Thesis (Masters) -- California Institute of Technology, 1933. / Title from home page (viewed 04/28/10). Includes bibliographic references.

Thesis (M. Sc.(Geography))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M. Sc.)(Geography)--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes summary. Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1971. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 141-147).

This thesis seeks to examine the politics of building resilience to climate change by analysing the manner in which policy contexts and initiatives to build climate change resilience interact. For analysis, the ‘policy context' is broken into its three constituent parts- actors, policy spaces and discourses. This permits the addition of new knowledge on how discourses attached to resilience are dissonant with those prevailing in ossified policy environments in developing countries; the influence of actor networks, epistemic communities, knowledge intermediaries and policy entrepreneurs in helping climate change resilience gain traction in policy environments; and the dynamic interaction of interest, agendas and power within decision-making spaces attached to resilience-building processes. This analysis takes place by employing a case-study of a major, international climate change resilience initiative unfolding in two Indian cities. Using data gathered through a variety of rigorous qualitative research methods employed over 14 months of empirical inquiry the thesis highlights issues of politics and power to argue that they are significant determinants of processes to deal with climate impacts. More specifically, it expands current understandings of engaging with climate impacts by exposing gaps in resilience thinking and argues against a technocratic approach to designing and executing resilience policies. In doing so it also demonstrates that resilience, with its emphasis on systems thinking, dealing with uncertainty and community engagement brings new challenges for policy makers. As the study is located in the urban context, it highlights the manner in which fragmented urban policy environments, dense patterns of settlement in cities, urban livelihood patterns and prevailing epistemic cultures can pose obstacles for a policy initiative aimed at building resilience to climate change. Finally, the research underlines the importance of coupling resilience with local narratives of dealing with shocks and stresses, argues for genuine iteration and shared learning during decision-making and highlights the need to celebrate multiple visions of resilience. Findings from this research can help inform a growing number of policy initiatives aimed at deploying resilience to help those battling the exigencies of a changing climate in some of the world's most vulnerable areas.

Some sociologists have suggested that focusing on individual behaviour change to reduce emissions detracts attention from larger structural issues. The first part of this thesis draws on mixed methods (1 interview study and 3 experimental studies) to look at the relationship between views on individual and structural levels of climate change mitigation. Interviewees mostly suggested individual behaviour change as a means for addressing climate change. The subsequent experimental studies investigate to what extent support for structural level change is minimised by focusing attention on individual behaviour change, but no such evidence emerged. However, there are other unexpected outcomes: for example, participants judge recycling to be one of the most impactful behaviours, illustrating that people's judgements of effective climate change mitigation may need revising. The second part of the thesis relates to suggestions that lack of personal experience of climate change partly explains people's inaction. Drawing on fieldwork consisting of 77 interviews conducted in California on people's experience of drought, I firstly explore how people experience the drought itself; such as what changes they note and how drought perceptions are influenced by location. Secondly, I discuss whether and why people tend to think that drought and climate change are related or not. Importantly, people mostly interpret the drought according to their pre-existing climate change beliefs, so that if they already believed climate change was happening then the drought is treated as further evidence, whereas those who were sceptical of climate change usually see the drought as part of a natural cycle. In conjunction these studies expand the existing literature on views towards climate change mitigation and the role that personal experience plays in understandings of climate change.

Thesis (D.Phil.(Geography))-University of Pretoria, 2007. / Includes summary. Includes bibliographic references (leaves 185-188).

Several soil chronosequences were studied in southern California to determine the relative impacts of time and climatic change on soil genesis. Studying soil development in climatic regimes that vary from the moist, xeric climate of the coastal basins and Transverse Ranges to the hot, arid climate of the interior deserts of southern California provide data useful for evaluation of the impact of climatic change as well as time on pedogenesis. Seven distinctive stages of soil development are recognized in the study area. The first three occur in Holocene soils, and the last four are associated with late to mid-Pleistocene geomorphic surfaces. A distinct pattern of secondary soil mineral authigenesis is observed in increasingly older soils. The rapid formation of vermiculite and iron oxyhydroxides in xeric climates is attributed to rapid alteration of unstable Fe-bearing aluminosilicates. Continuous weathering of abundant feldspars results in a predominance of neogenetic kaolinite in mid-Pleistocene soils. Slightly acidic to mildly alkaline soil pH, rapid hydrolysis, and availablity of organic complexes result in formation of significant amounts of metastable ferrihydrite in young Holocene and late Pleistocene soils. Ferrihydrite dehydration and crystal aggregation result in hematite formation and increasingly lower Fe(,2)O(,3)o:Fe(,2)O(,3)d ratios. Arid climatic regimes are conductive to minimal chemical weathering. Clay/iron oxhydroxide regression analyses and mass balance calculations show that much of the silicate clay and secondary carbonate have been derived from external sources rather than by chemical weathering. Clay mineral authigenesis is characterized primarily by conversion of montmorillonite to palygorskite. A compartmental model developed in this study accurately predicts calcic horizon development under Holocene soil water balance characteristics. Results of model predictions indicate that the distribution of carbonate observed in latest Pleistocene soils is related to past changes in climate. In addition, mass balance calculations suggest that large decreases in chemical reaction rates in soils due to soil temperature decreases may well be offset by increases in the magnitude of weathering. However, the results of this study indicate that calcium carbonate provides the most sensitive index of past climates when compared to other indices and that temporal change in climate has significantly influenced soil development in southern California.

Anthropogenic climate change risks significant changes in the global distribution of precipitation. Across the western United States, modelling studies show significant reductions in wetness that imply weighty societal and ecological impacts. But the validity of the model projections need to be ground-truthed. Paleo-hydroclimate data are useful reference points to assess a model’s ability to hindcast past hydroclimate. If the hindcast matches the paleodata, it brings confidence to a model’s ability to predict future hydroclimatic change. The foremost metric of hydroclimate in the geologic record is the surface area of lakes in hydrologically closed basins. In such basins, a lake’s surface area is determined by the balance between precipitation and evaporation. The lake will expand when the balance is positive, and it will contract when the balance is negative. In this dissertation, I develop a 25-9 ka record of lake fluctuation from the Mono Basin, a hydrologically closed basin in east-central California. I deduced the fluctuations using three pieces of evidence: stratigraphy; geomorphology; and geochronology. These pieces of evidence were determined from a study of the Mono Basin’s Late Pleistocene lithostratigraphic unit: the Wilson Creek Formation. There are 19 tephra intercalated in the Wilson Creek tephra. They are named by their reverse depositional order (Ash 19 is the oldest and Ash 1 is the youngest). Uncertainty on their ages cause confusion as to the paleo-hydroclimate record of the Mono Basin. The age of Ash 19, for example, is important because its deposition marks the onset of relatively high lake levels that occurred during the last glaciation. There are two principal interpretations of Ash 19’s age: 40 ka, which is based on lacustrine macrofossil 14C data; and 66 ka, which is underpinned by paleomagnetic intensity data. In chapter 2, I tested these end-member interpretations. I used the U/Th method to date carbonate deposits that underlie and cut across Ash 19. The U/Th data show that Ash 19 must have been deposited between these two dates: 66.8 ± 2.8 ka; and 65.4 ± 0.3 ka. These dates are, therefore, more consistent with the 66 ka interpretation of Ash 19’s age. Thus the onset of relatively high lake levels in the Mono Basin corresponds with the rapid drawdown of atmospheric CO2 during Marine Isotope Stage 4. The coincidence between the drop in atmospheric CO2 and lake level rise is suggestive of a causal link. In chapter 3, I determined Mono Lake's fluctuations 25-9 ka. This time encompasses three climatic intervals: the coolest time of the last glaciation, termed the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM); the period corresponding to the rapid termination of the last glaciation, termed the deglaciation; and the early Holocene, a period of inordinate warmth that immediately followed the last glaciation’s termination. In this study, I used stratigraphic and geomorphic evidence in conjunction with 14C and U/Th dates. I measured the 14C dates on bird bones and charcoal. And I measured the U/Th dates on carbonates. Together the data showed that the lake's rises and falls concurred with North Atlantic climate. Periods of aberrant warmth in the North Atlantic concurred with low stands of Mono Lake. On the other hand, extreme cooling in the North Atlantic correlated with Mono Lake high stands. The timing of these lake fluctuations also corresponds with variations in other tropical and mid-latitude hydroclimatic records. The global harmony in the hydroclimatic records suggests a unifying conductor. I hypothesize that the conductor is tropical atmospheric circulation. In chapter 4, I present evidence on the peculiar case of an extreme low stand of Mono Lake. The low stand is dubbed the “Big Low”. The principal evidence underpinning the Big Low derives from a sedimentary sequence exposed along the canyon walls of Mill Creek. The strata show that the lake fell below 1,982 m between the deposition of Ashes 5 and 4—making this low stand the lowest recognized level of Mono Lake during the Wilson Creek Formation. Observations from dispersed sequences corroborate this interpretation. And three data constrain the age of the Big Low to be between ~24.4-20.5 ka: a carbonate U/Th date on a littoral conglomerate associated with the Big Low; a carbonate U/Th date that underlies Ash 4; and a carbonate U/Th date that cuts across Ash 5. Thus the interval that the Big Low must occur within encompasses the LGM. The timing of this low stand, therefore, corresponds with summer temperature minima, suggesting that the fall was due not to an increase in evaporation but due to a decrease in precipitation. This finding is counter to conventional wisdom: that the LGM was a relatively wet interval. In addition, both the documentation of a low stand during glacial maximum conditions and the inference that precipitation must have been reduced are contrary to previous published interpretations from model and paleoclimatic data. These discrepancies raise significant questions about our understanding of the regional expression and forcing of hydroclimate across the western United States during the LGM. Because of this period’s importance to ground-truthing climatic models, additional evidence on the geographic extent of this unexpected result is essential.

This thesis develops a conceptual and methodological approach to understanding how future climate change is likely to affect migration, and then applies this approach to explore the likely effects of climate change on different migration flows in and from Mexico. Scientific and policy interest in the climate change-migration nexus has been growing over the last decade, yet empirical results remain inconclusive. Existing approaches are often conceptually and methodologically unconvincing as they assume a linear relationship between climate change and migration, or try to separate climate stressors from other factors involved in migration decisions. Furthermore, most current research into the climate-migration nexus has focused on a relatively simple framing of localised environmental pressures forcing people to migrate. In contrast, this thesis acknowledges the complexity of migration and suggests that climate change is likely to affect factors involved in migration decisions at the local and the global level. It develops a more realistic understanding of the potential effect of climate change on migration by examining the impact of the local and global consequences of climate change on livelihood stressors and other factors involved in migration decisions. This thesis adopts a qualitative and comparative approach to illustrate this concept, based on fieldwork in Zacatecas and Veracruz, two Mexican states with different migration profiles and different local climate stressors. It analyses the factors involved in migration decisions, which include livelihood stressors but also networks, recruiters and individual agency. A risk matrix is then developed to explore the climate sensitivity of the various factors that influence internal and international migration flows. It analyses the extent to which each factor is likely to be affected by climate change in combination with the relevance of this factor for the migration decision-making process. This approach allows identifying those factors that, affected by future climate change, have the highest potential to impact on existing migration patterns. It also allows a comparison between different migration flows. Results suggest that climate change is likely to have moderate effects on migration, mainly on internal rural flows. Alarmist predictions of large numbers of 'climate change refugees' are thus inappropriate and policies should instead focus on the factors projected to impact most on migration under scenarios of future climate change. Policies should also aim at mitigating the negative effects of climate change on people's livelihoods and at protecting migrants and non-migrants.