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Faith communities can be important moral constituencies for action on climate change. The Faith Alliance for Climate Solutions (FACS) is a grassroots advocacy movement in Northern Virginia that motivates concrete actions by members of more than 75 diverse congregations to move the region to zero carbon emissions by 2050. We organize the concern that people of all faith traditions have toward care for creation into focused advocacy and leadership by example. FACS, a 501(c)(3) non-partisan organization, mobilizes clergy and lay members of Catholic, Hindu, Muslim, mainline and evangelical Protestant, Jewish, Sikh, Friends, Unitarian Universalist, and Buddhist faith communities, as well as people unaffiliated with specific faith traditions. We are creating practical, replicable models of local interfaith grassroots organizations that work locally to build healthy, resilient, and thriving communities in which environmentally sound choices become the default, first choices of individuals, corporations, and the public sector.

Although agricultural production contributed about 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States in 2019, existing agricultural practices are capable of making the sector carbon neutral. Whether American agriculture will ultimately achieve carbon neutrality is ultimately a question of political will, not a scientific one. Given the right policy environment, farms and ranches will be able to cut their emissions and use their land to sequester carbon, while becoming more climate resilient, productive, and profitable…

Urban Design Climate Workshops (UDCW) are underway to focus on urban heat stress adaptation integrated with flooding resiliency and greenhouse gas emission mitigation. Integrated Climate Mitigation and Climate Adaptation prioritizes mitigation strategies that yield concurrent adaptive benefits over those that do not. On the one hand, dense, compact urban forms that mix land use and support mass transit reduce the carbon footprint. On the other hand, these dense urban districts can be configured to reduce the impact of urban heat and storms due to the changing climate while enhancing quality of life.

The U.S. economy faces significant risks from unabated climate change. Every year of inaction serves to broaden and deepen those risks. In 2014 Michael R. Bloomberg, Henry M. Paulson Jr., and Thomas F. Steyer founded the Risky Business Project. The purpose of the project was to examine the economic risks presented by climate change and the opportunities to reduce these risks.

A series of recent extreme weather events — from hurricanes and wildfires in the U.S. to heat waves in Europe and floods in Japan — have put a spotlight on climate-related risks. Yet the implications for investment portfolios — stemming from a rising frequency and intensity of such events — have been notoriously hard for investors to grasp…

Consistent with its COP21 (Conference of Parties, 21st annual meeting) agreements, creating a United Nations Framework on Climate Change, China recently announced a three-year suspension of new permits for coal mine operations. At the same time, China has made major investments in developing renewable energy sources, and now leads the world in wind and solar power generation. It has also begun to ramp up its efforts to develop nuclear power. The search for alternatives, of course, means a shift away from carbon-based fossil fuels like coal and oil whose use generates the emission of the so-called “greenhouse gases”, thought to be responsible for global warming. This case discusses China’s motives in the global climate debate.

The Community Climate System Model (CCSM3) is the primary model for global climate research in the United States and is supported on a variety of computer systems. We present some of our porting experiences and describe the current performance of the CCSM3 on the Cray X1. We include the status of work in progress on other systems in the Cray product line.

Although the dramatic increase in computational power, a complete description of the Earth's climate by means of solutions of the equations of motion is far from being achieved. Most of the problems arise because the solutions depend on the second order effects of the dynamic and thermodynamic instability processes that plague the system. These instabilities are such that the observed behavior strongly departs from the response of the atmosphere to the forcing associated with the energy input. In illustrating the nature of the problem, we shall discuss the Atmospheric General Circulation, i.e. the circulation obtained by averaging the atmospheric motion along the longitude. We will show, by considering both the observed motion and some theoretical models, that the solution requires the parameterization of the momentum and heat fluxes associated with the baroclinic instability of the full three dimensional field. We will discuss how the parameterizations strongly depend on the detailed nature of the external parameters. As a conclusion, some speculations on the nature of the closure needed for this problem will be offered.

This paper discusses the state of knowledge about the trade-related environmental consequences of a country's development strategy along three channels: (i) direct trade-environment linkages (overexploitation of natural resources and trade-related transport costs); (ii) 'virtual trade' in emissions resulting from production activities; (iii) the product mix attributes of a 'green-growth' strategy (environmentally preferable products and goods for environmental management). Main conclusions are the following. Trade exacerbates over-exploitation of natural resources in weak institutional environments, but there is little evidence that differences in environmental policies across countries has led to significant 'pollution havens'. Trade policies to 'level the playing field' would be ineffective and result in destructive conflicts in the WTO. Lack of progress at the Doha round suggests the need to modifY the current system of global policy making.

Cycles of glaciation with an average period of ~100 kyr are mediated by impacts of cometary bolides. Ice-age conditions are dry and dusty with low rates of precipitation. Comets in the mass range 10¹⁵–10¹⁶ g impacting the oceans could release enough water vapour into the atmosphere to enhance a depleted greenhouse effect. The energy deposited in the oceans would also warm the surface layers, thus starting up an evaporation-precipitation cycle which ushers in warmer interglacial interludes. The latter have neutral stability and are necessarily short-lived, eventually drifting back to glacial conditions on timescales of ~10 kyr.

2015 is defined as El Nino year. Such phenomena would have influence on climate in China and furthermore impact the electricity condition. This paper is purposed to explore how El Nino phenomena affecting electricity and make prediction on summer electricity consumption. Since meteorological characteristics are complex and multiplex, a variety of meteorological factors should be considered and the paper used Body Feeling Temperature to measure it. Furthermore, to make prediction on summer electricity, the paper used the Pearson Analysis to measure the correlation between weather and electricity and then extracted the weather-used electricity from the whole society electricity using least square method. Finally, the paper built the model on relation between weather-used electricity and body feeling temperature, and took Beijing as an example to make electricity prediction. The prediction idea and model the paper put forward is reliable and practicable.

The geographical patterns of plant species richness at the large scale is one of the most pervasive features of life on Earth. This study described this pattern for plants from 18 nature reserves in China subtropical zone and explored the potential explanations behind this pattern. By means of Pearson's correlation analyses, the hidden forces that shape the plant species richness pattern in China subtropical zone were found. The findings showed that plant species richness variation was explained by both energy and water measured as annual potential evapotranspiration and minimum monthly precipitation, respectively. Moreover, climatic heterogeneity in nature reserve habitat explained more variance in plant species richness than topographical heterogeneity. This study emphasizes the importance of assessing the role of climatic heterogeneity in shaping plant species richness pattern.

Accurate climate data is an essential environmental factor to quantify ecology, geography and other related research fields. In this paper, we performed thin-plate smoothing spline interpolation implemented in ANUSPLIN on monthly climate data and obtained precipitation and temperature monthly interpolation surfaces in Kangdian area. Error analysis showed the RTMSE of temperature was less than 0.513 and the RTMSE of precipitation was less than 12.700 in most months. Compared with IDW and Kriging method, the proposed method could get more accurate results. It indicated that ANUSPLIN method could be the optimal spatial interpolation method in interpolating the monthly meteorological data in Kangdian area and other areas with complex terrain.