Browsing Faculty of Arts and Sciences by Keyword "Climate change"
Now showing items 1-20 of 35
-
Ant-mediated ecosystem functions on a warmer planet: effects on soil movement, decomposition and nutrient cycling
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2015)1.Direct and indirect consequences of global warming on ecosystem functions and processes mediated by invertebrates remain understudied but are likely to have major impacts on ecosystems in the future. Among animals, ... -
Assessing the Skill of Six CMIP6 Climate Models in Predicting Arctic Sea Ice to Narrow the Uncertainty in Projections of the September Ice-Free Arctic
(2022-03-08)Arctic sea ice is an important indicator and regulator of the state of the global climate. As global temperatures rise due to climate change, Arctic sea ice is undergoing unprecedented rapid melting, bringing vast physical ... -
Can Negotiating a Uniform Carbon Price Help to Internalize the Global Warming Externality?
(University of Chicago Press, 2014)It is difficult to resolve the global warming free-rider externality problem by negotiating n different quantity targets. By contrast, negotiating a single internationally binding minimum carbon price (the proceeds from ... -
Canopy nitrogen, carbon assimilation, and albedo in temperate and boreal forests: Functional relations and potential climate feedbacks
(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2008)The availability of nitrogen represents a key constraint on carbon cycling in terrestrial ecosystems, and it is largely in this capacity that the role of N in the Earth's climate system has been considered. Despite this, ... -
Causes, evolution, and dynamics of ice ages in the last 3 million years
(2022-01-06)This thesis concerns the response of global climate to variations in Earth’s orbital configuration and atmospheric CO2 levels since major Northern Hemisphere ice sheets appeared three million years ago. A first chapter ... -
Climate change alters temperate tree and shrub spring phenology and false spring risk
(2021-08-24)Temperate tree and shrub species are at risk of damage from late spring freezing events. Individuals that initiate budburst before the last spring freeze risk leaf tissue loss, damage to the xylem, and slowed, or even ... -
Climate Change and Health: Implications for Cardiovascular Diseases and Inherently Hot Regions
(2022-06-06)The warming of our planet is unevenly distributed. In inherently hot and hyper-arid countries like Kuwait, temperatures are already soaring to unprecedented record-high levels and not a lot is known about what climate ... -
A Climate-friendly Energy Future: Prospects for Wind
(2014-06-06)The objective of this thesis is to evaluate the potential for wind as an alternative energy source to replace fossil fuels and reduce global CO2 emissions. From 1995 to 2007, fossil fuels as the major energy source accounted ... -
Combining Statistical, Physical, and Historical Evidence to Improve Historical Sea-Surface Temperature Records
(2021-04-23)Sea surface temperature (SST) is a crucial quantity for interpreting past climate variations, yet reconstructing historical SSTs from ship-based measurements is challenging because of varying biases that are on the order ... -
Concentrating Alkalinity for Direct Air Capture of Carbon Dioxide: Using Osmotic Pressure for Concentration and Separation
(2024-03-12)Climate change has resulted in the pressing need to globally manage carbon sources and sinks. Reducing emissions as much and as fast as possible must be prioritized to avoid the worst harms from global warming, which will ... -
Does it Hold Water? New Insights into the Stratospheric Water Vapor Feedback
(2023-05-09)A robust feature of climate and chemistry models forced with projected anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is an increase in the water vapor concentration of the lower stratosphere. This projection has concerning ... -
Ecosystem heterogeneity determines the ecological resilience of the Amazon to climate change
(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015)Understanding how changes in climate will affect terrestrial ecosystems is particularly important in tropical forest regions, which store large amounts of carbon and exert important feedbacks onto regional and global ... -
Essays on Political Responses to Climate Change Mitigation, Geoengineering, and Adaptation
(2022-11-23)Climate mitigation, geoengineering, and adaptation present humans with new opportunities and challenges. The three essays that comprise this dissertation use diverse methods — a randomized control trial, formal model, and ... -
Estimates of Land Ice Changes from Sea Level and Gravity Observations
(2014-06-06)Understanding how global ice volume on the Earth has changed is of significant importance to improving our understanding of the climate system. Fortunately, the geographically unique perturbations in sea level that result ... -
Evaluating blocking indices and investigating eddies’ response to static stability
(2020-09-15)This dissertation addresses two problems in the mid-latitude jet dynamics, namely evaluating indices of blocking anticyclone and investigating eddies' response to static stability. Changes in frequencies of blocking ... -
Exploring the Limits of Geophysical Models of Solar Geoengineering
(2022-05-13)Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) is a proposed method of reducing climate risks associated with climate change via modification of Earth's radiative budget. Due to the impracticality of global experimentation, research ... -
Factors Controlling Variability in the Oxidative Capacity of the Troposphere on Interannual to Interglacial Time Scales
(2013-08-21)This thesis explores the natural forces controlling variability of the tropospheric oxidants on interannual to glacial-interglacial time scales. The oxidants (primarily OH and ozone) determine the lifetime of many trace ... -
Fidelity of climate data: Trends, extremes, and nonlinearities in instrumental and tree-growth proxies of climate
(2023-01-12)This work looks at inferences of climate -- and specifically moisture and temperature --, past and present. In the present, asks whether we have enough data to understand extremes in temperature and trends in moisture. ... -
Fluxes of Atmospheric Methane Using Novel Instruments, Field Measurements, and Inverse Modeling
(2013-09-24)The atmospheric concentration of methane \((CH_4)\) - the most significant non-\(CO_2\) anthropogenic long-lived greenhouse gas - stabilized between 1999 and 2006 and then began to rise again. Explanations for this behavior ... -
Global budget of black carbon aerosol and implications for climate forcing
(2014-02-25)This thesis explores the factors controlling the distribution of black carbon (BC) in the atmosphere/troposphere and its implications for climate forcing. BC is of great climate interest because of its warming potential. ...