Message in a Bottleneck? Attitudes and Perceptions of Climate Change in the Cooperative Extension Service in the Southeastern United States

This paper addresses factors affecting climate change perceptions and attitudes among Cooperative Extension professionals in the Southeastern United States. Extension serves as a critical link between climate researchers and stakeholders who have the capacity to directly affect climate change impacts through on-the-ground action. We used the Six Americas scale, developed by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication, as the basis for a webbased survey of 2,758 Extension professionals in eight Southeastern states between August 2011 and March 2012. Given their role as science communicators, one might expect Extension professionals to be as concerned as climate scientists about potential climate changes. We found, however, that Extension professionals are similar to the general public and represent the full range of Six Americas categories. Factors correlated with Six Americas results included: gender, political leaning, education, state Extension program, Extension program area, role within Extension, and coastal/inland location. Our results suggest the importance of engaging Extension staff in a long-term professional development strategy that involves improved training and climate education, preparing Extension professionals to effectively communicate climate change information to farmers and forest landowners whose actions impact climate outcomes

Recommendations for Early Phases of Engaging Communities in Climate Change Adaptation

Communities across the globe have begun planning for and adapting to climate change. Cooperative Extension Service professionals are in a unique position to use the resources available to them to facilitate climate change adaptation in their communities. Adaptation planning is a local activity that must be context specific. However, general recommendations can be made to help facilitate the planning process. In this study, we conducted a systematic review of research about climate change adaptation in communities to explore ideas that contribute to successful adaptation-planning communication. We identified and reviewed 50 peer-reviewed articles that described various outreach efforts to engage communities in planning for adaptation across a range of contexts and settings. Five themes emerged addressing how to facilitate early stages of the climate change adaptation process: establishing positive initial engagement, incorporating participatory methods, using tools to facilitate understanding, addressing trust and uncertainty, and maximizing limited time. Based on the review and emergent themes, we offer practical recommendations for educators and Cooperative Extension Service professionals as they engage communities in climate change adaptation

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Abstracts from the 20th International Symposium on Signal Transduction at the Blood-Brain Barriers

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138963/1/12987_2017_Article_71.pd

Public Perceptions of Using Woody Biomass as a Renewable Energy Source

Woody biomass is an energy source that may play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. One barrier to using wood for energy is public perceptions. This article describes the results of a needs assessment survey that was used to develop a public outreach program. Survey responses from 298 residents of Alachua County, Florida suggest that respondents do not know about using wood for energy, are willing to be engaged in the decision-making process, and are generally in favor of using waste wood as an energy source. Respondents are most concerned about sustaining nearby forests and air quality

Wirtschaftspolitische Grundsätze der Gestaltung von Risikotransfersystemen für Naturgefahren

Zentrales Element zur Verbesserung des Naturgefahrenmanagements in Deutschland ist die Änderung des bestehenden Risikotransfersystems. Durch den Übergang von der freiwilligen Versicherung zu einer Versicherungspflicht würden neben einer besseren Absicherung auftretender Schäden auch stärkere Anreize zur Risikominderung und -prävention geschaffen. Eine solche Änderung des ordnungspolitischen Rahmens erscheint vor dem Hintergrund der ansteigenden Häufigkeit von Naturkatastrophen mit großen volkswirtschaftlichen Schäden und der offensichtlichen Probleme des derzeitigen Systems in Deutschland dringend erforderlich. Aufgrund der institutionellen Gegebenheiten in Deutschland ist eine Versicherungspflicht bei privaten Versicherungen am ehesten geeignet, die bestehenden Probleme zu lösen. Mit der Versicherungspflicht sollte auch ein Kontrahierungszwang für die Anbieter von Versicherungen eingeführt werden. Ferner wird angeregt, die Versicherungspflicht durch einen Fonds zu Finanzierung von Präventionsmaßnahmen und einen Risikostrukturausgleich zu ergänzen.The central element to improve the management of natural hazards in Germany is to amend the existing risk-transfer system. A transition of the current voluntary insurance system into a compulsory insurance system would make the hedging of losses and damages easier and would create stronger incentives for risk reduction and prevention. Such a modification of the regulatory framework is needed because of the increasing frequency of natural disasters with huge economic losses and the obvious problems of the current insurance system in Germany. Against the background of the institutional situation in Germany the article shows that a compulsory insurance system is the best answer to solve the existing problems. Together with the implementation of a compulsory insurance system a constraint to contract for insurance suppliers to avoid cherry picking should be introduced. The article suggests furthermore complementing the compulsory insurance system with a fund for financing of preventative measures and a risk structure compensation between insurance supplier