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Purpose – This paper proposes a new procedure for measuring affective responses during social interaction using facial thermographic imaging.

Methodology – We first describe the results of several small pilot experiments designed to develop and refine this new measure that reveal some of the methodological advantages and challenges offered by this measurement approach. We then demonstrate the potential utility of this measure using data from a laboratory experiment (N=114) in which we used performance feedback to manipulate identity deflection and measured several types of affective responses – including self-impressions and emotions.

Findings – We find warming of the brow (near the corrugator muscle) and cheek (near the zygomatic major muscle) related most strongly to emotion valence and self-potency, with those whose brows and cheeks warmed the most feeling less positive emotion and less potent self-impressions. Warming in the eye area (near the orbicularis oculi) related most closely to undirected identity deflection and to positive self-sentiments. Positive self-views and strong identity disruptions both contributed to warming of the eyes.

Implications – The rigor of contemporary sociological theories of emotion exceeds our current ability to empirically test these theories. Facial thermographic imaging may offer sociologists new assessments of affect and emotion that are ecologically valid, socially unreactive, temporally sensitive, and accurate. This could dramatically improve our ability to test and develop affect based theories of social interaction.

In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report revealed an important increase in the level of consensus concerning the reality of human-caused climate warming. The scientific basis for global warming has thus been sufficiently established to enable meaningful planning of appropriate policy responses to address global warming. As a result, the world's policy makers, governments, industries, energy producers/planners, and individuals from many other walks of life have increased their attention toward finding acceptable solutions to the challenge of global warming. This laudable increase in worldwide attention to this global-scale challenge has not, however, led to a heightened optimism that the required substantial reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions deemed necessary to stabilize the global climate can be achieved anytime soon. This fact is due in large part to several fundamental aspects of the climate system that interact to ensure that climate change is a phenomenon that will emerge over extensive timescales.

Although most of the warming observed during the 20th century is attributed to increased greenhouse gas concentrations, because of the high heat capacity of the world's oceans, further warming will lag added greenhouse gas concentrations by decades to centuries. Thus, today's enhanced atmospheric CO2 concentrations have already “wired in” a certain amount of future warming in the climate system, independent of human actions. Furthermore, as atmospheric CO2 concentrations increase, the world's natural CO2 “sinks” will begin to saturate, diminishing their ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Future warming will also eventually cause melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which will contribute substantially to sea level rise, but only over hundreds to thousands of years. As a result, current generations have, in effect, decided to make future generations pay most of the direct and indirect costs of this major global problem. The longer the delay in reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, the greater the burden of climate change will be for future life on earth.

Collectively, these phenomena comprise a “global warming dilemma.” On the one hand, the current level of global warming to date appears to be comparatively benign, about 0.6°C. This seemingly small warming to date has thus hardly been sufficient to spur the world to pursue aggressive CO2 emissions reduction policies. On the other hand, the decision to delay global emissions reductions in the absence of a current crisis is essentially a commitment to accept large levels of climate warming and sea level rise for many centuries. This dilemma is a difficult obstacle for policy makers to overcome, although better education of policy makers regarding the long-term consequences of climate change may assist in policy development.

The policy challenge is further exacerbated by factors that lie outside the realm of science. There are a host of values conflicts that conspire to prevent meaningful preventative actions on the global scale. These values conflicts are deeply rooted in our very globally diverse lifestyles and our national, cultural, religious, political, economic, environmental, and personal belief systems. This vast diversity of values and priorities inevitably leads to equally diverse opinions on who or what should pay for preventing or experiencing climate change, how much they should pay, when, and in what form. Ultimately, the challenge to all is to determine the extent to which we will be able to contribute to limiting the magnitude of this problem so as to preserve the quality of life for many future generations of life on earth.

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to design and build a wild animal pest repellent device with combination of passive infrared (PIR) sensor and ultrasonic signal based on microcontroller as system controller. The PIR sensor is used to detect the presence of wild animal objects and ultrasonic signals to interfere with the hearing.

Design/Methodology/Approach – The design of the system is built based on microcontroller as the system controller. The system as a whole includes hardware and software. The design of hardware consists of the system design on the transmitter side and the system design on the receiver side, while the software in the of system are algorithms using C language programming.

Findings – The resulting repellent device can detect animals approaching up to a distance of 5 m and may interfere with its hearing with a 40 kHz ultrasonic frequency up to a distance of 20 m. The system also uses remote monitoring devices using 433 MHz radio frequency up to a distance of 60 m.

Research Limitations/Implications – Each animal has different hearing frequencies, as well as some wild animals, but the hearing frequencies of wild animals are generally at ultrasonic frequencies. The frequency of animal hearing may vary from audio frequency to ultrasonic frequency, so ultrasonic wave emission testing with varying frequencies is required.

Practical Implications – This research combines systems on transmitters and receivers, with real-time monitoring of wild animal positions, and it can be possible to monitor the position of more detailed animals by installing more types of sensors as well as increasing the number of sensors.

Originality/Value – This paper may provide additional insight into the hearing frequencies of animals and may also serve as comparable papers for similar studies.

A variety of gases, including water vapor (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), add to the radiative forcing of Earth's atmosphere, meaning that they absorb certain wavelengths of infrared radiation (heat) that is leaving the Earth and thus raise the temperature of its atmosphere. Since glass has the same effect on the loss of heat from a greenhouse, these gases are known as “greenhouse” gases. It is fortunate that these gases are found in the atmosphere; without its natural greenhouse effect, Earth's temperature would be below the freezing point, and all waters on its surface would be ice. However, for the past 100 years or so, the concentrations of CO2, CH4, and N2O in the atmosphere have been rising as a result of human activities. An increase in the radiative forcing of Earth's atmosphere is destined to cause global warming, superimposed on the natural climate cycles that have characterized Earth's history.

In the southern hemisphere, the Antarctic continent is also experiencing a net loss in ice from the extensive glaciers and ice sheets that cover it. However, the connection between changes in Antarctic ice sheets and the global warming trend are much more uncertain than in the Arctic. The complex of changes in the Antarctic climate and the ice sheets are described in a later section of this chapter.

This chapter tests theoretically and empirically the existence of a stable relationship between energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Based on microeconomics and physics, a model has been specified and applied to annual data for twenty countries, which representing 61 percent of the world’s population in 2018, over the period 1995–2015. The data are from the International Energy Agency (2019) and econometric techniques including panel data and causality tests have been used. The results indicate that there is a causal relationship between energy consumption and CO2 emissions. In general, consumers cannot directly change emissions caused by production processes, but they can act on emissions caused by their own domestic energy consumption. Approximately three quarters of domestic energy consumption is due to heating and domestic hot water consumption. Taking into account the lower emissions and the lower economic cost of the initial investment, four potential energy systems have been selected for use in heating and domestic hot water. Their social returns have been assessed across nine of the twenty countries in the sample over a lifecycle of 25 years from 2018: France, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Iceland, Germany, United Kingdom, Morocco and the United States. Cost-benefit analysis techniques have been used for this purpose and the results indicate that the use of thermal water, where applicable, is the most socially profitable system among the proposed systems, followed by natural gas. The least socially profitable systems are those using electricity.