Modelling the impact of the recession on greenhouse gases from agriculture in Ireland

working paperThe effects of the recession of 2009 have been felt across the economy of Ireland. The rapid contraction in economic activity has had its effect on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as well. It is possible to model the recession’s effect on agricultural GHG in the FAPRI-Ireland GHG model using the latest international commodity price projections from Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI). The FAPRI-Ireland GHG model creates projections of future levels of Irish agricultural activity and then uses a mix of national and default emissions factors to convert this activity to estimates of annual GHG emissions from now to 2020. Our model is shocked using post-downturn commodity price projections for a selection of exogenous prices. The changes to these international commodity prices reflect the international market response to the downturn, and as such they have an impact on the level of GHG emitted by the agricultural sector in Ireland. This analysis finds that, despite the depth and breadth of the recession, the impact on GHG emissions from Irish agriculture has been muted. The impact of the shock is to reduce the projected annual emissions from the sector by only 0.14 Mt by 2020. This compares to the 2.97 Mt reduction in annual emissions which the sector would have to achieve if, for example, a reduction target of 20 percent on 2005 levels were to be imposed

Why Haven\u27t You Published That Research (and Your Other Ideas)?

Various disincentives and barriers keep communicators from pursuing scholarly publication opportunities

Panel: Going Virtual: Are there Real Opportunities for Business in Virtual Worlds?

Summary of Panel Topic (related to ICIS track theme on Social Networking

Navy composite maintenance and repair experience

The Navy has been a strong proponent of composites for aircraft structure. Fleet use of composites started with the F-14 in the early 1970's and has steadily increased. This experience base provides sufficient information to allow an evaluation of the maintenance performance of polymer composites in service. A summary is presented of the Navy's experience with maintenance of composite structure. The general types of damage experienced in the fleet as well as specific examples of composite damage to aircraft is described. The impact of future designs on supportability is also discussed

Space-Time Clustering and Correlations of Major Earthquakes

Earthquake occurrence in nature is thought to result from correlated elastic stresses, leading to clustering in space and time. We show that occurrence of major earthquakes in California correlates with time intervals when fluctuations in small earthquakes are suppressed relative to the long term average. We estimate a probability of less than 1% that this coincidence is due to random clustering.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to PR

Systematic procedural and sensitivity analysis of the pattern informatics method for forecasting large (M > 5) earthquake events in southern California

Recent studies in the literature have introduced a new approach to earthquake forecasting based on representing the space-time patterns of localized seismicity by a time-dependent system state vector in a real-valued Hilbert space and deducing information about future space-time fluctuations from the phase angle of the state vector. While the success rate of this Pattern Informatics (PI) method has been encouraging, the method is still in its infancy. Procedural analysis, statistical testing, parameter sensitivity investigation and optimization all still need to be performed. In this paper, we attempt to optimize the PI approach by developing quantitative values for "predictive goodness" and analyzing possible variations in the proposed procedure. In addition, we attempt to quantify the systematic dependence on the quality of the input catalog of historic data and develop methods for combining catalogs from regions of different seismic rates.Comment: 39 pages, 4 tables, 9 figures. Submitted to Pure and Applied Geophysics on 30 November 200