10 research outputs found
Denying bogus skepticism in climate change and tourism research
This final response to the two climate change denial papers by Shani and Arad further highlights the inaccuracies, misinformation and errors in their commentaries. The obfuscation of scientific research and the consensus on anthropogenic climate change may have significant long-term negative consequences for better understanding the implications of climate change and climate policy for tourism and create confusion and delay in developing and implementing tourism sector responses
Exact joint likelihood of pseudo-Cℓ estimates from correlated Gaussian cosmological fields
We present the exact joint likelihood of pseudo- power spectrum
estimates measured from an arbitrary number of Gaussian cosmological fields.
Our method is applicable to both spin-0 fields and spin-2 fields, including a
mixture of the two, and is relevant to Cosmic Microwave Background, weak
lensing and galaxy clustering analyses. We show that Gaussian cosmological
fields are mixed by a mask in such a way that retains their Gaussianity,
without making any assumptions about the mask geometry. We then show that each
auto- or cross-pseudo- estimator can be written as a quadratic form,
and apply the known joint distribution of quadratic forms to obtain the exact
joint likelihood of a set of pseudo- estimates in the presence of an
arbitrary mask. Considering the polarisation of the Cosmic Microwave Background
as an example, we show using simulations that our likelihood recovers the full,
exact multivariate distribution of , and pseudo- power
spectra. Our method provides a route to robust cosmological constraints from
future Cosmic Microwave Background and large-scale structure surveys in an era
of ever-increasing statistical precision.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures. Updated to match accepted versio
Sufficiency of a Gaussian power spectrum likelihood for accurate cosmology from upcoming weak lensing surveys
We investigate whether a Gaussian likelihood is sufficient to obtain accurate
parameter constraints from a Euclid-like combined tomographic power spectrum
analysis of weak lensing, galaxy clustering and their cross-correlation.
Testing its performance on the full sky against the Wishart distribution, which
is the exact likelihood under the assumption of Gaussian fields, we find that
the Gaussian likelihood returns accurate parameter constraints. This accuracy
is robust to the choices made in the likelihood analysis, including the choice
of fiducial cosmology, the range of scales included, and the random noise
level. We extend our results to the cut sky by evaluating the additional
non-Gaussianity of the joint cut-sky likelihood in both its marginal
distributions and dependence structure. We find that the cut-sky likelihood is
more non-Gaussian than the full-sky likelihood, but at a level insufficient to
introduce significant inaccuracy into parameter constraints obtained using the
Gaussian likelihood. Our results should not be affected by the assumption of
Gaussian fields, as this approximation only becomes inaccurate on small scales,
which in turn corresponds to the limit in which any non-Gaussianity of the
likelihood becomes negligible. We nevertheless compare against N-body weak
lensing simulations and find no evidence of significant additional
non-Gaussianity in the likelihood. Our results indicate that a Gaussian
likelihood will be sufficient for robust parameter constraints with power
spectra from Stage IV weak lensing surveys.Comment: 15 pages, 19 figures, matches version accepted by MNRA
Using archived and biocollection samples towards deciphering the DNA virus diversity associated with rodent species in the families cricetidae and heteromyidae
No time for smokescreen skepticism: A rejoinder to Shani and Arad
Shani and Arad (2014) claimed that tourism scholars tend to endorse the most pessimistic assessments regarding climate change, and that anthropogenic climate change was a “fashionable” and “highly controversial scientific topic”. This brief rejoinder provides the balance that is missing from such climate change denial and skepticism studies on climate change and tourism. Recent research provides substantial evidence that reports on anthropogenic climate change are accurate, and that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, including from the tourism industry, play a significant role in climate change. Some positive net effects may be experienced by some destinations in the short-term, but in the long-term all elements of the tourism system will be impacted. The expansion of tourism emissions at a rate greater than efficiency gains means that it is increasingly urgent that the tourism sector acknowledge, accept and respond to climate change. Debate on tourism-related adaptation and mitigation measures is to be encouraged and welcomed. Climate change denial is not