Climate change governance

Climate change governance poses difficult challenges for contemporary political/administrative systems. These systems evolved to handle other sorts of problems and must now be adapted to handle emerging issues of climate change mitigation and adaptation. This paper examines long-term climate governance, particularly in relation to overcoming"institutional inertia"that hampers the development of an effective and timely response. It argues that when the influence of groups that fear adverse consequences of mitigation policies is combined with scientific uncertainty, the complexity of reaching global agreements, and long time frames, the natural tendency is for governments to delay action, to seek to avoid antagonizing influential groups, and to adopt less ambitious climate programs. Conflicts of power and interest are inevitable in relation to climate change policy. To address climate change means altering the way things are being done today - especially in terms of production and consumption practices in key sectors such as energy, agriculture, and transportation. But some of the most powerful groups in society have done well from existing arrangements, and they are cautious about disturbing the status quo. Climate change governance requires governments to take an active role in bringing about shifts in interest perceptions so that stable societal majorities in favor of deploying an active mitigation and adaptation policy regime can be maintained. Measures to help effect such change include: building coalitions for change, buying off opponents, establishing new centers of economic power, creating new institutional actors, adjusting legal rights and responsibilities, and changing ideas and accepted norms and expectations.Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases,Climate Change Economics,Environmental Economics&Policies,Science of Climate Change,Environment and Energy Efficiency

A literary critical comparison of the Masoretic Text and Septuagint of Daniel 2-7

This thesis applies the tools of literary or narrative criticism to a comparison of the Masoretic Text (MT) and Septuagint (@) versions of Daniel 2-7, the chapters which MT preserves in Aramaic. The approach treats both versions as literary creations with their own integrity, as a means of discovering more about both versions, their relationship to one another, and their provenance. The thesis is structured on the premise that chs 2-7 form a chiasm in the Aramaic. Accordingly, the central pair, chs 4-5, is treated first, followed by chs 6 and 3 and finally the outer pair, chs 2 and 7. At each stage, the relationship of the particular story in question to the rest of chs 2-7 is also compared.As a result of the study three types of conclusion are drawn: literary, thematic and historical. In literary terms, the MT narrator is more covert. As a result motivation and point of view are conveyed in MT by a variety of literary devices including the use of irony, the manipulation of dialogue and deployment of characters in the stories. The more overt © tends to anticipate the story and to attribute motives and emotions to characters. These differences are most acute in Daniel 4 because of the presence of Nebuchadnezzar as first person narrator, but can be observed in all the other narratives of Daniel 2-7. There is greater internal consistency evident in MT, and a greater congruency with other biblical narratives. All of this suggests that MT is a more deliberately crafted form than its © counterpart. There is also literary evidence for a differing structure within the wider narrative unit. MT binds the central pair of stories (chs 4 and 5) together primarily with the common Nebuchadnezzar material. This is not the case in ©, where chs 4 and 5 have less in common with one another yet chs 3 and 4 are more closely linked than in MT. This gives some credence to the view that the more chronological chapter order in P967 — chs 7 and 8 between chs 4 and 5 — may have been original to the Old Greek.Several thematic conclusions arise from the literary analysis. MT's treatment of the interplay between heaven and earth in both story and vision suggests a more sophisticated handling of symbolism, in comparison to the allegorical approach of ©. The wisdom of Daniel in MT is more mantic than is the case in the Greek narratives, which prefer to see Daniel more in terms of Bildungsweisheit. The view taken of Nebuchadnezzar by © is more negative than in MT, more reminiscent of the attitude toward the evil regime of chs 7-12 and less of the Babylonian/Persian setting conveyed in the Aramaic. As a result, MT is more universalist and © more concerned with Israelite nation and cult. However there are aspects of © that point to much earlier material also.A tentative historical conclusion is reached that each version reflects a different circle of tradition originating from Persian times, chiefly distinguishable by their views on wisdom and their attitudes to the monarchs encountered by Israel in the diaspora.The thesis is rounded out by a survey of differences in chs 1 and 8-12 as a check on findings from chs 2-7. One appendix treats Theodotion's translation briefly, and another provides an English translation of the Septuagint of Daniel 2-7

The history and historiography of the Russian worker-revolutionaries of the 1870s

In March, 1877, the radical worker Pëtr Alekseev gave his speech at the ‘Trial of Fifty,’ contributing to the social-revolutionary movement one of the founding documents in Russia’s fledgling, working-class history. In the decades that followed, many others of the workers’ circles of the 1870s would compose and contribute their own stories to this revolutionary, ‘workers’ history.’ It was understood that, for workers to ‘speak for themselves’ was one step towards a workers’ revolution, carried out by and for the working people. The ‘workers’ voice’ had been borne by Alekseev in 1877, and was shared by worker-memoirists and other worker-writers through the early twentieth century. Individual workers were called represent, embody, testify to and speak for the mass, or the working-class as a whole. Thus, the notion of the ‘workers’ voice’ tied together the propaganda, the historiography, and the philosophy of the Russian social-revolutionary movement. A study of the ‘workers’ voice’ in history and historiography reveals the connections between these areas of revolutionary thought and practice, and provides a better understanding of the role of individual workers - as activists and as writers - in the Russian socialist movement. Revolutionary historiography developed alongside and in concert with political theories of the social revolution, mass action, social law and social determination, individuality, and consciousness. For a small number of radical democrats-turned-‘rebels,’ anarchists, and social-revolutionaries – most, if not all, born into the educated elite, a few to the families of the high, landed nobility - adherence to the narodnik tenet that ‘the emancipation of the working class should be conquered by workers’ themselves’ made their own, committed or conscious choice of the ‘cause’ over the existing system of things marginal to the historical and social forces driving Russia towards revolution. The ‘going to the people’ movement was aimed at bringing ‘workers themselves’ into their movement. By developing certain working people into carriers of the socialist message, the movement hitherto limited to students, publicists, and the wayward sons and daughters of state officials, merchants and clergymen would become the ‘a working-class matter.’ Thus, a special place was allotted to the ‘self-educated’ or ‘self-developed’ workers who, like the self-styled ‘intelligentsia,’ were consciously committed, synthesising ‘consciousness’ with their own class experience and the social necessity behind it. The political and historical valorisation of the ‘workers’ voice’ extended this idea into the documentation and the history of the popular and workers’ movements. Just as the workers would have to ‘emancipate themselves,’ so too would they speak for themselves and write their own history. This history, it was thought, would eventually belong to the workers by right. Thus, historical writing and the documentation of a workers’ history, informed by judgments regarding individuality, society, class, history, and their relationships, became politically significant for the revolutionary movement as working people began to enter it and ‘speak for themselves.’ Late in the nineteenth century, the worker-revolutionaries of the 1870s began to write their own memoirs of events. Entering the documentary record as individuals, it was their task to testify to working-class experience. Thus, at the point where working people became ‘individuals’ for history and for future historians, marking themselves as different from the mass by leaving their own writings, and stories, and memoirs, they were also tied inextricably to a political viewpoint that identified every and any worker as practically identical. As political figures, ‘conscious’ radicals who had taken responsibility for their own actions, their lives were historically definite; as ‘working men,’ sharing in a victimhood that was common to millions, their lives were indefinite, unhistorical, alienated. In the attempt to explain one part of their lives by the other, in the juxtaposition of class experience with political experience, in the light of a political function that had workers become witnesses rather than writers, the worker-revolutionaries reproduced in their political and historical writings the class categories that their radicalism had contradicted. The awkward position of worker-intelligent – in one half unique, conscious, definite, historical, active, by the other: plural, instinctive, indefinite, and passive – was stamped into ‘workers’ writings

750 GeV Diphoton excess from E6E_6 in F-theory GUTs

We interpret the 750-760 GeV diphoton resonance as one or more of the spinless components of a singlet superfield arising from the three 27-dimensional representations of $E_6$ in F-theory, which also contain three copies of colour-triplet charge $\mp 1/3$ vector-like fermions $D_i,\bar{D}_i$ and inert Higgs doublets to which the singlets may couple. For definiteness we consider (without change) a model that was proposed some time ago which contains such states, as well as bulk exotics, leading to gauge coupling unification. The smoking gun prediction of the model is the existence of other similar spinless resonances, possibly close in mass to 750-760 GeV, decaying into diphotons, as well as the three families of vector-like fermions $D_i,\bar{D}_i$.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, minor corrections, reference

Advanced Aeromechanics Prediction Methods for Rotorcraft Flight Vehicles

No abstract availabl

R-Parity violation in F-Theory

We discuss R-parity violation (RPV) in semi-local and local F-theory constructions. We first present a detailed analysis of all possible combinations of RPV operators arising from semi-local F-theory spectral cover constructions, assuming an $SU(5)$ GUT. We provide a classification of all possible allowed combinations of RPV operators originating from operators of the form $10\cdot \bar 5\cdot \bar 5$, including the effect of $U(1)$ fluxes with global restrictions. We then relax the global constraints and perform explicit computations of the bottom/tau and RPV Yukawa couplings, at an $SO(12)$ local point of enhancement in the presence of general fluxes subject only to local flux restrictions. We compare our results to the experimental limits on each allowed RPV operator, and show that operators such as $LLe^c$, $LQd^c$ and $u^cd^cd^c$ may be present separately within current bounds, possibly on the edge of observability, suggesting lepton number violation or neutron-antineutron oscillations could constrain F-theory models.Comment: 40 pages, 13 figures, minor correction

MSSM from F-theory SU(5) with Klein Monodromy

We revisit a class of $SU(5)$ SUSY GUT models which arise in the context of the spectral cover with Klein Group monodromy $V_4=Z_2\times Z_2$. We show that $Z_2$ matter parities can be realised via new geometric symmetries respected by the spectral cover. We discuss a particular example of this kind, where the low energy effective theory below the GUT scale is just the MSSM with no exotics and standard matter parity, extended by the seesaw mechanism with two right-handed neutrinos