• Energy Research
• 2021-2025close
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Communities around the world are already facing the impacts of climate change. In this 1°C warmer world, many of those who have already endured impacts have little recourse, while ‘big emitters’ have largely externalized costs of their activities. The field of climate accountability has emerged as a response to this uneven distribution of harms and gains. The question—who ultimately is responsible for climate impacts?—has been asked with increasing frequency over the past decade in both policy spheres and litigation as extreme events have increased in both likelihood and intensity. In this dissertation, I interrogate this broader field of climate accountability, leveraging cross-disciplinary methodologies to build evidence for—and identify gaps in—this field. The central question underpinning the dissertation is: who is responsible for climate impacts, and how can the field of climate accountability best serve impacted communities?To do so, I build a conceptual framework to guide allocating causal responsibility (Chapter 1). Identifying causality for impacts is an insufficient and yet necessary component of all proposed climate accountability mechanisms. The bulk of this dissertation then tests this conceptual framework by conducting ‘end-to-end attribution’—or attributing climate impacts to sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—by focusing on climate change-related drought impacts in the Southwestern United States. End-to-end attribution broadly includes three components: extreme event attribution (Chapter 2), impact attribution (Chapter 3), and source attribution (Chapter 4). Chapter 2 presents two detection and attribution (D&A) analyses, quantifying the impact of increased temperatures from anthropogenic climate change on local vapor pressure deficit (VPD) and vegetation health in the Four Corners region of the Southwest. The studies find that anthropogenic forcing increased temperatures, corresponding to sizeable increases in VPD and substantial impacts on vegetation health. Chapter 3 examines ...

AbstractIndirect climate effects on tree fecundity that come through variation in size and growth (climate-condition interactions) are not currently part of models used to predict future forests. Trends in species abundances predicted from meta-analyses and species distribution models will be misleading if they depend on the conditions of individuals. Here we find from a synthesis of tree species in North America that climate-condition interactions dominate responses through two pathways, i) effects of growth that depend on climate, and ii) effects of climate that depend on tree size. Because tree fecundity first increases and then declines with size, climate change that stimulates growth promotes a shift of small trees to more fecund sizes, but the opposite can be true for large sizes. Change the depresses growth also affects fecundity. We find a biogeographic divide, with these interactions reducing fecundity in the West and increasing it in the East. Continental-scale responses of these forests are thus driven largely by indirect effects, recommending management for climate change that considers multiple demographic rates.

Thermal comfort is one of the primary factors influencing occupant health, well-being, and productivity in buildings. Existing thermal comfort systems require occupants to frequently communicate their comfort vote via a survey which is impractical as a long-term solution. Here, we present a novel thermal infrared-fused computer vision sensing method to capture thermoregulation performance in a non-intrusive and non-invasive manner. In this method, we align thermal and visible images, detect facial segments (i.e., nose, eyes, face boundary), and accordingly read the temperatures from the appropriate coordinates in the thermal image. We focus on the human face since it is often clearly visible to cameras and is not merged into a hot background (unlike hands). We use a regularized Gaussian Mixture model to track the thermoregulation changes over time and apply a heuristic algorithm to extract hot and cold indices. We present a personalized and a generalized comfort modeling method, selected based on the availability of the occupant historical indices measurements in a neutral environment, and use the time-series of the hot and cold indices to define corrections to HVAC system operations in the form of setpoint constraints. To evaluate the efficacy of our proposed approach in responding to thermal stimuli, we designed a series of controlled experiments to simulate exposure to cold and hot environments. While applying personalized modeling showed an acceptable average accuracy of 91.3%, the generalized model’s average accuracy was only 65.2%. This shows the importance of having access to physiological records in modeling and assessing comfort. We also found that individual differences should be considered in selecting the cooling and heating rates when some knowledge of the occupant’s overall thermal preference is available.

The Earth's mean surface temperature is already approximately 1.1°C higher than pre-industrial levels. Exceeding a mean 1.5°C rise by 2050 will make global adaptation to the consequences of climate change less possible. To protect public health, anaesthesia providers need to reduce the contribution their practice makes to global warming. We convened a Working Group of 45 anaesthesia providers with a recognised interest in sustainability, and used a three-stage modified Delphi consensus process to agree on principles of environmentally sustainable anaesthesia that are achievable worldwide. The Working Group agreed on the following three important underlying statements: patient safety should not be compromised by sustainable anaesthetic practices; high-, middle- and low-income countries should support each other appropriately in delivering sustainable healthcare (including anaesthesia); and healthcare systems should be mandated to reduce their contribution to global warming. We set out seven fundamental principles to guide anaesthesia providers in the move to environmentally sustainable practice, including: choice of medications and equipment; minimising waste and overuse of resources; and addressing environmental sustainability in anaesthetists' education, research, quality improvement and local healthcare leadership activities. These changes are achievable with minimal material resource and financial investment, and should undergo re-evaluation and updates as better evidence is published. This paper discusses each principle individually, and directs readers towards further important references.

As Earth’s climate has varied strongly through geological time, studying the impacts of past climate change on biodiversity helps to understand the risks from future climate change. However, it remains unclear how paleoclimate shapes spatial variation in biodiversity. Here, we assessed the influence of Quaternary climate change on spatial dissimilarity in taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional composition among neighboring 200-kilometer cells (beta-diversity) for angiosperm trees worldwide. We found that larger glacial-interglacial temperature change was strongly associated with lower spatial turnover (species replacements) and higher nestedness (richness changes) components of beta-diversity across all three biodiversity facets. Moreover, phylogenetic and functional turnover was lower and nestedness higher than random expectations based on taxonomic beta-diversity in regions that experienced large temperature change, reflecting phylogenetically and functionally selective processes in species replacement, extinction, and colonization during glacial-interglacial oscillations. Our results suggest that future human-driven climate change could cause local homogenization and reduction in taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity of angiosperm trees worldwide.

Marine fishes' intolerance to global change conditions can affect the abundance and distribution of ecologically and economically important species, reshape the structure of trophic webs, and profoundly impact the human communities that rely on fished species for their livelihood and culture. Only by understanding the vulnerability of fished species and fishing communities to global change can we take effective adaptive action and implement climate-ready fisheries management. In this dissertation, I investigate the vulnerability of eight commercially important fished species and one fishing community to global change in the Northeastern Pacific Ocean. In chapter one, I expose Lingcod (Ophiodon elongatus), a benthic egg layer,to temperature, oxygen, and pH conditions we expect to see in the Central California Current System (CCS) by the year 2050 and 2100. I examine both the lethal and sublethal effects of these two multistressor climate change scenarios by measuring differences in metabolic rate, hatching success, and larval quality between treatments. In chapter two, I use a species distribution modeling approach to evaluate how historical (1982-2019) and projected (2030 through end-of-century) warming in the Eastern Bering Sea (EBS), Alaska, affects predator-prey interactions for some of the most commercially valuable fisheries in the U.S. These species include: 1) Pacific Cod (Gadus macrocephalus), 2) Pacific Halibut (Hippoglossus stenolepis), 3) Arrowtooth Flounder, 4) Walleye Pollock (Gadus chalcogrammus), 5) Tanner Crab (Chionoecetes bairdi), 6) Snow Crab (Chionoecetes opilio), and 7) Alaskan Pink Shrimp (Pandalus eous). In chapter three, I use social network analyses to depict the resilience and adaptability of the California Market Squid fishery (Doryteuthis opalescens), the most valuable in the state, to climate perturbations and project changes in habitat suitability by the year 2100 in the CCS. By using all of these vulnerability assessment tools, we can begin to prepare U.S. west coast fisheries for ...