scholarly journals Climate Change and Nighttime Heat Stress: Tales of Two Cities in the US Midwest

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 197-210
Author(s):  
Woonsup Choi ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shandrea Stallworth ◽  
Swati Shrestha ◽  
Brooklyn Schumaker ◽  
Nilda Roma-Burgos ◽  
Te-Ming Tseng

Rice is a staple food for more than 3.5 billion people worldwide, with Asia producing almost 90% of the global rice yield. In the US, rice is primarily produced in four regions: Arkansas Grand Prairie, Mississippi Delta, Gulf Coast, and Sacramento Valley of California. Arkansas currently accounts for more than 50% of the rice produced in the US. As global temperatures continue to rise and fluctuate, crop-breeding programs must continue to evolve. Unfortunately, sudden submergence due to climate change and unpredictable flash flooding can cause yield reduction up to 100% and affect 20 million ha of agricultural farmlands. Similarly, it has been demonstrated that temperatures higher than 34°C can cause spikelet infertility resulting in up to 60% reduction in yield. One major drawback to developing abiotic stress-tolerant rice is the loss of critical traits such as vegetative vigor, spikelet fertility, and grain quality, which are essential in increasing economic return for farmers. To replace traits lost in past breeding endeavors, weedy rice (WR) has been proposed as a source for novel trait discovery to improve rice breeding programs. Therefore, the goal of this study was to screen and identify heat- and submergence-tolerant WR accessions. A WR mini germplasm consisting of seedlings at the 3–4 leaf stage was exposed to heat (38°C) and complete submergence for 21 days. After each treatment, height was recorded every 7 days for 28 days, and biomass was collected 28 days after treatment. The average height reduction across all accessions was 19 and 21% at 14 and 28 days after treatment (DAT) for the heat-stress treatment. The average height reduction across all accessions was 25 and 33% for the complete submergence stress. The average biomass reduction across all accessions was 18 and 21% for heat and complete submergence stress, respectively. Morphologically, at 28 DAT, 28% of the surviving WR accessions in the heat-stress treatment with <20% height reduction were straw-colored hull types without awns. Under complete submergence stress, 33% of the surviving WR accessions were blackhull types without awns. These specific biotypes may play a role in the increased resilience of WR populations to heat or submergence stress. The results presented in this paper will highlight elite WR accessions that can survive the effects of climate change.


Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda J. Bilmes

AbstractThe United States has traditionally defined national security in the context of military threats and addressed them through military spending. This article considers whether the United States will rethink this mindset following the disruption of the Covid19 pandemic, during which a non-military actor has inflicted widespread harm. The author argues that the US will not redefine national security explicitly due to the importance of the military in the US economy and the bipartisan trend toward growing the military budget since 2001. However, the pandemic has opened the floodgates with respect to federal spending. This shift will enable the next administration to allocate greater resources to non-military threats such as climate change and emerging diseases, even as it continues to increase defense spending to address traditionally defined military threats such as hypersonics and cyberterrorism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 174-177
Author(s):  
Karl Aiginger

AbstractAfter President Trump’s departure, many expected that the transatlantic partnership would return to its previous state with the US playing a leading role. This article challenges that view. Instead, a new world order is foreseen, with different partnerships and spheres of influence. Europe can decide whether it wants to remain small and homogeneous or a larger but also more heterogenous Union that leads in welfare indicators such as life expectancy, fighting poverty and limiting climate change. Expanding this lead and communicating its uniqueness can empower Europe to combine enlargement and deepening, which appears unlikely without changes in governance and self-confidence.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Hatem Mahmoud ◽  
Ayman Ragab

The density of building blocks and insufficient greenery in cities tend to contribute dramatically not only to increased heat stress in the built environment but also to higher energy demand for cooling. Urban planners should, therefore, be conscious of their responsibility to reduce energy usage of buildings along with improving outdoor thermal efficiency. This study examines the impact of numerous proposed urban geometry cases on the thermal efficiency of outer spaces as well as the energy consumption of adjacent buildings under various climate change scenarios as representative concentration pathways (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5 climate projections for New Aswan city in 2035. The investigation was performed at one of the most underutilized outdoor spaces on the new campus of Aswan University in New Aswan city. The potential reduction of heat stress was investigated so as to improve the thermal comfort of the investigated outdoor spaces, as well as energy savings based on the proposed strategies. Accordingly, the most appropriate scenario to be adopted to cope with the inevitable climate change was identified. The proposed scenarios were divided into four categories of parameters. In the first category, shelters partially (25–50% and 75%) covering the streets were used. The second category proposed dividing the space parallel or perpendicular to the existing buildings. The third category was a hybrid scenario of the first and second categories. In the fourth category, a green cover of grass was added. A coupling evaluation was applied utilizing ENVI-met v4.2 and Design-Builder v4.5 to measure and improve the thermal efficiency of the outdoor space and reduce the cooling energy. The results demonstrated that it is better to cover outdoor spaces with 50% of the overall area than transform outdoor spaces into canyons.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 797-811 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brianne Suldovsky ◽  
Asheley Landrum ◽  
Natalie Jomini Stroud

In an era where expertise is increasingly critiqued, this study draws from the research on expertise and scientist stereotyping to explore who the public considers to be a scientist in the context of media coverage about climate change and genetically modified organisms. Using survey data from the United States, we find that political ideology and science knowledge affect who the US public believes is a scientist in these domains. Our results suggest important differences in the role of science media attention and science media selection in the publics “scientist” labeling. In addition, we replicate previous work and find that compared to other people who work in science, those with PhDs in Biology and Chemistry are most commonly seen as scientists.


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