Experts Look for Early Successes from Paris Climate Accord

The experts look ahead

The future of integrated electronics is the future of electronics itself. The advantages of integration will bring about a proliferation of electronics, pushing this science into many new areas. Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers—or at least terminals connected to a central computer—automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment. ...

Data Analysis Project: What Makes Paris Look like Paris?

Given a large repository of geotagged imagery, we seek to automatically find visual elements, e.g. windows, balconies, and street signs, that are most distinctive for a certain geo-spatial area, for example the city of Paris. This is a tremendously difficult task as the visual features distinguishing architectural elements of different places can be very subtle. In addition, we face a hard sear...

Climate Impacts of the Paris Agreement

Will oncologists applaud the Paris Accord? Time to rethink global mega-conferences.

It is ironic that the signing of the Paris Accord1,2, on 12 December at the 21st United Nations Climate Change Conference, coincided with the last large-scale global oncology conference of 2015: the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. While international representatives from 195 nations met in Paris and pledged to limit global warming, more than 7500 conference attendees from more than 90 coun...

Another Look at Climate Sensitivity

We analyze here a classical energy balance model (EBM) with nonlinear feedbacks and revisit in this context a recent claim that — in a model-independent sense — the climate system may exhibit an asymmetric, large-amplitude response to normally distributed forcing; such a response would imply irreducible uncertainty in climate change predictions. We show that equilibrium climate sensitivity in a...