James Boulter - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by James Boulter

Color poster with text, charts, and graphs.Since signing the American College and University Pres... more Color poster with text, charts, and graphs.Since signing the American College and University President’s Climate Commitment in 2007, the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire has completed five biennial Greenhouse Gas Emission (GGE) inventories. Students enrolled in an Honors course completed all inventories. By presenting both current and historic data, we report measured emissions by sector, and highlight areas where additional efforts are needed. This presentation concludes with recommendations to inform the development of a Campus Climate Action Plan.University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire Office of Research and Sponsored Program

Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association, 1996

The Journal of Chemical Physics, 2009

Low-temperature, amorphous water ice films grown by vapor deposition under high-vacuum are expose... more Low-temperature, amorphous water ice films grown by vapor deposition under high-vacuum are exposed to microwave-frequency discharge-activated oxygen in order to investigate its effect on the ice surface. Adsorption of methane is used to probe alterations to microscale structures and surface morphology. Films are interrogated throughout the experiment by grazing-angle Fourier-transform infrared reflection-absorption spectroscopy, and after the experiment by temperature-programmed desorption mass spectrometry. Multilayer Fresnel thin-film optics simulations aid in the interpretation of absorbance spectra. Using these techniques, structural alterations are observed over a range of spatial and time scales. At first, spectral absorbance features arising from incompletely coordinated water molecules disappear. The density of high-energy methane adsorption sites is reduced, lowering the equilibrium amount of adsorbed methane. At longer exposure times, this is manifested in a narrowing of the width of the primary methane desorption peak, indicating a narrower range of methane adsorption energies on the ice surface. Together these observations indicate restructuring of micropores resulting in an increase in the structural homogeneity of the film. Enhancement of small, higher-temperature methane desorption features associated with methane encapsulation during thermal annealing indicates alterations to larger pore structures by the same restructuring process. Attribution of these effects to various energetic species in active oxygen is discussed. Based on their abundance, O((3)P) and O(2)(a (1)Delta(g)) are the most likely candidates; other trace atomic and molecular species may also contribute.

Geophysical Research Letters, 2005

Aerosol Science and Technology, 2006

Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per res... more Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing this collection of information. Send corilments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden to Washington Headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports,

The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses

Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 2013

ABSTRACT Despite the overwhelming scientific consensus, climate change is a divisive national and... more ABSTRACT Despite the overwhelming scientific consensus, climate change is a divisive national and international policy issue. There is still much public debate and uncertainty regarding the reality of climate change and the degree to which human activities are responsible. In terms of climate change issues, the US and China are of particular interest because they are disproportionately responsible for the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Using the data from a survey of US and Chinese college students, this paper compares climate change public opinion among young adults in these two countries. We found that US students much less likely to believe anthropogenic climate change is happening compared to Chinese students. US students were also less convinced of the consensus among climate scientists regarding human-induced climate change. In addition, US students rated the economy higher than the environment as a government priority, whereas Chinese students rated the economy and environment as equally important. In terms of familiarity with the current policy debate, Chinese students were more familiar with both national and international climate change policies. Although Chinese students favor joining an international agreement to address climate change more than US students, on average, there was a relatively strong support among students in both countries for joining such an agreement. However, within the US, there are significant differences in climate change public opinion between those with conservative and liberal political ideologies for almost every variable studied. These results are interesting and could have meaningful implications for both national and international climate change policies in the future.

Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 2015

ABSTRACT China and the USA share the highest importance related to climate change, both in terms ... more ABSTRACT China and the USA share the highest importance related to climate change, both in terms of their greenhouse gas emissions and their centrality to potential mitigation policies. Because college students represent the future leaders of these countries and because young adults have a longer time horizon and thus are more vulnerable to the long-term consequences of climate change, their opinions on this issue are of considerable interest. We report and interpret the results of online surveys of just over 4,000 college students from across China (n = 1670) and the USA (n = 2335) between September and November 2013. We examined perceptions and beliefs regarding the scientific basis and potential impacts of climate change as well as attitudes about policy responses. A substantially larger proportion of Chinese students reported acceptance of the considerable scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change. In contrast, a smaller proportion of US students reported seeing a risk of harm to humans from climate change, while a higher proportion of US students reported being unconcerned about climate change compared to Chinese students. In terms of policy, Chinese respondents showed greater support for joining an international agreement to address climate change than Americans. Although the future of international climate change policy is uncertain, it is clear that meaningful climate change mitigation policies and actions must include the participation and cooperation of both China and the USA. Thus, the results of this study should be interesting and informative to all parties considering the issue of global climate change policy.

Trace atmospheric gases may provide significant interferences for in situ chemical analyses of at... more Trace atmospheric gases may provide significant interferences for in situ chemical analyses of atmospheric particles. Hence, a continuous technique to selectively remove the aerosol fraction from ambient air is desirable. A low-pressure "counterflow exchanging virtual impactor" (LP-CEVI), based upon the principle of inertial particle impaction, was developed to exchange aerosol particles larger than a certain aerodynamic size into a stream of inert gas while excluding atmospheric gases. Impactor particle transmission was characterized by two experimental techniques, one utilizing condensation particle counting of size-selected, nebulized salt particles and the other utilizing filter collection and extraction of monodisperse fluorescent microspheres. The impactor was also characterized for the ability to exclude ambient air, using the detection of nitric oxide by gas-phase chemiluminescence resulting from its reaction with ozone. Within certain pressure and counterflow regi...

The temporal and spatial distribution of boundary-layer ozone was studied during June 2000 at Sum... more The temporal and spatial distribution of boundary-layer ozone was studied during June 2000 at Summit, Greenland by surface-level measurements and vertical profiling from a tethered balloon. Three weeks of continuous ozone surface data and 133 meteorological and 82 ozone vertical profile data sets were collected from the surface to a maximum altitude of 1400 m above ground. The lower atmosphere at Summit was characterized by the prevalence of high stability conditions with strong surface temperature inversions. These inversions succumbed to neutral to slightly unstable conditions between appr. 9.00 and 18.00 hrs local time with the formation of shallow mixing heights of typically 70-250 m above the surface. Surface ozone ranged from 39 to 68 ppbv and occasionally had rapid changes of up to 20 ppb in 12 hours. The diurnal mean ozone mixing ratio showed distinct cycles indicating meteorological and photochemical controls of surface ozone. Vertical profiles were within the range of 37 t...

Remote observations of PMCs have become more sophisticated and have increased in geographic and t... more Remote observations of PMCs have become more sophisticated and have increased in geographic and temporal coverage, while numerical models have advanced in detail and predictive power. Together, these advances enable new questions of PMC morphology, optical properties, and microphysical processes in their formation and dissipation. Laboratory investigations also advance this understanding, simulating physical and chemical processes unique to this atmospheric region under comparable conditions. In this work, ice deposition experiments in the presence of microwave discharge-dissociated molecular oxygen suggest heterogeneous interactions between dangling OH bonds on the ice surface and atomic oxygen. Ice films deposited on a gold substrate at temperatures of 115, 130, and 140 K from oxygen/water gas mixtures representative of the summertime polar mesosphere exhibit infrared absorption features characteristic of dangling bonds, whereas films grown in the presence of atomic oxygen do not....

The Journal of Physical Chemistry A, 2006

The effective Knudsen diffusion coefficients for characteristic oxide powder beds used in heterog... more The effective Knudsen diffusion coefficients for characteristic oxide powder beds used in heterogeneous uptake experiments have been measured using countercurrent diffusion and transient pressure drop techniques. Room-temperature thermal-velocity-normalized effective Knudsen diffusion coefficients are found to lie in the 0.15 to 0.35 µm range for magnesium silicate, aluminum oxide, and iron oxide powder beds. Measured values are compared with theoretical estimates and are consistent with low bed tortuosities (below 3) expected for media with open porosity above 0.5. The impact of uncertainties in effective diffusion coefficients on corrections of measured uptake coefficients is discussed. The value of careful uptake measurements in both the low and high sample mass limits is reinforced, as this allows uptake corrections independent of explicitly measured or estimated diffusion coefficient values. It is suggested that correction procedures requiring tortuosity values greater than 3 are suspect.

Ammonia ice condensation and cloud formation microphysics are topics of relevance for understandi... more Ammonia ice condensation and cloud formation microphysics are topics of relevance for understanding the atmospheres of the giant planets. Ammonia ices are also considered important components of the icy satellites found in the outer solar system, and are thought to play an important role in their geological activity. Although observational evidence and thermochemical models suggest ammonia clouds in the Jovian atmosphere should be ubiquitous, less than only 1% of Jupiter's atmosphere appears covered by spectrally identifiable ammonia clouds, with a clear preference in turbulent regions.1,2 The paradox of the rather scarce spectroscopic signatures of ammonia clouds and their appearance in turbulent regions suggests that the nascent ammonia clouds may undergo processing that modifies their spectroscopic properties. No relevant laboratory experimental results are available to resolve this problem. Two possible sources of processing that have been suggested in the literature includ...

Inconsistencies have been noted between model predictions and observations of mesospheric composi... more Inconsistencies have been noted between model predictions and observations of mesospheric composition in narrow regions of the mesosphere. Several arctic rocket campaigns between 1978 and 1993 have observed oxygen atom "bite-outs," narrow layers just below 85 km depleted in atomic oxygen, correlated with NLC observations1. Separate observations from the HALOE instrument on UARS indicated the presence of a band of enhanced water vapor centered near 70 km at mid-latitudes that has not yet been adequately explained by current HOx models2. Because the upper mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) contains a variety of surfaces such as ice particles and ablated meteoric dust, heterogeneous reactions might influence these observed phenomena. Reactions currently being considered are the recombination of oxygen atoms to form molecular oxygen and the reaction of molecular hydrogen with atomic oxygen to form water. To investigate these possible surface-mediated reactions, Knudsen ce...