Failures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by adopting policies, technologies, and lifestyle changes have led the world to the brink of crisis, or likely beyond. Here we use Internet surveys to attempt to understand these failures by studying factors that affect the adoption of personal energy conservation behaviors and also endorsement of energy conservation goals proposed for others. We demonstrate an asymmetry between goals for self and others (“I’ll do the easy thing, you do the hard thing”), but we show that this asymmetry is partly produced by actor/observer differences: people know what they do already (and generally do not propose those actions as personal goals) and also know their own situational constraints that are barriers to action. We also show, however, that endorsement of conservation goals decreases steeply as a function of perceived difficulty; this suggests a role for motivated cognition as a barrier to conservation: difficult things are perceived as less applicable to one’s situation.

Today’s youth will inherit the brunt of climate change. Science literacy plays a critical role in raising future adults who commit to climate change mitigation by reducing daily household energy use. The objective of this study was to examine the mediating role of climate change knowledge efficacy on the positive influence of science literacy on engagement in energy conservation at home among Filipino adolescents. Data from the Program for International Student Assessment 2018 which included 7233 15-year-old high school students from 187 schools across 17 regions in the Philippines was used to address the study’s objective. Results showed that climate change knowledge efficacy fully mediated the positive association between science literacy and household energy conservation among Filipino adolescents. The study discussed the importance of emphasizing environmentalism in science education, parenting, and community programs as a viable and long-term climate change mitigation response.

This paper concerns the energy conservation for the weak solutions of the compressible Navier–Stokes equations. Assume that the density is positively bounded, we work on the regularity assumption on the gradient of the velocity, and establish a Lp–Ls type condition for the energy equality to hold in the distributional sense in time. We mention that no regularity assumption on the density derivative is needed any more.

We study a novel class of numerical integrators, the adapted nested force-gradient schemes, used within the molecular dynamics step of the Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm. We test these methods in the Schwinger model on the lattice, a well known benchmark problem. We derive the analytical basis of nested force-gradient type methods and demonstrate the advantage of the proposed approach, namely reduced computational costs compared with other numerical integration schemes in HMC.

The staggered discontinuous Galerkin (SDG) method has been recently developed for the numerical approximation of partial differential equations. An important advantage of such methodology is that the numerical solution automatically satisfies some conservation properties which are also satisfied by the exact solution. In this paper, we will consider the numerical approximation of the inviscid Burgers equation by the SDG method. For smooth solutions, we prove that our SDG method has the properties of mass and energy conservation. It is well-known that extra care has to be taken at locations of shocks and discontinuities. In this respect, we propose a local total variation (TV) regularization technique to suppress the oscillations in the numerical solution. This TV regularization is only performed locally where oscillation is detected, and is thus very efficient. Therefore, the resulting scheme will preserve the mass and energy away from the shocks and the numerical solution is regularized locally near shocks. Detailed description of the method and numerical results are presented.

The first IAU Office of Astronomy for Development Task Force 3 project on light pollution is described along with evaluations and recommendations for future projects.

This paper presents the results of a study that explored the effectiveness of three intervention strategies in facilitating energy saving behaviour among resident undergraduate university students. In contrast to a dominant practice of motivating with rewards or competition this study sought to appeal to students' intrinsic motivations. An experimental design was used with two intervention groups and a control group. The interventions were the provision of real-time feedback provided by an inhouse energy consumption display unit (ecoMeter) and a targeted social marketing approach. They were evaluated using energy consumption data and self-report data from the participants via an on-line survey and focus groups. Across the three research phases the rate of reduced electricity consumption for the interventions ranged from an average of 17% to 28% less than the control group. The findings provide evidence that facilitation of intrinsically motivated behaviours can result in reduced energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

This paper is an introduction to a conservative, positive numerical scheme which takes into account the phenomena of reflection and transmission of high frequency acoustic waves at a straight interface between two homogeneous media. Explicit forms of the interpolation coefficients for reflected and transmitted wave vectors on a two-dimensional uniform grid are derived. The propagation model is a Liouville transport equation solved in phase space.

The plane wave stability properties of the conservative schemes of Besse [SIAM J. Numer. Anal.42 (2004) 934–952] and Fei et al. [Appl. Math. Comput.71 (1995) 165–177] for the cubic Schrödinger equation are analysed. Although the two methods possess many of the same conservation properties, we show that their stability behaviour is very different.An energy preserving generalisation of the Fei method with improved stability is presented.

In long-time numerical integration of Hamiltonian systems,and especially in molecular dynamics simulation,it is important that the energy is well conserved. For symplecticintegrators applied with sufficiently small step size, thisis guaranteed by the existence of a modifiedHamiltonian that is exactly conserved up to exponentially smallterms. This article is concerned with the simplifiedTakahashi-Imada method, which is a modificationof the Störmer-Verlet method that is as easy to implement buthas improved accuracy. This integrator is symmetric andvolume-preserving, but no longer symplectic. We study itslong-time energy conservation and give theoreticalarguments, supported by numerical experiments, whichshow the possibility of a drift in the energy (linear or like a random walk).With respect to energy conservation, this article provides empiricaland theoretical data concerning the importance of using a symplecticintegrator.

The Discontinuous Galerkin Time Domain (DGTD) methods are now popular for the solution of wave propagation problems. Able to deal with unstructured, possibly locally-refined meshes, they handleeasily complex geometries and remain fully explicit with easy parallelization and extension to high orders of accuracy. Non-dissipative versions exist, where some discrete electromagnetic energy is exactly conserved. However, the stability limit of the methods, related to the smallest elements in the mesh, calls for the construction of local-time stepping algorithms. These schemes have already been developed for N-body mechanical problems and are known as symplectic schemes. They are applied here to DGTD methods on wave propagation problems.