The Third Reich in East German Film: Defa, Memory, and the Foundational Narrative of the German Democratic Republic

This study will explore how East German films released from the 1940s to the 1980s played a central role in both reinforcing and chipping away at the national foundational narrative of the German Democratic Republic. This narrative looked back at the memory of the Third Reich and classified communists as heroes, Nazis as villains, and the majority of Germans as dangerously apolitical while also emphasizing the contemporary Cold War division between the east and the west. This thesis argues that DEFA films utilized the memory of the Third Reich to support, question, and expand this dynamic foundational narrative which remained malleable and contested throughout the state’s existence

A Global Land System Framework for Integrated Climate-Change Assessments

Abstract in HTML and technical report in PDF available on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change website (http://mit.edu/globalchange/www/).Land ecosystems play a major role in the global cycles of energy, water, carbon and nutrients. A Global Land System (GLS) framework has been developed for the Integrated Global Systems Model Version 2 (IGSM2) to simulate the coupled biogeophysics and biogeochemistry of these ecosystems, as well as the interactions of these terrestrial processes with the climate system. The GLS framework has resolved a number of water and energy cycling deficiencies and inconsistencies introduced in IGSM1. In addition, a new representation of global land cover and classification as well as soil characteristics has been employed that ensures a consistent description of the global land surface amongst all the land components of the IGSM2. Under this new land cover classification system, GLS is run for a mosaic of land cover types within a latitudinal band defined by the IGSM2 atmosphere dynamics and chemistry sub-model. The GLS shows notable improvements in the representation of land fluxes and states of water and energy over the previous treatment of land processes in the IGSM1. In addition, the zonal features of simulated carbon fluxes as well as key trace gas emissions of methane and nitrous oxide are comparable to estimates based on higher resolution models constrained by observed climate forcing. Given this, the GLS framework represents a key advance in the ability of the IGSM to faithfully represent coupled terrestrial processes to the climate system, and is well poised to support more robust two-way feedbacks of natural and managed hydrologic and ecologic systems with the climate and socio-economic components of the IGSM2.This study received support from the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is funded by a consortium of government, industry and foundation sponsors

Potential Direct and Indirect Effects of Global Cellulosic Biofuel Production on Greenhouse Gas Fluxes from Future Land-use Chage

http://globalchange.mit.edu/research/publications/2240The production of cellulosic biofuels may have a large influence on future land emissions of greenhouse gases. These effects will vary across space and time depending on land-use policies, trade, and variations in environmental conditions. We link an economic model with a terrestrial biogeochemistry model to explore how projections of cellulosic biofuels production may influence future land emissions of carbon and nitrous oxide. Tropical regions, particularly Africa and Latin America, are projected to become major producers of biofuels. Most biofuels production is projected to occur on lands that would otherwise be used to produce crops, livestock and timber. Biofuels production leads to displacement and a redistribution of global food and timber production along with a reduction in the trade of food products. Overall, biofuels production and the displacement of other managed lands increase emissions of greenhouse gases primarily as a result of carbon emissions from deforestation and nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer applications to maximize biofuel crop production in tropical regions. With optimal application of nitrogen fertilizers, cellulosic biofuels production may enhance carbon sequestration in soils of some regions. As a result, the relative importance of carbon emissions versus nitrous oxide emissions varies among regions. Reductions in carbon sequestration by natural ecosystems caused by the expansion of biofuels have minor effects on the global greenhouse gas budget and are more than compensated by concurrent biofuel-induced reductions in nitrous oxide emissions from natural ecosystems. Land policies that avoid deforestation and fertilizer applications, particularly in tropical regions, will have the largest impact on minimizing land emissions of greenhouse gas from cellulosic biofuels production.This research was supported in part by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to the MBL, Department of Energy, Office of Science (BER) grants DE-FG02-94ER61937, DE-FG02- 93ER61677, DE-FG02-08ER64648, EPA grant XA-83240101, NSF grant BCS-0410344, and the industrial and foundation sponsors of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change

Interactions between carbon and nitrogen dynamics in estimating net primary productivity for potential vegetation in North America

We use the terrestrial ecosystem model (TEM), a process-based model, to investigate how interactions between carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) dynamics affect predictions of net primary productivity (NPP) for potential vegetation in North America. Data on pool sizes and fluxes of C and N from intensively studied field sites are used to calibrate the model for each of 17 non-wetland vegetation types. We use information on climate, soils, and vegetation to make estimates for each of 11,299 non-wetland, 0.5° latitude × 0.5° longitude, grid cells in North America. The potential annual NPP and net N mineralization (NETNMIN) of North America are estimated to be 7.032 × 1015 g C yr−1 and 104.6 × 1012 g N yr−1, respectively. Both NPP and NETNMIN increase along gradients of increasing temperature and moisture in northern and temperate regions of the continent, respectively. Nitrogen limitation of productivity is weak in tropical forests, increasingly stronger in temperate and boreal forests, and very strong in tundra ecosystems. The degree to which productivity is limited by the availability of N also varies within ecosystems. Thus spatial resolution in estimating exchanges of C between the atmosphere and the terrestrial biosphere is improved by modeling the linkage between C and N dynamics. We also perform a factorial experiment with TEM on temperate mixed forest in North America to evaluate the importance of considering interactions between C and N dynamics in the response of NPP to an elevated temperature of 2°C. With the C cycle uncoupled from the N cycle, NPP decreases primarily because of higher plant respiration. However, with the C and N cycles coupled, NPP increases because productivity that is due to increased N availability more than offsets the higher costs of plant respiration. Thus, to investigate how global change will affect biosphere-atmosphere interactions, process-based models need to consider linkages between the C and N cycles