Racing climate change: Collaboration and conflict in California's global climate change policy arena

Media accounts routinely refer to California's Assembly Bill 32 (AB 32), the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, as "landmark" climate change legislation. On its surface, this label is an accurate reflection of the state's forward-thinking stance across many environmental issues including pesticides, toxic substances, solid waste, and air quality. For all its promise, however, AB 32 can also be considered a low point in the landscape of conflict between state environmental regulators and California's environmental justice movement. While the legislation included several provisions to address the procedural and distributive dimensions of environmental justice, the implementation of AB 32 has been marked by heated conflict. The most intense conflicts over AB 32 revolve around the primacy of market mechanisms such as "cap and trade." This article examines the drivers and the manifestations of these dynamics of collaboration and conflict between environmental justice advocates and state regulators, and pays particular attention to the scalar and racialized quality of the neoliberal discourse. The contentiousness of climate change politics in California offers scholars and practitioners around the world a cautionary tale of how the best intentions for integrating environmental justice principles into climate change policy do not necessarily translate into implementation and how underlying racialized fractures can upend collaboration between state and social movement actors. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd

Decadal Disruption of the QBO by Tropical Volcanic Supereruptions

The Los Chocoyos (14.6°N, 91.2°W) supereruption happened ∼75,000 years ago in Guatemala and was one of the largest eruptions of the past 100,000 years. It emitted enormous amounts of sulfur, chlorine, and bromine, with multi‐decadal consequences for the global climate and environment. Here, we simulate the impact of a Los Chocoyos‐like eruption on the quasi‐biennial oscillation (QBO), an oscillation of zonal winds in the tropical stratosphere, with a comprehensive aerosol chemistry Earth System Model. We find a ∼10‐year disruption of the QBO starting 4 months post eruption, with anomalous easterly winds lasting ∼5 years, followed by westerlies, before returning to QBO conditions with a slightly prolonged periodicity. Volcanic aerosol heating and ozone depletion cooling leads to the QBO disruption and anomalous wind regimes through radiative changes and wave‐mean flow interactions. Different model ensembles, volcanic forcing scenarios and results of a second model back up the robustness of our results

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

Weakened tropical circulation and reduced precipitation in response to geoengineering

Copyright © 2014 IOP Publishing LtdContent from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/). Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.Open Access journalGeoengineering by injection of reflective aerosols into the stratosphere has been proposed as a way to counteract the warming effect of greenhouse gases by reducing the intensity of solar radiation reaching the surface. Here, climate model simulations are used to examine the effect of geoengineering on the tropical overturning circulation. The strength of the circulation is related to the atmospheric static stability and has implications for tropical rainfall. The tropical circulation is projected to weaken under anthropogenic global warming. Geoengineering with stratospheric sulfate aerosol does not mitigate this weakening of the circulation. This response is due to a fast adjustment of the troposphere to radiative heating from the aerosol layer. This effect is not captured when geoengineering is modelled as a reduction in total solar irradiance, suggesting caution is required when interpreting model results from solar dimming experiments as analogues for stratospheric aerosol geoengineering.Natural Environment Research Counci

Short Paper: Antennas for Mussel-Based Underwater

ABSTRACT Researchers are working on using freshwater mussels as biological sensors. A sensor placed on the mussel detects the mussel's rhythmic opening and closing, or gape. Changes in the gape can indicate changes in the mussel's environment. We plan to attach gape sensors, microcontrollers, and radios to mussels and place them back in their natural environment. Small, inexpensive radios operating in the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) bands will provide the physical link of an underwater wireless sensor network (WSN). Despite the attenuation radio waves experience in water, the low cost of these radios should allow us to deploy enough to set up a reliable communications network. While commercially available radios can be used underwater with waterproofing, antennas designed for use in air are unsuitable for use in water, because of the different electromagnetic properties of water and air. We designed dipole, loop, and folded dipole antennas for use in water and attached these to transmitters. We measured the power transmitted by the antennas by immersing the transmitters in a tank of water and measuring the received power at different distances using a small dipole antenna attached to a spectrum analyzer. The distance between the antennas was precisely controlled with a motorized xy positioner. Categories and Subject Descriptors General Terms Measurement, Design, Experimentation Keywords Antenna, electromagnetic, underwater, radio, communications, wireless sensor networ

Іноземні інвестиції у контексті економічного зростання

The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 injected a large amount of SO2 into the stratosphere, which formed sulfate aerosols. Increased scattering and absorption of UV radiation by the enhanced stratospheric SO2 and aerosols decreased the amount of UV radiation reaching the troposphere, causing changes in tropospheric photochemistry. These changes affected the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere and the removal rate of CH4 in the years following the eruption. We use the three-dimensional chemistry transport model TM5 coupled to the aerosol microphysics module M7 to simulate the evolution of SO2 and sulfate aerosols from the Pinatubo eruption. Their effect on tropospheric photolysis frequencies and concentrations of OH and CH4 is quantified for the first time. We find that UV attenuation by stratospheric sulfur decreased the photolysis frequencies of both ozone and NO2 by about 2% globally, decreasing global OH concentrations by a similar amount in the first 2 years after the eruption. SO2 absorption mainly affects OH primary production by ozone photolysis, while aerosol scattering also alters OH recycling. The effect of stratospheric sulfur on global OH and CH4 is dominated by the effect of aerosol extinction, while SO2 absorption contributes by 12.5% to the overall effect in the first year after the eruption. The reduction in OH concentrations causes an increase in the CH4 growth rate of 4 and 2 ppb/yr in the first and second years after the eruption, respectively, contributing 11 Tg to the 27 Tg observed CH4 burden change in late 1991 and early 1992. Key Points We modeled the effect of Pinatubo sulfur on tropospheric photochemistry SO2 absorption and aerosol extinction reduce tropospheric UV levels The tropospheric OH sink of CH4 decreased by 17.8 Tg during June 1991-June 199

Aerosol size confines climate response to volcanic super-eruptions

Extremely large volcanic eruptions have been linked to global climate change, biotic turnover, and, for the Younger Toba Tuff (YTT) eruption 74,000 years ago, near-extinction of modern humans. One of the largest uncertainties of the climate effects involves evolution and growth of aerosol particles. A huge atmospheric concentration of sulfate causes higher collision rates, larger particle sizes, and rapid fall out, which in turn greatly affects radiative feedbacks. We address this key process by incorporating the effects of aerosol microphysical processes into an Earth System Model. The temperature response is shorter (9–10 years) and three times weaker (−3.5 K at maximum globally) than estimated before, although cooling could still have reached −12 K in some midlatitude continental regions after one year. The smaller response, plus its geographic patchiness, suggests that most biota may have escaped threshold extinction pressures from the eruption

Real-time Flood Forecasting And Information System For The State Of Iowa

Iowa Flood Center\u27s automated real-time flood forecasting and information system serves as a complement to the National Water Center\u27s proposed national system

Assessing the controllability of Arctic sea ice extent by sulfate aerosol geoengineering

In an assessment of how Arctic sea ice cover could be remediated in a warming world, we simulated the injection of SO2 into the Arctic stratosphere making annual adjustments to injection rates. We treated one climate model realization as a surrogate “real world” with imperfect “observations” and no rerunning or reference to control simulations. SO2 injection rates were proposed using a novel model predictive control regime which incorporated a second simpler climate model to forecast “optimal” decision pathways. Commencing the simulation in 2018, Arctic sea ice cover was remediated by 2043 and maintained until solar geoengineering was terminated. We found quantifying climate side effects problematic because internal climate variability hampered detection of regional climate changes beyond the Arctic. Nevertheless, through decision maker learning and the accumulation of at least 10 years time series data exploited through an annual review cycle, uncertainties in observations and forcings were successfully managed

Epitaxial growth and anisotropy of La(O,F)FeAs thin films deposited by Pulsed Laser Deposition

LaFeAsO1-xFx thin films were deposited successfully on (001)-oriented LaAlO3 and MgO substrates from stoichiometric LaFeAsO1-xFx polycrystalline targets with fluorine concentrations up to x = 0.25 by PLD. Room temperature deposition and post annealing of the films yield nearly phase pure films with a pronounced c-axis texture and a strong biaxial in-plane orientation. Transport measurements show metallic resistance and onset of superconductivity at 11 K. Hc2(T) was determined by resistive measurements and yield Hc2 values of 3 T at 3.6 K for B||c and 6 T at 6.4 K for B||ab.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure