No abstract

One quarter of Americans self-identify as evangelical and a strong majority of these reject humaninduced climate change. Can one lecture on climate science from a Christian perspective change their minds? Here, we examine the response of undergraduates at three evangelical institutions, located in upper state New York, Texas, and Canada, to a recorded lecture by an evangelical climate scientist. Pre/post-test surveys posed six questions from the Global Warming's Six Americas instrument with additional questions on participants' political and theological perspectives. All populations showed significant pre/post-test gains on almost every question, immediately after the intervention, with gains among the most conservative population being as large as the others. A one-month delayed postsurvey showed that gains were still significant relative to pre-test values for most of the questions. Furthermore, gains did not decrease when the Christian frame was removed, except on one item related to Christian responsibility. These results suggest that even a limited exposure to accurate information can change minds, and that the context in which the information is presented (here, the evangelical college and faculty sponsor) may be more important than the content frame.

Time-resolved dispersed fluorescence spectroscopy has been used to study very low energy collision-induced vibrational relaxation in 1B2u benzene-d6 expanded in a supersonic free jet. Several expansion gases have been used to enable rate coefficients for vibrational relaxation to be obtained as a function of collision partner in the very low energy collision regime. Benzene-d6 is found to undergo vibrational deactivation with each of the chosen collision partners He, H2, N2, and Ar. This study focuses on measuring state-to-state relaxation rate coefficients and branching ratios for vibrational relaxation from the S1 vibrational level 61 (εvib =498 cm−1). Relaxation occurs to all the known S1 vibrational levels lying lower in energy than 61, namely 101 (εvib =454 cm−1), 162 (εvib =414 cm−1), 111 (εvib =382 cm−1), 41 (εvib =306 cm−1), 161 (εvib =207 cm−1), and 00 (εvib =0 cm−1). Two other unidentified channels also participate. Nitrogen and argon are found to be the most efficient collision partners in inducing relaxation (σobs/σhs ∼1.1, 1.7, respectively), whereas hydrogen and helium are found to be an order of magnitude less efficient (σobs/σhs ∼0.08, 0.02, respectively). The relaxation channels 61→101 and 61→111 are the dominant deactivation pathways for all the gases studied. The relative importance of relaxation pathways changes with collision partner. There appears to be a light or small collision partner effect, whereby the propensity for transfer through the channel 61→101 (Δεvib =−44 cm−1) seems to be redistributed among other channels, involving a greater energy or momentum gap, as the collision partner becomes lighter.