Physical-World Knowledge and Public Views on Climate Change

Climate change is a formidable topic, challenging the research efforts of countless scientists across many different fields. Surveys find surprisingly high levels of confidence among nonscientists, however, regarding their own understanding of climate change. More than threefourths of the respondents on recent U.S. surveys claimed to understand either a moderate amount or a great deal about climate change. Follow-up questions testing actual knowledge suggest that self-assessments are high relative to physical-world knowledge. For some people, self-assessments reflect confidence in their political views rather than geographical or science knowledge. This paper replicates and extends previous research using new data: an October 2018 survey that included a four-item test of basic, climate-relevant but belief-neutral geographical or physical knowledge, such as locations of the North and South Pole. Mean knowledge scores are higher among younger, male, and college-educated respondents, and also differ significantly across political groups. Relationships between physical/geographical knowledge and selfassessed understanding of climate change, or between knowledge and agreement with the scientific consensus on climate change, are sometimes positive as expected — but in both cases, these relationships depend on political identity

Visualizing population dynamics of alaska\u27s arctic communities

Abstract Arctic demography has previously been reviewed on a large scale, across the circumpolar nations. We look instead at some recent population dynamics on sub-regional to community scales, focusing on Arctic Alaska. Detailed graphics depicting yearly population changes from 1990 to 2006 in 43 selected Arctic Alaska towns and villages and all 27 of the state\u27s county-equivalent entities (e.g., boroughs) have been published online in connection with two International Polar Year projects. Seemingly comparable places within the same borough have taken widely divergent paths. Birth rates generally exceed death rates, although both are high. Year-to-year and place-to-place variations are dominated not by natural increase, but by differences in net migration. Population changes influence demand for resources such as water, electricity, fuel, and capital improvements, and probably for subsistence resources as well. Migration rates provide sensitive indicators that integrate diverse internal and external pressures

Place matters: challenges and opportunities in four rural Americas

A survey of 7,800 rural Americans in 19 counties across the country has led to the Carsey Institute\u27s first major publication that outlines four distinctly different rural Americas—amenity, decline, chronic poverty, and those communities in decline that are also amenity-rich—each has unique challenges in this modern era that will require different policies than their rural neighbors

Above and below the water: Social/ecological transformation in northwest Newfoundland

Marine fisheries and fishing societies develop around the resources provided by a particular ecosystem. As they exploit these resources, fisheries transform the ecosystem, which pushes fishery and society to adapt in turn. This process is illustrated by fisheries, ecological and social data tracking dramatic changes on Newfoundland\u27s Northern Peninsula and its adjacent marine ecosystem, the northern Gulf of St. Lawrence. There a longstanding fishery for cod and other groundfish collapsed in the 1990s, and was replaced by fisheries targeting invertebrates. The new invertebrate fisheries have different socioeconomic characteristics than the former groundfish fisheries. The shift in target species reflects deep ecological changes that were underway at least a decade before official recognition of the crisis. Our analysis of biological data reveals that the main ecological changes occurred during “the glory years” of the 1980s, when Newfoundland\u27s domestic fisheries were at their peak. Overfishing and interactions with adverse climatic conditions drove the changes. As the ecosystem transformed, human population declined due to outmigration, and social indicators show signs of distress. Accounts by outport residents paint a generational picture of social change

Place effects on environmental views

How people respond to questions involving the environment depends partly on individual characteristics. Characteristics such as age, gender, education, and ideology constitute the well-studied social bases of environmental concern, which have been explained in terms of cohort effects or of cognitive and cultural factors related to social position. It seems likely that people\u27s environmental views depend not only on personal characteristics but also on their social and physical environments. This hypothesis has been more difficult to test, however. Using data from surveys in 19 rural U.S. counties, we apply mixed-effects modeling to investigate simple place effects with respect to locally focused environmental views. We find evidence for two kinds of place effects. Net of individual characteristics, specific place characteristics have the expected effect on related environmental views. Local changes are related to attitudes about regulation and growth. For example, respondents more often perceive rapid development as a problem, and favor environmental rules that restrict development, in rural counties with growing populations. Moreover, they favor conserving resources for the future rather than using them now to create jobs in counties that have low unemployment. After we controlled for county growth, unemployment and jobs in resource based industries, and individual social-position and ideological factors, there remains significant place-to-place variation in mean levels of environmental concern. Even with both kinds of place effects in the models, the individual level predictors of environmental concern follow patterns expected from previous research. Concern increases with education among Democrats, whereas among Republicans, the relationship is attenuated or reversed. The interaction marks reframing of environmental questions as political wedge issues, through nominally scientific counterarguments aimed at educated, ideologically receptive audiences. © 2010, by the Rural Sociological Society

Metamaterials for light rays: ray optics without wave-optical analog in the ray-optics limit

Volumes of sub-wavelength electromagnetic elements can act like homogeneous materials: metamaterials. In analogy, sheets of optical elements such as prisms can act ray-optically like homogeneous sheet materials. In this sense, such sheets can be considered to be metamaterials for light rays (METATOYs). METATOYs realize new and unusual transformations of the directions of transmitted light rays. We study here, in the ray-optics and scalar-wave limits, the wave-optical analog of such transformations, and we show that such an analog does not always exist. Perhaps, this is the reason why many of the ray-optical possibilities offered by METATOYs have never before been considered.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, references update

Local light-ray rotation

We present a sheet structure that rotates the local ray direction through an arbitrary angle around the sheet normal. The sheet structure consists of two parallel Dove-prism sheets, each of which flips one component of the local direction of transmitted light rays. Together, the two sheets rotate transmitted light rays around the sheet normal. We show that the direction under which a point light source is seen is given by a Mobius transform. We illustrate some of the properties with movies calculated by ray-tracing software.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Constraints of solar flare particle transport models from anisotropy observations at Voyager 1

In general a particle transport model for energetic solar flare particles contains a number of free parameters which are determined by fitting various features of observed particle events. Frequently the parameter values are not uniquely determined. In order to place tighter constraints on the models, the anisotropy of 1 and 25 MeV/nuc protons and helium nuclei were examined during the 22 November 1977 solar particle event using data from the LECP experiment on Voyager 1 at 1.6 AU. These observations were combined with the time intensity profiles at Voyager 1 and at 1 AU from ISEE-1 and IMP-8 to determine the magnitude and radial dependence of the interplanetary diffusion coefficient and the required injection duration at the sun. The first order anisotropy amplitudes for both 1 MeV and 25 MeV protons are observed to decrease from maximum values (approx. 1) during the event onset at Voyager 1 to values consistent with convection in the solar wind at about 3 days into the event decay phase. The intensity and anisotropy profiles at 1.6 AU are consistent with predictions of diffusive transport with a modest mean free path (lambda = approx. 0.1 AU)

Reduction and scientific analysis of data from the charge-energy-mass (CHEM) spectrometer on the AMPTE/CCE spacecraft

The Charge-Energy-Mass (CHEM) spectrometer instrument on the AMPTE/Charge Composition Explorer (CCE) spacecraft is designed to measure the mass and charge-state abundance of magnetospheric and magnetosheath ions between 0.3 and 315 keV/e, an energy range that includes the bulk of the ring current and the dynamically important portion of the plasma sheet population. Continuing research is being conducted using the AMPTE mission data set, and in particular, that of the CHEM spectrometer which has operated flawlessly since launch and still provides excellent quality data. The requirted routine data processing and reduction, and software develpment continues to be performed. Scientific analysis of composition data in a number of magnetospheric regions including the ring current region, near-earth plasma sheet and subsolar magnetosheath continues to be undertaken. Correlative studies using data from the sister instrument SULEICA, which determines the mass and charge states of ions in the energy range of approximately 10 to 250 keV/e on the IRM, as well as other data from the CCE and IRM spacecraft, particularly in the upstream region and plasma sheet have also been undertaken

Predicting September sea ice: Ensemble skill of the SEARCH Sea Ice Outlook 2008-2013

Abstract Since 2008, the Study of Environmental Arctic Change Sea Ice Outlook has solicited predictions of September sea-ice extent from the Arctic research community. Individuals and teams employ a variety of modeling, statistical, and heuristic approaches to make these predictions. Viewed as monthly ensembles each with one or two dozen individual predictions, they display a bimodal pattern of success. In years when observed ice extent is near its trend, the median predictions tend to be accurate. In years when the observed extent is anomalous, the median and most individual predictions are less accurate. Statistical analysis suggests that year-to-year variability, rather than methods, dominate the variation in ensemble prediction success. Furthermore, ensemble predictions do not improve as the season evolves. We consider the role of initial ice, atmosphere and ocean conditions, and summer storms and weather in contributing to the challenge of sea-ice prediction. Key Points Analysis of Sea Ice Outlook contributions 2008-2013 shows bimodal success Years when observations depart from trend are hard to predict despite preconditioning Yearly conditions dominate variations in ensemble prediction success