Aesthetics and literature : a problematic relation?

The paper argues that there is a proper place for literature within aesthetics but that care must be taken in identifying just what the relation is. In characterising aesthetic pleasure associated with literature it is all too easy to fall into reductive accounts, for example, of literature as merely "fine writing". Belleslettrist or formalistic accounts of literature are rejected, as are two other kinds of reduction, to pure meaning properties and to a kind of narrative realism. The idea is developed that literature-both poetry and prose fiction-invites its own distinctive kind of aesthetic appreciation which far from being at odds with critical practice, in fact chimes well with it

Projected changes of extreme weather events in the eastern United States based on a high resolution climate modeling system

This study is the first evaluation of dynamical downscaling using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model on a 4 km × 4 km high resolution scale in the eastern US driven by the new Community Earth System Model version 1.0 (CESM v1.0). First we examined the global and regional climate model results, and corrected an inconsistency in skin temperature during the downscaling process by modifying the land/sea mask. In comparison with observations, WRF shows statistically significant improvement over CESM in reproducing extreme weather events, with improvement for heat wave frequency estimation as high as 98%. The fossil fuel intensive scenario Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 was used to study a possible future mid-century climate extreme in 2057–9. Both the heat waves and the extreme precipitation in 2057–9 are more severe than the present climate in the Eastern US. The Northeastern US shows large increases in both heat wave intensity (3.05 °C higher) and annual extreme precipitation (107.3 mm more per year). doi:10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/04402

How would farmers in the French Alps adapt their systems to different drought and socio-economic context scenarios?

International audienceThe French Alps are considered as an area that is particularly vulnerable to climate change. Several droughts have already occurred since 2003. In order to assess the ability of farming systems to adapt to future drought events, we developed prospective scenarios combining different climatic and socio-economic contexts. Four scenarios were defined based on (i) prospective studies conducted at national and international levels, and (ii) a participatory approach with various stakeholders to transcribe these scenarios at a local level. Farmers and shepherds in the Vercors and Oisans massifs were surveyed in order to understand how they had reacted to previous droughts, and how they would plan to react to our scenarios. Results show first that the farmers would strive to continue their activity in each scenario, taking advantage of the flexibility of their farming systems, as in previous years. However, in the most pessimistic climatic scenario, they would also decrease the size of their herds. Depending on the socio-economic hypothesis, they would adopt farm structural changes (farm processing activities, direct selling, etc.), or look for part-time non-agricultural jobs. Three types of strategies were identified, depending on the farmers' objectives and adjustments. Finally, public policies to accompany these changes are considered

Improvement of the Prediction of Surface Ozone Concentration Over Conterminous U.S. by a Computationally Efficient Second-Order Rosenbrock Solver in CAM4-Chem

The global chemistry-climate model (CAM4-Chem) overestimates the surface ozone concentration over the conterminous U.S. (CONUS). Reasons for this positive bias include emission, meteorology, chemical mechanism, and solver. In this study, we explore the last possibility by examining the sensitivity to the numerical methods for solving the chemistry equations. A second-order Rosenbrock (ROS-2) solver is implemented in CAM4-Chem to examine its influence on the surface ozone concentration and the computational performance of the chemistry program. Results show that under the same time step size (1800 s), statistically significant reduction of positive bias is achieved by the ROS-2 solver. The improvement is as large as 5.2 ppb in Eastern U.S. during summer season. The ROS-2 solver is shown to reduce the positive bias in Europe and Asia as well, indicating the lower surface ozone concentration over the CONUS predicted by the ROS-2 solver is not a trade-off consequence with increasing the ozone concentration at other global regions. In addition, by refining the time step size to 180 s, the first-order implicit solver does not provide statistically significant improvement of surface ozone concentration. It reveals that the better prediction from the ROS-2 solver is not only due to its accuracy but also due to its suitability for stiff chemistry equations. As an added benefit, the computation cost of the ROS-2 solver is almost half of first-order implicit solver. The improved computational efficiency of the ROS-2 solver is due to the reuse of the Jacobian matrix and lower upper (LU) factorization during its multistage calculation

The vertical distribution of ozone instantaneous radiative forcing from satellite and chemistry climate models

We evaluate the instantaneous radiative forcing (IRF) of tropospheric ozone predicted by four state-of-the-art global chemistry climate models (AM2-Chem, CAM-Chem, ECHAM5-MOZ, and GISS-PUCCINI) against ozone distribution observed from the NASA Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) during August 2006. The IRF is computed through the application of an observationally constrained instantaneous radiative forcing kernels (IRFK) to the difference between TES and model-predicted ozone. The IRFK represent the sensitivity of outgoing longwave radiation to the vertical and spatial distribution of ozone under all-sky condition. Through this technique, we find total tropospheric IRF biases from -0.4 to + 0.7 W/m(2) over large regions within the tropics and midlatitudes, due to ozone differences over the region in the lower and middle troposphere, enhanced by persistent bias in the upper troposphere-lower stratospheric region. The zonal mean biases also range from -30 to + 50 mW/m(2) for the models. However, the ensemble mean total tropospheric IRF bias is less than 0.2 W/m(2) within the entire troposphere

Iodine chemistry in the troposphere and its effect on ozone

Despite the potential influence of iodine chemistry on the oxidizing capacity of the troposphere, reactive iodine distributions and their impact on tropospheric ozone remain almost unexplored aspects of the global atmosphere. Here we present a comprehensive global modelling experiment aimed at estimating lower and upper limits of the inorganic iodine burden and its impact on tropospheric ozone. Two sets of simulations without and with the photolysis of IxOy oxides (i.e. I2O2, I2O3 and I2O4) were conducted to define the range of inorganic iodine loading, partitioning and impact in the troposphere. Our results show that the most abundant daytime iodine species throughout the middle to upper troposphere is atomic iodine, with an annual average tropical abundance of (0.15-0.55) pptv. We propose the existence of a "tropical ring of atomic iodine" that peaks in the tropical upper troposphere (∼11-14 km) at the equator and extends to the sub-tropics (30°N-30°S). Annual average daytime I = IO ratios larger than 3 are modelled within the tropics, reaching ratios up to ∼20 during vigorous uplift events within strong convective regions. We calculate that the integrated contribution of catalytic iodine reactions to the total rate of tropospheric ozone loss (IOx Loss) is 2-5 times larger than the combined bromine and chlorine cycles. When IxOy photolysis is included, IOx Loss represents an upper limit of approximately 27, 14 and 27% of the tropical annual ozone loss for the marine boundary layer (MBL), free troposphere (FT) and upper troposphere (UT), respectively, while the lower limit throughout the tropical troposphere is ∼9 %. Our results indicate that iodine is the second strongest ozone-depleting family throughout the global marine UT and in the tropical MBL. We suggest that (i) iodine sources and its chemistry need to be included in global tropospheric chemistry models, (ii) experimental programs designed to quantify the iodine budget in the troposphere should include a strategy for the measurement of atomic I, and (iii) laboratory programs are needed to characterize the photochemistry of higher iodine oxides to determine their atmospheric fate since they can potentially dominate halogen-catalysed ozone destruction in the troposphere

Analytic Aesthetics

Peer reviewe

How emissions, climate, and land use change will impact mid-century air quality over the United States: A focus on effects at national parks

We use a global coupled chemistry-climate-land model (CESM) to assess the integrated effect of climate, emissions and land use changes on annual surface O3 and PM2.5 in the United States with a focus on national parks (NPs) and wilderness areas, using the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 projections. We show that, when stringent domestic emission controls are applied, air quality is predicted to improve across the US, except surface O3 over the western and central US under RCP8.5 conditions, where rising background ozone counteracts domestic emission reductions. Under the RCP4.5 scenario, surface O3 is substantially reduced (about 5 ppb), with daily maximum 8 h averages below the primary US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) of 75 ppb (and even 65 ppb) in all the NPs. PM2.5 is significantly reduced in both scenarios (4 μg m-3; ~50%), with levels below the annual US EPA NAAQS of 12 μg m-3 across all the NPs; visibility is also improved (10-15 dv; >75 km in visibility range), although some western US parks with Class I status (40-74 % of total sites in the US) are still above the 2050 planned target level to reach the goal of natural visibility conditions by 2064. We estimate that climate-driven increases in fire activity may dominate summertime PM2.5 over the western US, potentially offsetting the large PM2.5 reductions from domestic emission controls, and keeping visibility at present-day levels in many parks. Our study indicates that anthropogenic emission patterns will be important for air quality in 2050. However, climate and land use changes alone may lead to a substantial increase in surface O3 (2-3 ppb) with important consequences for O3 air quality and ecosystem degradation at the US NPs. Our study illustrates the need to consider the effects of changes in climate, vegetation, and fires in future air quality management and planning and emission policy making

A new Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) experiment designed for climate and chemistry models

A new Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) experiment "G4 specified stratospheric aerosols" (short name: G4SSA) is proposed to investigate the impact of stratospheric aerosol geoengineering on atmosphere, chemistry, dynamics, climate, and the environment. In contrast to the earlier G4 GeoMIP experiment, which requires an emission of sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the model, a prescribed aerosol forcing file is provided to the community, to be consistently applied to future model experiments between 2020 and 2100. This stratospheric aerosol distribution, with a total burden of about 2 Tg S has been derived using the ECHAM5-HAM microphysical model, based on a continuous annual tropical emission of 8 Tg SO2 yr−1. A ramp-up of geoengineering in 2020 and a ramp-down in 2070 over a period of 2 years are included in the distribution, while a background aerosol burden should be used for the last 3 decades of the experiment. The performance of this experiment using climate and chemistry models in a multi-model comparison framework will allow us to better understand the impact of geoengineering and its abrupt termination after 50 years in a changing environment. The zonal and monthly mean stratospheric aerosol input data set is available at https://www2.acd.ucar.edu/gcm/geomip-g4-specified-stratospheric-aerosol-data-set