Corporate Rescue: This Year, Next Year...

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新破產清盤法: 陷阱與漏洞

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Sexual and geographic dimorphism in northern rockhopper penguins breeding in the South Atlantic Ocean

The Endangered northern rockhopper penguin Eudyptes moseleyi, like all penguins, is monomorphic, making sex determination of individuals in the field challenging. We examined the degree of sexual size dimorphism of adult birds across the species’ breeding range in the Atlantic Ocean and developed discriminant functions (DF) to predict individuals’ sex using morphometric measurements. We found significant site-specific differences in both bill length and bill depth, with males being the larger sex on each island. Across all islands, bill length contributed 78% to dissimilarity between sexes. Penguins on Gough Island had significantly longer bills, whilst those from Tristan da Cunha had the deepest. Island-specific DFs correctly classified 82-94% of individuals, and all functions performed significantly better than chance. The model for Nightingale Island correctly classified the greatest proportion of individuals (94-95%), while that for Tristan da Cunha performed the poorest (80-82%). A discriminant function derived from all sites accurately sexed 86-88% of northern rockhopper penguins achieving similar accuracy to island-specific functions. While molecular techniques conclusively determine an individual’s sex, morphometric measurements can provide a reliable estimate with close to 90% accuracy using a method that is less invasive and requires little technical expertise. Sexing is an important tool for meaningful interpretation of ecological data. Consideration of sex-specific differences in future studies will aid investigation of a potential sex-dependent vulnerability in this Endangered species.© The authors 2019. Open Access under Creative Commons by Attribution Licence. Use, distribution and reproduction are unrestricted. Authors and original publication must be credited. The attached file is the published pdf

Special study: Legal transition programme review

This study is an evaluation of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's Legal Transition Programme’s activities from 2001-2011, through a review of a sample of 30 legal reform projects and advisory projects in Armenia, Hungary, Mongolia, Russia and Serbia. It was conducted by the Evaluation department in conjunction with three external experts: Professor Douglas Arner (University of Hong Kong), Professor Charles Booth (University of Hawaii) and Professor Gordon Walker (LaTrobe University). Overall the programme was found to be successful due to its compatibility with the Bank’s activities and highly relevant due to its support of the Bank’s investments through contributions to legal improvements. The programme’s projects have made a core contribution to the transition process, influencing domestic policy formulation and contributing to stronger free market economies. The transition impact and sustainability of the programme was found to be excellent.published_or_final_versio

The mechanisms of North Atlantic CO2 uptake in a large Earth System Model ensemble

The oceans currently take up around a quarter of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by human activity. While stored in the ocean, this CO2 is not influencing Earth's radiation budget; the ocean CO2 sink therefore plays an important role in mitigating global warming. CO2 uptake by the oceans is heterogeneous, with the subpolar North Atlantic being the strongest CO2 sink region. Observations over the last 2 decades have indicated that CO2 uptake by the subpolar North Atlantic sink can vary rapidly. Given the importance of this sink and its apparent variability, it is critical that we understand the mechanisms behind its operation. Here we explore the combined natural and anthropogenic subpolar North Atlantic CO2 uptake across a large ensemble of Earth System Model simulations, and find that models show a peak in sink strength around the middle of the century after which CO2 uptake begins to decline. We identify different drivers of change on interannual and multidecadal timescales. Short-term variability appears to be driven by fluctuations in regional seawater temperature and alkalinity, whereas the longer-term evolution throughout the coming century is largely occurring through a counterintuitive response to rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations. At high atmospheric CO2 concentrations the contrasting Revelle factors between the low latitude water and the subpolar gyre, combined with the transport of surface waters from the low latitudes to the subpolar gyre, means that the subpolar CO2 uptake capacity is largely satisfied from its southern boundary rather than through air-sea CO2 flux. Our findings indicate that: (i) we can explain the mechanisms of subpolar North Atlantic CO2 uptake variability across a broad range of Earth System Models; (ii) a focus on understanding the mechanisms behind contemporary variability may not directly tell us about how the sink will change in the future; (iii) to identify long-term change in the North Atlantic CO2 sink we should focus observational resources on monitoring lower latitude as well as the subpolar seawater CO2; (iv) recent observations of a weakening subpolar North Atlantic CO2 sink may suggest that the sink strength has peaked and is in long-term decline.This work was supported by the EU FP7 Collaborative Project CarboOcean (Grant Agreement Number 264879), the Joint DECC/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme (GA01101), and the NERC directed research programme RAGNARoCC (NE/K002473/1)

Narrowing the Range of Future Climate Projections Using Historical Observations of Atmospheric CO2

This is the final version. Available from American Meteorological Society via the DOI in this recordUncertainty in the behavior of the carbon cycle is important in driving the range in future projected climate change. Previous comparisons of model responses with historical CO2 observations have suggested a strong constraint on simulated projections that could narrow the range considered plausible. This study uses a new 57-member perturbed parameter ensemble of variants of an Earth system model for three future scenarios, which 1) explores a wider range of potential climate responses than before and 2) includes the impact of past uncertainty in carbon emissions on simulated trends. These two factors represent a more complete exploration of uncertainty, although they lead to a weaker constraint on the range of future CO2 concentrations as compared to earlier studies. Nevertheless, CO2 observations are shown to be effective at narrowing the distribution, excluding 30 of 57 simulations as inconsistent with historical CO2 changes. The perturbed model variants excluded are mainly at the high end of the future projected CO2 changes, with only 8 of the 26 variants projecting RCP8.5 2100 concentrations in excess of 1100 ppm retained. Interestingly, a minority of the high-end variants were able to capture historical CO2 trends, with the large-magnitude response emerging later in the century (owing to high climate sensitivities, strong carbon feedbacks, or both). Comparison with observed CO2 is effective at narrowing both the range and distribution of projections out to the mid-twenty-first century for all scenarios and to 2100 for a scenario with low emissions.This work was supported by the Joint U.K. DECC/DEFRA Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme (GA01101). Chris Jones’s contribution was supported by the CRESCENDO project under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Grant Agreement 641816. Jo House was supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and EU FP7 Project LUC4C (603542). Stephen Sitch was supported by the EU FP7 through Project LUC4C (GA603542)

Sources of uncertainty in future projections of the carbon cycle

This is the final version of the article. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.The inclusion of carbon cycle processes within CMIP5 Earth System Models provides the opportunity to explore the relative importance of differences in scenario and climate model representation to future land and ocean carbon fluxes. A two-way ANOVA approach was used to quantify the variability owing to differences between scenarios and between climate models at different lead times. For global ocean carbon fluxes, the variance attributed to differences between Representative Concentration Pathway scenarios exceeds the variance attributed to differences between climate models by around 2025, completely dominating by 2100. This contrasts with global land carbon fluxes, where the variance attributed to differences between climate models continues to dominate beyond 2100. This suggests that modelled processes that determine ocean fluxes are currently better constrained than those of land fluxes, thus we can be more confident in linking different future socio-economic pathways to consequences of ocean carbon uptake than for land carbon uptake. The apparent agreement in atmosphere-ocean carbon fluxes, globally, masks strong climate model differences at a regional level. The North Atlantic and Southern Ocean are key regions, where differences in modelled processes represent an important source of variability in projected regional fluxesMOHC authors were supported by the Joint DECC / Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Cli- mate Programme (GA01101). SY was supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University grant “Bayesian Modelling for Quantifying Uncertainty in Climate Predictions” (1-ZV9Z). We acknowl- edge use of R software package (R Core Team 2013). We acknowledge the World Climate Re- search Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP and we thank the climate modelling groups for providing their GCM output (listed in Table 1). Support of this dataset was provided by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy

The age of anxiety? It depends where you look: changes in STAI trait anxiety, 1970–2010

Purpose Population-level surveys suggest that anxiety has been increasing in several nations, including the USA and UK. We sought to verify the apparent anxiety increases by looking for systematic changes in mean anxiety questionnaire scores from research publications. Methods We analyzed all available mean State–Trait Anxiety Inventory scores published between 1970 and 2010. We collected 1703 samples, representing more than 205,000 participants from 57 nations. Results Results showed a significant anxiety increase worldwide, but the pattern was less clear in many individual nations. Our analyses suggest that any increase in anxiety in the USA and Canada may be limited to students, anxiety has decreased in the UK, and has remained stable in Australia. Conclusions Although anxiety may have increased worldwide, it might not be increasing as dramatically as previously thought, except in specific populations, such as North American students. Our results seem to contradict survey results from the USA and UK in particular. We do not claim that our results are more reliable than those of large population surveys. However, we do suggest that mental health surveys and other governmental sources of disorder prevalence data may be partially biased by changing attitudes toward mental health: if respondents are more aware and less ashamed of their anxiety, they are more likely to report it to survey takers. Analyses such as ours provide a useful means of double-checking apparent trends in large population surveys