“ Bold in the Senate House and Brave at War ” : Naval Officers in the House of Commons 1715 - 1815

Between 1715 and 1815, 182 British naval officers sat in the House of Commons, a group hitherto unstudied in a systematic way. This thesis draws upon the work of the History of Parliament Trust to examine naval MPs’ backgrounds, means of entering and leaving Parliament, activities in the House and the interrelationship between their professional and parliamentary obligations and patronage. By critically engaging with contemporary scholarship, naval MPs are placed within an eighteenth century context of nascent patriotism and national identity fuelled by popular culture and print media, indicating further avenues of inquiry

Nitrogen attenuation of terrestrial carbon cycle response to global environmental factors

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2009. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles 23 (2009): GB4028, doi:10.1029/2009GB003519.Nitrogen cycle dynamics have the capacity to attenuate the magnitude of global terrestrial carbon sinks and sources driven by CO2 fertilization and changes in climate. In this study, two versions of the terrestrial carbon and nitrogen cycle components of the Integrated Science Assessment Model (ISAM) are used to evaluate how variation in nitrogen availability influences terrestrial carbon sinks and sources in response to changes over the 20th century in global environmental factors including atmospheric CO2 concentration, nitrogen inputs, temperature, precipitation and land use. The two versions of ISAM vary in their treatment of nitrogen availability: ISAM-NC has a terrestrial carbon cycle model coupled to a fully dynamic nitrogen cycle while ISAM-C has an identical carbon cycle model but nitrogen availability is always in sufficient supply. Overall, the two versions of the model estimate approximately the same amount of global mean carbon uptake over the 20th century. However, comparisons of results of ISAM-NC relative to ISAM-C reveal that nitrogen dynamics: (1) reduced the 1990s carbon sink associated with increasing atmospheric CO2 by 0.53 PgC yr−1 (1 Pg = 1015g), (2) reduced the 1990s carbon source associated with changes in temperature and precipitation of 0.34 PgC yr−1 in the 1990s, (3) an enhanced sink associated with nitrogen inputs by 0.26 PgC yr−1, and (4) enhanced the 1990s carbon source associated with changes in land use by 0.08 PgC yr−1 in the 1990s. These effects of nitrogen limitation influenced the spatial distribution of the estimated exchange of CO2 with greater sink activity in high latitudes associated with climate effects and a smaller sink of CO2 in the southeastern United States caused by N limitation associated with both CO2 fertilization and forest regrowth. These results indicate that the dynamics of nitrogen availability are important to consider in assessing the spatial distribution and temporal dynamics of terrestrial carbon sources and sinks.We also acknowledge the financial support of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Land Cover and Land Use Change Program (NNX08AK75G)

Future atmospheric methane concentrations in the context of the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations

Abstract. Tropospheric CH 4 concentration depends, according to modeled tropospheric processes, on many factors, including emissions of CH 4 as well as NO x and CO. Illustrative analyses of the relation between emissions and CH 4 concentration give some guidance on the role of CH 4 in the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations. The contribution of CH 4 to radiative forcing at the time of stabilization is expected to be modest, provided CH 4 and CO emissions do not go far beyond current rates. However, in cases leading to stabilization the potential mitigation of increases in radiative forcing by methane control could be comparable to that of CO 2 control over the next century. Whether or not this potential is realized will depend partially on the cost of deep reductions of CH 4 , NO x , CO, or CO 2 emissions over the next century, which is not known

The role of industrial carbon capture and storage (CCS) in emission mitigation

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is an important option in the portfolio of emission mitigation technologies in scenarios that lead to deep reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions consistent with limiting increases in global average surface air temperature to 2 degrees Celsius (2C). Industrial CCS applications are more challenging to analyze than CCS in the power sector -- mainly due to the vast heterogeneity in industrial and fuel processes. Our study focuses on the cement industry and provides the estimated costs associated with several CCS options: coal-fired post-combustion capture (PCC), natural gas-fired PCC, and Cryogenic Carbon Capture (CCC). We explore regional cost estimates with variations in costs of capital and fuels to provide a basis for regional and global projections of industrial CCS deployment. We offer a methodology for incorporating the CCS cost information into energy-economic and integrated assessment models. Our methodology can be applied to other applications of CCS in the industrial sector. We illustrate our method by introducing the industrial CCS options into the MIT EPPA model, a global energy-economic model that provides a basis for the analysis of long-term energy deployment, and we discuss different scenarios for industrial CCS deployment in different parts of the world. We tested in the EPPA model the potential for industrial CCS under the assumptions that CCS is the only mitigation option for deep GHG emission reduction in industry and that negative emission options are not available for other sectors of the economy. Overall, industrial CCS enables the continued use of energy-intensive goods with large reductions in global and sectoral emissions. We find that in scenarios with stringent climate policy, CCS in the industry sector is a key mitigation option, and our approach provides a path to projecting the deployment of industrial CCS across industries and regions