<p> Community solar is a renewable energy practice that&rsquo;s been adopted by multiple U.S. states and is being considered by many more, including the state of Oregon. A recent senate bill in Oregon, called the &ldquo;Clean Electricity and Coal Transition Plan&rdquo;, includes a provision that directs the Oregon Public Utility Commission to establish a community solar program for investor-owned utilities by late 2017. Thus, energy consumers in Portland will be offered participation in community solar projects in the near future. Community solar is a mechanism that allows ratepayers to experience both the costs and benefits of solar energy while also helping to offset the proportion of fossil-fuel generated electricity in utility grids, thus aiding climate change mitigation. </p><p> For community solar to achieve market success in the residential sector of Portland, ratepayers of investor-owned utilities must socially accept this energy practice. The aim of this study was to forecast the potential social acceptance of community solar among Portland residents by measuring willingness to participate in these projects. Additionally, consumer characteristics, attitudes, awareness, and knowledge were captured to assess the influence of these factors on intent to enroll in community solar. The theory of planned behavior, as well as the social acceptance, diffusion of innovation, and dual-interest theories were frameworks used to inform the analysis of community solar adoption. These research objectives were addressed through a mixed-mode survey of Portland residents, using a stratified random sample of Portland neighborhoods to acquire a gradient of demographics. 330 questionnaires were completed, yielding a 34.2% response rate. </p><p> Descriptive statistics, binomial logistic regression models, and mean willingness to pay were the analyses conducted to measure the influence of project factors and demographic characteristics on likelihood of community solar participation. Roughly 60% of respondents exhibited interest in community solar enrollment. The logistic regression model revealed the percent change in utility bill (essentially the rate of return on the community solar investment) as a dramatically influential variable predicting willingness to participate. Community solar project scenarios also had a strong influence on willingness to participate: larger, cheaper, and distant projects were preferred over small and expensive local projects. Results indicate that community solar project features that accentuate affordability are most important to energy consumers. Additionally, demographic characteristics that were strongly correlated with willingness to enroll were politically liberal ideologies, higher incomes, current enrollment in green utility programs, and membership in an environmental organization. Thus, the market acceptance of community solar in Portland will potentially be broadened by emphasizing affordability over other features, such as community and locality. </p><p> Additionally, I explored attitudinal influences on interest in community solar by conducting exploratory factor analysis on attitudes towards energy, climate change, and solar barriers and subsequently conducting binomial logistic regression models. Results found that perceiving renewable energy as environmentally beneficial was positively correlated with intent to enroll in community solar, which supported the notion that environmental attitudes will lead to environmental behaviors. The logistic regression model also revealed a negative correlation between community solar interest and negative attitudes towards renewable energy. Perceptions of solar barriers were mild, indicating that lack of an enabling mechanism may be the reason solar continues to be underutilized in this region.</p><p>

<p> Droughts reduce water resources necessary for human survival, economic development, and to sustain healthy ecosystems. Our ability to monitor and forecast droughts has grown dramatically in the past decades due to improved hydrological modeling made possible by satellite data and high computing power. However, there is still a large gap of knowledge regarding the mechanisms behind drought onset, development, and recovery. This gap prevents us from being able to forecast every severe drought and from being more confident about the effects of climate change. This thesis proposes a paradigm shift from droughts as local events to droughts as dynamic hazards that can travel in space. In this framework, droughts become the frame of reference, opening new possibilities for drought assessment and forecasting. Here, droughts are shown to have traveled across continents between 1979&mdash;2009. Patterns of frequent and common directions of displacement are identified. Precipitation recycling is proposed as an important mechanism behind these observed dynamics, and a detailed study of moisture sources over North America from 1980&mdash;2016 is carried out. This work shows that drought conditions can propagate downwind, especially from the U.S. Southwest to the U.S. Midwest, and from the northwest of Mexico and Central America to the center and south of Mexico. The effect of local precipitation recycling on drought intensification is quantified and shown to be highest in the north of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. In a study of climate change's impacts on droughts, large biases are found in the climate models' representation of the hydrologic cycle and land-atmospheric coupling. This is shown to affect the models' drought projections by the end of the twenty-first century. Finally, this thesis includes a study of drought impacts on electricity generation and on <i>CO</i>₂, <i> SO</i>₂, and <i>NO_x</i> emissions from the power sector in the American West under current and future climates. This work advances the understanding of how droughts propagate through the hydrologic cycle locally and across continents, opening new opportunities for seasonal forecasting. It also includes a rigorous drought impact study on the electricity sector that provides useful information to stakeholders and decision makers.</p><p>

Using energy more efficiently is essential if carbon emissions are to be reduced. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), energy efficiency improvements represent the largest and least costly savings in carbon emissions, even when compared with renewables, nuclear power and carbon capture and storage. Yet, how should future priorities be directed? Should efforts be focused on light bulbs or diesel engines, insulating houses or improving coal-fired power stations? Previous attempts to assess energy efficiency options provide a useful snapshot for directing short-term responses, but are limited to only known technologies developed under current economic conditions. Tomorrow's economic drivers are not easy to forecast, and new technical solutions often present in a disruptive manner. Fortunately, the theoretical and practical efficiency limits do not vary with time, allowingthe uncertainty of economic forecasts to be avoided and the potential of yet to be discovered efficient designs to be captured. This research aims to provide a rational basis for assessing all future developments in energy efficiency. The global fow of energy through technical devices is traced from fuels to final services, and presented as an energy map to convey visually the scale of energy use. An important distinction is made between conversion devices, which upgrade energy into more useable forms, and passive systems, from which energy is lost as low temperature heat, in exchange for final services. Theoretical efficiency limits are calculated for conversion devices using exergy analysis, and show a 89% potential reduction in energy use. Efforts should befocused on improving the efficiency of, in relative order: biomass burners, refrigeration systems, gas burners and petrol engines. For passive systems, practical utilisation limits are calculated based on engineering models, and demonstrate energy savings of 73% are achievable. Significant gains are found in technical solutions that increase the thermal insulation of building fabrics and reduce the mass of vehicles. The result of this work is a consistent basis for comparing efficiency options, that can enable future technical research and energy policy tobe directed towards the actions that will make the most difference.

This thesis considers perceptions of climate change in contemporary Bolivia. It commences with a view of a small highland community, Kaata, and expands outwards, tracing the networks of migration that connect this village to the city, and looking at how climate change discourse changes as we scale up to the national and international level. Climate change is considered in Kaata to constitute an ontological shift from the networks of reciprocity which until recently comprised a whole landscape, holding community members to one another as well as to neighbouring villages and telluric landscape spirits. Young people now increasingly desire city made commodities, engaging in capitalist relations which lead them away from this landscape. Climate change thus charts a weakening of the community, of people, their fields and rituals. While a modernist perspective is inclined to separate the weather, as ‘nature’, from ‘culture’ or human actions, Kaateños consider all these conversant animate elements of a system. I take this emic definition of climate change as the basis of this thesis. We continue, following the human element of this landscape, the young people, in the networks that draw them into the city, analysing the desires by which they are led there. Crucially, these are shaped by mimesis, emulating the city/western other through changing dress and dancing styles. I show how these dynamics of alterity are deeply rooted, resembling classic structuralist analyses of Andean culture based in the ethnic interplay of self and other. In Chapter Three I look at efforts to reform Bolivia’s agricultural system through implementing Food Sovereignty (FS). The social movements representing Kaata hope this would connect such villages into national markets and thus motivate young people to remain there through integrating the village into cash economies. I explore how such measures become influenced by a city-based discourse of an ideal rural ‘other’, which is inadequate to the contemporary reality of villages like Kaata, and limits their efficacy, even where young people desire return migration. The FS discourse is similarly influenced by a search for an ideal ‘other’ removed from capitalism. In Chapter Four I assess President Evo Morales’ claim to be effecting a pachakuti, a shift in the ontological bases of the nation, equal and counterposed to the Spanish conquest. Kaata challenges Morales’ assertion of a pachakuti of Andean against colonial values, as it considers that it is shifting to become more ‘white’. Indian actors are nationally rising within a landscape determined by international capital, revealing Morales’ pachakuti to be human-centred. Rather than transforming existing landscapes to make them more indigenous, this is a pachakuti or ontological shift to the landscape of the western ‘other’, entailing the ‘death’ of the highlands and tradition. The Tipnis crisis presents challenges Morales on the national stage. I conclude that while the animist landscapes Kaata evokes can help moderns conceptualise climate change, it does not provide the solution sought after from animist indigenous peoples at an international level. While they are fetishized as ‘the people outside capitalism’, human agency is but a small factor in an animist landscape, and humans have not the agency to combat climate change.

For most of the 20th century, multiyear landfast sea ice (MLSI) existed in semi-permanent plugs across Nansen Sound and Sverdrup Channel and formed an incipient ice shelf in Yelverton Bay, Ellesmere Island in the northern CAA. Both plugs broke in 1962 and 1998, and several breakups within the last decade indicate that the plugs are becoming temporary seasonal features. The history of the plugs is reviewed using Canadian Ice Service ice charts, satellite imagery and a literature review. The weather systems associated with plug breakup events are related to a sequence of synoptic patterns, with most breakups occurring when low pressure centers over the Asian side of the Arctic Ocean and a warm pressure ridge develops over the QEI, creating warm temperatures, clear skies, and frequent wind reversals. The 2005 simultaneous breakup of the plugs was accompanied by the removal of 690 km2 of 55-60 year old MLSI from Yelverton Bay. Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and ice cores taken in June 2009 provide the first detailed assessment of the remaining MLSI in Yelverton Inlet, which in turn provides ground-truthing of satellite scenes and air photos used to chart historical changes in the MLSI. The last of the Yelverton Bay MLSI was removed in August 2010. The removal of these MLSI features in recent years aligns with the larger trend of reductions in age and thickness of sea ice in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

Coupled climate and sea ice variability in the Arctic was investigated using a combination of modern, historical and proxy observations. In the Canadian Arctic, operational sea ice charts were homogenized into a spatially and temporally consistent gridded dataset. A complete climatic analysis of this dataset revealed the presence of dominant modes of sea ice variability related to driving climate patterns and atmospheric circulation indices such as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). On a hemispheric scale, the late-summer ice cover extent is decreasing at a much faster rate than the maximum winter ice cover. The disappearing perennial ice is partly replaced by seasonal ice, the areal extent of which has increased steadily over the last century. The enhanced seasonal sea ice freeze-thaw cycle is predicted to increase the salinity of surface waters over continental shelves, thereby enhancing haline convection and ventilation of the deeper Arctic Ocean. Coupled sea ice and climate proxies for the North Baffin Bay region were developed from an existing ice core from Devon Ice Cap and a new ice core from the Prince-of-Wales (POW) Icefield on Ellesmere Island. A sea-salt concentration record from the Devon ice core was found to relate with sea ice concentration in nearby Baffin Bay. The record was used to study past sea ice conditions in Baffin Bay over the last 200 years in relation with temperature proxies (melt %, delta18O). Sea ice extent variations in northern Baffin Bay appear to be mostly dynamically driven, with sea ice decreasing when Nares Strait becomes congested with ice from the Arctic Ocean, and northerly winds advect ice from Baffin Bay southward. A new high-resolution melt record was developed using digital image analysis of the POW ice core. The record was used to show that melting affects the solid conductivity signal of the core, which compromises dating by seasonal layer counting, and hinders the identification of acidic volcanic horizons. The POW melt record, a proxy for summer warmth, was shown to be site-specific, which may be explained by the close presence of the North Open Water polynya and the peculiar position of the ice cap which rests on the shifting boundary between the maritime climate of Baffin Bay and the drier, colder climate of the high Arctic. The long-term, natural variability of late-summer Arctic sea ice was reconstructed from a network of 68 climate proxies from the circum-Arctic region. The proxy network contains both a temperature and a sea ice signal. Past sea ice extent was reconstructed using multivariate statistical calibration of the network against historical sea ice observations over the last century. The record shows that the decline in sea ice extent of the last two decades is anomalous in the context of the last 900 years. Non-linear processes are responsible for much of the variability in ice extent over the past millennium, and the same processes may be enhancing the greenhouse gas-induced decrease in ice extent currently observed.

Lake sediment cores collected from four lakes (Upper Fly Lake 61.04&deg;N, 138.09&deg;W, 1326 m a.s.l.; Jenny Lake 61.04&deg;N, 138.36&deg;W, 817 m. a.s.l.; Donjek Kettle 61.69&deg;N, 139.76&deg;W, 732 m a.s.l.; Lake WP02 61.48&deg;N, 139.97&deg;W, 1463 m a.s.l.) in the southwest Yukon provide records of postglacial climatic variability in the region. A 13,000 year pollen record from Upper Fly Lake indicated that herbaceous tundra existed on the landscape from 13.6 to 11 ka, followed by birch shrub tundra until 10 ka, when Picea forests were established in the region. Pollen-, chironomid-, and ostracode-inferred paleoclimate reconstructions showed a long-term cooling with increasing moisture from the late glacial through the Holocene. The early and mid-Holocene were warm and dry, with cool, wet conditions after 4 ka, and warm, dry conditions over the last 100 years. Chironomid accumulation rates provided evidence of millennial-scale climate variability, and the chironomid community responded to rapid climate changes. Late Holocene environmental variability was investigated through the analysis of paleoproduction indices (sediment loss-on-ignition, biogenic silica) and chironomid and ostracode communities. Coherent trends were revealed among the four lakes and pairs of sites located closer together showed more similarities than more distant sites located in similar environments (alpine tundra or boreal forest). Chironomid-inferred paleotemperature estimates are inconsistent with other data from the region, however certain fluctuations in paleoproduction indices and changes in abundance and composition of the chironomid and ostracode communities compare well with interpretations based on independent paleoclimate records. The White River Ash event (1147 cal yrs BP and 1953 cal yrs BP) impacted three of the four aquatic ecosystems studied, with a greater impact occurring at sites with greater ash thickness. Interannual variability in the lake environment is of lesser concern when deriving inference models relating organisms to environmental variables, and the results presented here provide guarded optimism that the sampling methodology applied in paleolimnological studies is appropriate in this region.

The purpose of this thesis was to study long-term climatic variations and their impacts on aquatic ecosystem functioning in the Canadian Arctic. Sub-fossil remains of chironomids preserved in lacustrine sediment cores, and the organic, biogenic silica and carbonate fraction of the sediment matrix were analyzed to infer past lake production and provide new evidence of the impact of past climate changes in the Arctic. The modern relationship between chironomids, biological production indices and the physical environment was studied to permit the interpretation and quantification of past conditions from sediment cores. Bedrock composition exerts a very strong influence on sediment organic, biogenic silica and carbonate content of lake sediments, and an inference model for reconstructing lake water pH based on these parameters was developed. July air temperatures also affect aquatic and terrestrial production in the Arctic, but this effect is secondary to the effect of nutrient input. An inference model for reconstructing past mean July air temperatures based on the chironomid assemblages was developed using 88 Arctic lakes, and further improved by combining it with previously published data from across North America. A new inference model for July air temperatures, based on 379 Arctic and Boreal lakes was developed. This training set was based on sites covering a large temperature gradient (2&deg;-16.6&deg;C) and containing a great diversity of chironomid assemblages, making it appropriate for reconstructing past July air temperatures for Arctic and boreal lakes. Holocene climatic conditions were evaluated for the Arctic at Lake WB02 (Northern Victoria Island), Lake KR02 (Western Victoria Island) and Lake JR01 (Boothia Peninsula). Prior to &sim;6.5-5.5ka the Arctic was relatively warm, and overall lake production was high. Mean July air temperatures remained colder during the mid- to late-Holocene until -1.0ka, when temperatures again cooled rapidly during the Little Ice Age. A recent (last 150 years) warming is seen at all three lakes as primary and chironomid production increased. At all locations, however, inferred temperatures for the last 150 years remain up to 2-3&deg;C cooler than those inferred for the early Holocene.

The phenomenon of human-caused climate change releases a “cosmopolitan imperative” (Beck 2010, 258) that demands cooperation across boundaries: national, scalar, temporal, epistemological and ontological (cf. Hulme 2010, Urry 2011). However, many of the approaches taken today only reinforce such distinctions: for example, by insisting on a universal scientific understanding of climate change as a basis for policy (Jasanoff 2010a). In the People’s Republic of China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide (PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency 2007), the new leadership has made “Beautiful China” and “Ecological Civilization” two of their most prominent official slogans and enshrined sustainable development as core state policy (Geall 2012, Geall and Hilton 2014). This drive for “low-carbon development,” like climate change more broadly, reveals a set of social, ecological and political concerns with interlocking, complex and uncertain dynamics. How we frame incomplete knowledge about such dynamic systems affects the political approaches that are taken to sustainability (Rittel and Webber 1973, Leach, Scoones and Stirling 2010). This dissertation uses ethnographic methods to investigate how Chinese environmental journalists make framing decisions around the science and politics of climate change. This reveals how reporters can find spaces for political engagement in a restrictive and changeable media and governance environment, one that not only reflects a changing history of attitudes towards the environment in China, but also an international arena dominated by technocratic and managerial approaches to sustainability. It finds that Chinese journalists have found sophisticated ways to map the complex interactions of human and natural systems presented by climate change – and have addressed uncertainties in a fashion that points towards more open and plural pathways to sustainability.

Climate change emerged as a topic of public and political concern in the 1980s alongside the discovery of the ‘Antarctic Ozone Hole.’ The issue was raised up the political agenda in the latter half of the 1980s by scientists and international administrators operating in a transnational setting –culminating in the eventual formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. Created to produce a comprehensive assessment of the science, impacts and possible response strategies to climate change, the Panel managed to bridge to the two worlds of science and politics as a hybrid science-policy organisation, meeting the divergent needs of a variety of groups, specifically in the US Government. This thesis will provide an analysis of the negotiations that resulted in the formation of the IPCC in 1988. In particular, I examine the power politics of knowledge production in the relationship between a transnational set of scientists engaged in assessments of climate change and national policymakers. I argue that the IPCC was established as a means of controlling who could speak for the climate, when and how, and as such the Panel legitimised and privileged certain voices at the expense of others. In addition to tracing and examining the history of international climate change assessments in the 1980s, I will scrutinise how the issue became a topic of international political concern. Focusing on the negotiations between the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United States of America in the formation of the IPCC, I will argue against the received view that the U.S. has consistently been in a battle with climate science and the IPCC. As I will show that the U.S. government was both integral to the decision to establish the IPCC and also one of its strongest backers. Following the formation of the Panel I examine the ad hoc decisions taken and processes adopted during the First Assessment (AR1) that contributed to the anchoring of the IPCC as the central authority on climate related knowledge. As such I show that in the absence of any formal procedural guidance there was considerable leeway for the scientists and Working Group Chairs to control and shape the content of the assessment. Finally, I analyse the ways in which U.S. and UK policymakers strategically engaged with the Panel. Significantly, I show that the ways in which the U.S. pushed all political debates to the heart of the scientific assessment imparted a linear approach to policymaking –assessment precedes and leads the policymaking –contributing to the increasing entanglement of the science and politics of climate change. Moreover, the narrow technical framing of the issue and the largely tokenistic attempts to involve participants from developing countries in the IPCC resulted in the UN resolutions (backed by developing countries) establishing the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee/United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (INC/UNFCC) contrary to the wishes of U.S. policymakers.