loss of forests and carbon stocks in developing countries. REDD+ operates on the basis of performance‐based payments. This article focuses on REDD+ as a market‐based mechanism in the voluntary carbon market (VCM). It assesses the viability of using REDD+ on indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon by examining three key aspects of REDD+—the legal, technical and market requirements—in light of recent policy developments in Brazil and under the UNFCCC. REDD+ as a market‐based mechanism in the VCM currently faces significant barriers as a useful tool for forest protection in the Amazon, due to the lack of an international carbon market under the UNFCCC, the highly complex technical requirements, and the low market demand for REDD+ credits in the VCM. Moreover, we suggest that, although legally possible under Brazilian law, REDD+ projects in the VCM may not be a suitable market‐based option for indigenous communities in the Amazon due to the current national and international climate policy context

The European COST Action EUBrewNet: towards consistency in quality control, quality assurance and coordinated operations of the Brewer Instrument

Presentación realizada en: 10th meeting of the Ozone Research Managers (ORM) como parte de "Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer", celebrado en Ginebra (Suiza) del 28 al 30 de marzo de 2017

Design of an RF-Dipole Crabbing Cavity System for the Electron-Ion Collider

The Electron-Ion Collider requires several crabbing systems to facilitate head-on collisions between electron and proton beams in increasing the luminosity at the interaction point. One of the critical rf systems is the 197 MHz crabbing system that will be used in crabbing the proton beam. Many factors such as the low operating frequency, large transverse voltage requirement, tight longitudinal and transverse impedance thresholds, and limited beam line space makes the crabbing cavity design challenging. The rf-dipole cavity design is considered as one of the crabbing cavity options for the 197 MHz crabbing system. The cavity is designed including the HOM couplers, FPC and other ancillaries. This paper presents the detailed electromagnetic design, mechanical analysis, and conceptual cryomodule design of the crabbing system

HOM Damper Design for BNL EIC 197MHZ Crab Cavity

The interaction region (IR) crab cavity system is a special RF system to compensate the loss of luminosity due to a 25 mrad crossing angle at the interaction point (IP) for Brookhaven National Lab electron ion collider (BNL EIC). There will be six crab cavities, with four 197 MHz crab cavities and two 394 MHz crab cavities, installed on each side of the IP in the proton/ion ring, and one 394 MHz crab cavity on each side of the IP in the electron ring. Both rings share identical 394 MHz crab cavity design to minimize the cost and risk in designing a new RF system, and it will be scaled from 197 MHz crab cavity. In this paper, the higher order mode (HOM) damper design for 197 MHz crab cavity is introduced

Lake surface temperature [in “State of the Climate in 2017”]

Observed lake surface water temperature anomalies in 2017 are placed in the context of the recent warming observed in global surface air temperature by collating long-term in situ lake surface temperature observations from some of the world’s best-studied lakes and a satellite-derived global lake surface water temperature dataset. The period 1996–2015, 20 years for which satellite-derived lake temperatures are available, is used as the base period for all lake temperature anomaly calculations

On the Neutral Scalar Sector of the General R-parity Violating MSSM

Starting out from the most general, gauge invariant and renormalizable scalar potential of the R-parity violating MSSM and performing a calculable rotation to the scalar fields we arrive at a basis where the sneutrino VEVs are zero. The advantage of our rotation is that, in addition, we obtain diagonal soft supersymmetry breaking sneutrino masses and all potential parameters and VEVs real, proving that the MSSM scalar potential does not exhibit spontaneous or explicit CP-violation at tree level. The model has five CP-even and four CP-odd physical neutral scalars, with at least one CP-even scalar lighter than M_Z. We parametrise the neutral scalar sector in a way that resembles the parametrisation of the R-parity conserving MSSM, analyze its mass spectrum, the coupling to the gauge sector and the stability of the potential.Comment: 19 pages, minor changes, published version to appear in PL

Detecting volcanic sulfur dioxide plumes in the Northern Hemisphere using the Brewer spectrophotometer, other networks, and satellite observations

This paper demonstrates that SO 2 columnar amounts have significantly increased following the five largest volcanic eruptions of the past decade in the Northern Hemisphere. A strong positive signal was detected by all the existing networks either ground based (Brewer, EARLINET, AirBase) or from satellites (OMI, GOME-2). The study particularly examines the adequacy of the existing Brewer network to detect SO 2 plumes of volcanic origin in comparison to other networks and satellite platforms. The comparison with OMI and 45 GOME-2 SO 2 space-borne retrievals shows statistically significant agreement between the Brewer network data and the collocated satellite overpasses. It is shown that the Brewer instrument is capable of detecting significant columnar SO 2 increases following large volcanic eruptions, when SO 2 levels rise well above the instrumental noise of daily observations, estimated to be of the order of 2 DU. A model exercise from the MACC project shows that the large increases of SO 2 over Europe following the Bárðarbunga eruption in Iceland were not caused by local sources or ship emissions but are clearly linked to the eruption. We propose that by combining Brewer data with that from other networks and satellites, a useful tool aided by trajectory analyses and modeling could be created which can be used to forecast high SO 2 values both at ground level and in air flight corridors following future eruptions

About ergodicity in the family of limacon billiards

By continuation from the hyperbolic limit of the cardioid billiard we show that there is an abundance of bifurcations in the family of limacon billiards. The statistics of these bifurcation shows that the size of the stable intervals decreases with approximately the same rate as their number increases with the period. In particular, we give numerical evidence that arbitrarily close to the cardioid there are elliptic islands due to orbits created in saddle node bifurcations. This shows explicitly that if in this one parameter family of maps ergodicity occurs for more than one parameter the set of these parameter values has a complicated structure.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure

WRR4, a broad-spectrum TIR-NB-LRR gene from Arabidopsis thaliana that confers white rust resistance in transgenic oilseed brassica crops

White blister rust caused by Albugo candida (Pers.) Kuntze is a common and often devastating disease of oilseed and vegetable brassica crops worldwide. Physiological races of the parasite have been described, including races 2, 7 and 9 from Brassica juncea, B. rapa and B. oleracea, respectively, and race 4 from Capsella bursa-pastoris (the type host). A gene named WRR4 has been characterized recently from polygenic resistance in the wild brassica relative Arabidopsis thaliana (accession Columbia) that confers broad-spectrum white rust resistance (WRR) to all four of the above Al. candida races. This gene encodes a TIR-NB-LRR (Toll-like/interleukin-1 receptor-nucleotide binding-leucine-rich repeat) protein which, as with other known functional members in this subclass of intracellular receptor-like proteins, requires the expression of the lipase-like defence regulator, enhanced disease susceptibility 1 (EDS1). Thus, we used RNA interference-mediated suppression of EDS1 in a white rust-resistant breeding line of B. napus (transformed with a construct designed from the A. thaliana EDS1 gene) to determine whether defence signalling via EDS1 is functionally intact in this oilseed brassica. The eds1-suppressed lines were fully susceptible following inoculation with either race 2 or 7 isolates of Al. candida. We then transformed white rust-susceptible cultivars of B. juncea (susceptible to race 2) and B. napus (susceptible to race 7) with the WRR4 gene from A. thaliana. The WRR4-transformed lines were resistant to the corresponding Al. candida race for each host species. The combined data indicate that WRR4 could potentially provide a novel source of white rust resistance in oilseed and vegetable brassica crops