162 research outputs found
Atmospheric Pressure and Snowball Earth Deglaciation: Model and Input Data
No full textThis is the radiative-convective model used to obtain the results in the paper "Atmospheric Pressure and Snowball Earth Deglaciation" by Nicholas Edkins and Roger Davies
The effect of atmospheric pressure on Snowball Earth deglaciation
No full textThe most common explanation for the escape from a Snowball Earth state involves, among other factors, a strong greenhouse effect caused by a large partial pressure of CO2. This leads to an increase in surface pressure, which most models do not account for. With a higher surface pressure, pressure broadening increases, and convection reaches a deeper layer, both of which result in higher surface temperatures. The latter mechanism, which has not previously been reported, is found to be a greater source of warming than pressure broadening in the normal range of CO2 partial pressures at the point of deglaciation
The effect of surface pressure on snowball earth deglaciation
No full textA 1D radiative-convective model was built to investigate the effect of surface pressure on Snowball Earth deglaciation. This type of model was chosen because it is accurate enough to replicate both the modern climate and the extreme Snowball state, but simple enough that the consequences of a large structural change can be readily understood. Most models of the Snowball Earth keep the surface pressure fixed at its present value of 1 bar. However, deglaciation requires a CO2 inventory in the range 0.1{0:4 bar. This substantially increases the surface pressure, which increases the surface temperature. Therefore, it would require less CO2 to escape a Snowball state than these models would suggest. A previous study used the correct surface pressure of 1 bar + PI;CO2 , but the warming caused by the increased pressure was attributed to pressure broadening of the CO2 absorption lines. Here it is shown that pressure broadening is not the primary effect; instead, the increase in surface pressure allows convection to extend down to higher pressures, while the energy balance at the top of the atmosphere remains unchanged. This process, which is new to the literature, is termed 'convective deepening'. At the deglaciation threshold of 0:25 bar, compared to an atmosphere with surface pressure fixed at 1 bar, it was found that the surface is 3K warmer if pressure broadening is included, and 13K warmer if both pressure broadening and convective deepening are included. Therefore, convective deepening is the major source of warming when the surface pressure increases in Snowball Earth conditions. With 0:25 bar of CO2, Cp decreases by 3%, while Rspecific decreases by 5%, which means the moist adiabatic lapse rate increases, causing a 2K increase in surface temperature. This effect, while smaller than convective deepening and pressure broadening, is not negligible
Trauma and the ethical in international relations
No full textThe suffering that initially prompts ethical reflection is frequently forgotten in the generalised rational response of much contemporary International Relations theory. This thesis draws on Theodor W. Adorno and Gillian Rose to propose an alternative approach to suffering in world politics.
Adorno argues suffering and trauma play a key role in the task of enlightening Enlightenment. They emphasise the concrete particularity of human existence in a way that is radically challenging to Enlightenment thought. Understanding suffering helps to drive a negative dialectics that preserves the non-identical (that which cannot be understood, manipulated or controlled by reason), holding it up against the instrumentalism and abstraction that have prevented Enlightenment thought from fulfilling its promise.
Part One reviews contemporary approaches to international ethics in a way that draws out their affinity with the Enlightenment thought Adorno criticises. Despite their variety, liberal and Habermasian approaches to international ethics tend to be rational and problem-solving, to assume moral progress, to underestimate the importance of history and culture, and to neglect inner lives. They approach ethics in a way that pays too little attention to the social, historical, and cultural antecedents of suffering and therefore promotes solutions that, whilst in some ways inspiring, are too disconnected from the suffering they seek to address to be effective in practice.
Part Two deepens the critique of modern ethics through an exposition of Adorno's work. It then draws on Adorno's conception of promise, Rose's writing on mourning and political risk, and a broader literature on ways of working through trauma to propose an alternative way of being in the world with ethical and political implications. I advocate a neo-Hegelian work of mourning, which deepens understanding of the complexities of violence and informs a difficult, tentative, anxiety-ridden taking of political risk in pursuit of a good enough justice
Climate Sensitivity in a 2D Radiative-Convective Model: Heterogeneity, Nonlinearity, and Dynamical Feedback
No full textDynamical feedback is the difference in equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) when horizontal heat transport is free to adjust compared to when it is held fixed. This work provides an understanding of dynamical feedback and how it results from the interaction between the spatial heterogeneity of climate variables and the nonlinearity of their influence on surface temperature. An analytical model of dynamical feedback is used to develop intuition about how heterogeneity and changes in transport combine to influence ECS without nonlinearity. A 2D radiative-convective model (RCM) is then developed to model the nonlinear response more realistically by incorporating water vapour, surface albedo, and lapse rate feedbacks. Dynamical feedback strongly depends on the latitudinal heterogeneity, so representing both the tropical and polar extremes is important for calculating ECS. This dependence of ECS and dynamical feedback on the heterogeneity of lapse rate and water vapour is modelled explicitly in the 2D RCM. Without dynamical feedback, increasing the heterogeneity of a variable can either increase or decrease ECS; with dynamical feedback, increasing heterogeneity decreases ECS. For water vapour specifically, increasing heterogeneity can cause a runaway greenhouse effect, but enabling dynamical feedback counters this tendency and results in ECS decreasing with heterogeneity. The interaction between dynamical feedback and the water vapour, lapse rate, and ice-albedo feedbacks is also investigated in more detail by performing a latitudinal decomposition of the dynamical feedback using a novel method. With water vapour feedback enabled, dynamic feedback reduces the ECS globally by 10%. A new classification of radiator fin types is presented, which reveals that the dynamical feedback with water vapour feedback enabled is caused about equally by an increase in transport out of the sensitive tropics and a decrease in transport into the insensitive poles. With ice-albedo feedback enabled, dynamical feedback reduces the ECS by 40%. With both water vapour and ice-albedo feedbacks enabled, dynamical feedback reduces the ECS by 50%, which is split between all four types of radiator fin, with some latitudes providing a positive dynamical feedback and others providing a stronger negative dynamical feedback
Sovereign-less subject and the possibility of resistance
No full textThis article explores exclusionary practices of contemporary politics and alternative forms of resistance. It starts off explaining how Giorgio Agamben's theory can be understood in the context of resistance. In so doing, it turns to the arguments put forward by Edkins and Pin-Fat. In their article 'Through the Wire', they identify two forms of resistance. Drawing on Agamben's thought: refusal and the assumption of bare life. This article argues that these two forms are not sufficient for thinking resistance. This is so because of a gap in Agamben's thought and the way Edkins and Pin-Fat read him. In order to explore resistance in a more fruitful way, the article critiques Edkins and Pin-Fat's conclusions on the understanding bare life as a form of resistance; it amends Agamben's account by explaining the move from bare life to whatever being, and ultimately, the article finds whatever being as a fruitful way of understanding resistance on the example of Tiananmen. At the end I conclude that the Tiananmen protest successfully challenged the sovereign power from the position of in-between. © The Author(s), 2009
Researching and Remembering the Past in Markas Zingeris’ Novel Grojimas dviese (Playing Duo)
No full textThe paper aims at analysing how the topic of memory is handled in the novel Grojimas dviese (Playing Duo), which is written by Markas Zingeris and originally published in Lithuanian. The novel deals with the memory of the Holocaust in Kaunas (Lithuania) and the main character’s search for knowledge about the painful past. The analysis is based on a conceptual framework of trauma and memory studies and relies on such specialists in the field as Nicholas Chare, Jenny Edkins, Wulf Kansteiner, Marianne Hirsch, John Sutton, and others. It focuses on secondary trauma and its remembering which is currently gaining more and more interest in different fields of study, but in literary studies, it is still an underresearched topic. In Zingeris? novel, traumatic memory and speaking about it seem to be complicated in many ways
Art. XVII.—The Yi king of the Chinese, as a book of Divination and Philosophy
No full textAn important point in the study of the Yi king is the recognition of its existence before Wen wang's time. The elements of main difference between the Yi king of the early dynasties and that of Wen wang was in the order of the Kwa. The same names were current, and probably the admonitory remarks were, many of them, the same also. These remarks are all anonymous, and we are at liberty to guess who wrote them. The appendices are anonymous also, and they may have mainly been written by men before the time of Confucius. The three sages, Wen wang, Cheu kung, and Confucius, were all editors, and Fu hi the original author.</jats:p
Ethics and foreign policy : negotiation and invention
No full textTo what extent can ethics and foreign policy be conceived as possible? Instead of
answering within the implied dichotomy of possibility and impossibility, this thesis
argues for a reconceptualisation of the dichotomy. Ethics and foreign policy are better
understood on the basis of undecidability: neither simply possible nor impossible, but
both at the same time. A deconstructive reading of British (1997-2006) and EU (1999-
2004) foreign policy, both of which make claims to ethics, reveals how the issue is beset
by internal contradictions, paradoxes and aporias. The deconstruction is structured
around the concepts of subjectivity, responsibility and hospitality, each of which
constitutes an important point of undecidability within British and EU representations of
their ethical dimension. The subject of ethics and foreign policy is always haunted and
inhabited by its object, responsibility is necessarily irresponsible, and hospitality
contains an irrepressible hostility. Thus, ethics and foreign policy is best conceived as
undecidably im-possible. However, such undecidability cannot be used to justify
abandoning the goal of an ethical foreign policy. Rather, a Derridean 'negotiation' is
proposed. Negotiation seeks to remain loyal to the dual injunction of deconstruction, an
undecidability which is the condition of ethics and politics, and a decision which
decides, and closes to certain figures of otherness. It requires a permanent questioning,
testing and invention of the promise of ethics and foreign policy. This produces a range
of illustrative suggestions for the possible enactment of an ethico-political foreign
policy, which would refer to and strive for an ultimately unrealisable ethical foreign
policy. This research contributes a fundamental critique and questioning of the
possibility of ethics and foreign policy. It provides a revealing exploration of British and
EU foreign policy from the period, based around responsibility and hospitality. Finally,
the thesis introduces the Derridean notion of negotiation to the discipline, seen as a way
of moving through the potential paralysis brought by the undecidability arising from
foundational questioning
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