We are living in a great Greenhouse: our planet, the Earth. This sustainable system is almost closed, except the radiative energy received from the Sun. Understanding and respecting its principles is the only guaranty for a safe future of our species. The Greenhouse effect is a process by which a part of the incident solar energy is trapped by the lower atmosphere due to the action of some atmo...

Commercial hydroponics is a modern technology involving plant growth on inert media in place of the natural soil, in order to uncouple the performance of the crop from problems associated with the ground, such as soil-borne diseases, nonarable soil, poor physical properties, etc. Various non-toxic porous materials are used as plant growth substrates, including rockwool, perlite, pumice, expande...

This workshop brought together specialists from various fields to develop a drilling proposal to fill the “Oligo-Miocene Gap” that exists in our understanding of the functions of Earth’s systems. We propose to establish the first continuous high-deposition record of the Oligo-Miocene through new International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) drilling in the North Atlantic to allow the development...

A black planet irradiated by a sun serves as the archetype for a simple radiating two-layer system admitting of a continuum of steady states under steadfast insolation. Steady entropy production rates may be calculated for different opacities of one of the layers, explicitly so for the radiative interactions, and indirectly for all the material irreversibilities involved in maintaining thermal ...

Anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gas emissions are known to contribute to global increases in greenhouse gas concentrations and are widely believed to contribute to climate change. A reference carbon dioxide concentration of 383 ppm for 2007 is projected to increase to a nominal 500 ppm in less than 50 years according to business as usual models. This concentration change is equivalent to an...

This article analyses the profound and rapid climate changes that have taken place worldwide in the past two decades and their effects on modern enterprise. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and developing strategies to adapt to and counterbalance future impacts of climate change sustainably are among the most pressing needs of the world today. Global temperatures are predicted to continue risi...

Many multicriteria problems in economics and finance require that efficient solutions be found. A recent contribution to production theory established a characterization of efficient points under closedness and free-disposability (Bonnisseau and Crettez in Econ Theory 31(2):213–223, 2007, Theorem 1). However, as will be shown using a number of examples, these results cannot be applied to simple...

This paper is about dotted representations of efficient frontiers. Dotted representations, as in portfolio selection, can often be the most practical way of communicating an efficient frontier. The most popular method is to minimize variance subject to fixed levels of expected ∗Corresponding author [email protected]