On the Potentials and Limitations of Attributing a Small-Scale Climate Event

Intense convective storms can be hazardous when occurring over large populated cities. In a changing climate, decision makers and the general public increasingly need to be able to better understand if and to what extent these storms are influenced by anthropological climate change and what to expect as climate continues to warm. Unfortunately due to their limited ability to resolve small-scale features in models, convective storms remain a challenge to the modeling community. Here, we use a forecast-ensemble based method using a convection permitting model with full data-assimilation, to assess the risk of exceeding certain precipitation thresholds related to a critical cloudburst event that occurred over Copenhagen, Denmark. Our results show that this set-up is representing well the overall observed intensities. By adapting a pseudo-global warming approach, we show that both the risk for flooding and the risk for reaching unprecedented precipitation intensity increases resulting from further warmingpublishedVersio

Gerald Ferguson : The Standard Corpus of Present Day English Language Usage Arranged by Word Length and Alphabetized by Word Length

What can evolutionary biology tell us about male-female differences in preferences concerning family matters? Might mothers be more solicitous toward offspring than fathers, for example? The economics literature has documented gender differences—children benefit more from money put in the hands of mothers rather than fathers, for example—and these differences are thought to be partly due to preferences. Yet for good reason family economics is mostly concerned with how prices and incomes affect behavior against a backdrop of exogenous preferences. Evolutionary biology complements this approach by treating preferences as the outcome of natural\ud selection. We mine the well-developed biological literature to make a prima facie case for evolutionary roots of parental preferences. We consider the most rudimentary of traits—sex differences in gamete size and internal fertilization—and explain how they have been thought to generate malefemale differences in altruism toward children and other preferences related to family behavior. The evolutionary approach to the family illuminates connections between issues typically thought distinct in family economics, such as parental care and marriage markets