This article traces the definition and treatment of “vulnerable workers” within the province of Ontario’s regulation of employment standards over a fourteen-year period. An examination of the government’s discourse and its enforcement and legislative history reveals significant shifts and inconsistencies between the government’s claims and its enforcement practices. These shifts and inconsistencies are understood within a political economic analysis of “Third Way” employment policies, competing liberal ideologies, shifting political-economic conditions and institutional legacies. The analysis contributes to a cross-national literature exploring the inadequacies of employment standards enforcement in liberal market economies while at the same time identifying opportunities for change within the different “varieties of liberalism” exhibited within Third Way regimes.
A coarse resolution coupled ocean - atmosphere simulation in which surface albedo feedback is suppressed by prescribing surface albedo, is compared to one where snow and sea ice anomalies are allowed to affect surface albedo. Canonical CO2-doubling experiments were performed with both models to assess the impact of this feedback on equilibrium response to external forcing. It accounts for about half the high-latitude response to the forcing. Both models were also run for 1000 yr without forcing to assess the impact of surface albedo feedback on internal variability. Surprisingly little internal variability can be attributed to this feedback, except in the Northern Hemisphere continents during spring and in the sea ice zone of the Southern Hemisphere year-round. At these locations and during these seasons, it accounts for, at most, 20% of the variability. The main reason for this relatively weak signal is that horizontal damping processes dilute the impact of surface albedo feedback. When snow albedo feedback in Northern Hemisphere continents is isolated from horizontal damping processes, it has a similar strength in the CO2-doubling and internal variability contexts; a given temperature anomaly in these regions is associated with approximately the same change in snow depth and surface albedo whether it was externally forced or internally generated. This suggests that the presence of internal variability in the observed record is not a barrier to extracting information about snow albedo feedback's contribution to equilibrium climate sensitivity. This is demonstrated in principle in a "scenario run,'' where estimates of past, present, and future changes in greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols are imposed on the model with surface albedo feedback. This simulation contains a mix of internal variations and externally forced anomalies similar to the observed record. The snow albedo feedback to the scenario run's climate anomalies agrees very well with the snow albedo feedback in the CO2-doubling context. Moreover, the portion of the scenario run corresponding to the present-day satellite record is long enough to capture this feedback, suggesting this record could be used to estimate snow albedo feedback's contribution to equilibrium climate sensitivity.
This is the age of the train: certainly in Japan and in Europe; probably, soon, on the East Coast. The urgent question is whether California will catch the train, whether indeed it should catch the train, and if so how.
Modern high-speed train travel involves trains that achieve sustained high speed - a minimum of 125 mph, a maximum in revenue service so far of 187 mph - between cities that are typically between 100 and 500 miles apart. It all began exactly thirty years ago, when the Japanese opened their Tokaido Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka. It took nearly another two decades before France followed suit with its TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse) over the 270 miles between Paris and Lyon in 1981. But since then, high-speed trains have proliferated.
We have conducted a study of Sierra Nevada runoff by analyzing the onset of snowmelt (or peak snowmass timing) from observations and conducting model simulations of snowpack. For our observation study, monthly snow water equivalent (“SWE”) measurements were combined from two data sets to provide sufficient data from 1930 to 2008. The monthly snapshots are used to calculate peak snow mass timing for each snow season. Since 1930, there has been an overall trend towards earlier snow mass peak timing by 0.6 days per decade. The trend towards earlier timing also occurs at nearly all individual stations. Even stations showing an increase in April 1st SWE exhibit the trend toward earlier timing, indicating that enhanced melting is occurring at nearly all stations. Analysis of individual years and stations reveals that warm daily maximum temperatures averaged over March and April are associated with earlier snow mass peak timing for all spatial and temporal scales included in the data set. The influence is particularly pronounced for low accumulation years indicating the potential importance of albedo feedback for the melting of shallow snow. The robustness of the early spring temperature influence on peak timing suggests the trend towards earlier peak timing is attributable to the simultaneous warming trend (0.1ºC per decade since 1930, with an acceleration in warming in later time periods). For our modeling study, we have used the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (“WRF”) to model snowpack at high resolution over the Sierra Nevada during the 2001-2002 water year. We have focused on one year to validate the use of WRF for understanding runoff variability. We have found that high resolutions are necessary to accurately model snow cover over the Sierras.