Chinese State Media Coverage of Climate Change and the Future of China's Food and Water Security

This research centers on a summary of scientifically observed current effects of climate change on water security in China. It postulates that climate change has the potential to affect water security, and therefore, food security, at an increasingly rapid rate in the future, and discusses the climatic mechanisms by which these potentialities could occur. Specifically, it focuses on the relationship of water sources in the Tibetan Plateau with meteorological changes brought about by climate change, challenging commonly accepted assumptions regarding the rapid melt of glacial ice there, and instead, suggests that future water scarcity in China will be more heavily affected by changes in precipitation patterns than by decreases in glacial volumes. Finally, this research discusses the role of media in forming the social awareness of populations, adopting from social science the idea that an individual's perceptions define her reality. In particular, it explores the attitudes of the Chinese state-run media toward the publication of climate change-related news stories, and the effects these attitudes have on the substance and quality of these reports, concluding that the Chinese State considers thorough and accurate information about the causes and effects of climate change to be sensitive and potentially incendiary

First narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in advanced detector data

International audienceSpinning neutron stars asymmetric with respect to their rotation axis are potential sources of continuous gravitational waves for ground-based interferometric detectors. In the case of known pulsars a fully coherent search, based on matched filtering, which uses the position and rotational parameters obtained from electromagnetic observations, can be carried out. Matched filtering maximizes the signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio, but a large sensitivity loss is expected in case of even a very small mismatch between the assumed and the true signal parameters. For this reason, narrow-band analysis methods have been developed, allowing a fully coherent search for gravitational waves from known pulsars over a fraction of a hertz and several spin-down values. In this paper we describe a narrow-band search of 11 pulsars using data from Advanced LIGO’s first observing run. Although we have found several initial outliers, further studies show no significant evidence for the presence of a gravitational wave signal. Finally, we have placed upper limits on the signal strain amplitude lower than the spin-down limit for 5 of the 11 targets over the bands searched; in the case of J1813-1749 the spin-down limit has been beaten for the first time. For an additional 3 targets, the median upper limit across the search bands is below the spin-down limit. This is the most sensitive narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves carried out so far