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Research articles
Offshoring emissions through used vehicle exports
International trade of used vehicles lacks regulation on emissions standards. This study shows that vehicles exported from Great Britain generate substantially higher carbon and pollution emissions than scrapped or on-road vehicles.
- Saul Justin Newman
- Kayla Schulte
- Douglas R. Leasure
Municipal finance shapes urban climate action and justice
City fiscal and budgetary decisions play an essential role in the success of urban climate action. Using US cities as a case study, this Article reveals the interrelationship between urban climate finance, action and justice, as well as promising pathways to transform municipal finance practices.
- Claudia V. Diezmartínez
- Anne G. Short Gianotti
Over-reliance on water infrastructure can hinder climate resilience in pastoral drylands
Building additional water infrastructure such as wells is a key strategy to mitigate the impacts of severe droughts, particularly in drylands. This study shows, however, that this infrastructure can lead to loss of resilience under climate change due to erosion of traditional practices.
- Luigi Piemontese
- Stefano Terzi
- Elena Bresci
Boreal–Arctic wetland methane emissions modulated by warming and vegetation activity
Whether methane emissions from the Boreal–Arctic region are increasing under climate change is unclear, but critical for determining climate feedbacks. This study uses observations and machine learning to show an increase in wetland methane emissions over the past two decades, with inter-annual variation.
- Kunxiaojia Yuan
Globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action
Global support and cooperation are necessary for successful climate action. Large-scale representative survey results show that most of the population around the world is willing to support climate action, while a perception gap exists regarding other citizens’ intention to act.
- Peter Andre
- Teodora Boneva
Methane oxidation minimizes emissions and offsets to carbon burial in mangroves
Carbon sequestration in mangroves has been proposed as a mitigation strategy for climate change, yet the benefits of carbon burial may be offset by methane emissions. This study shows that methane offsets are small in saline and tropical mangroves, leading to greater net carbon sequestration.
- Luiz C. Cotovicz Jr
- Gwenaël Abril
- Isaac R. Santos
300 years of sclerosponge thermometry shows global warming has exceeded 1.5 °C
Understanding temperature change since the pre-industrial period is essential for climate action. This study uses an ocean proxy to better quantify when anthropogenic warming began and estimates that global temperatures have already increased by 1.7 °C.
- Malcolm T. McCulloch
- Amos Winter
- Julie A. Trotter
A representative survey experiment of motivated climate change denial
The desire to justify carbon-emitting behaviours could influence people’s climate change beliefs due to motivated cognition. Based on a pre-registered survey experiment in the United States, the study, however, finds no evidence supporting the claim in explaining climate denial and environmentally harmful behaviour.
- Lasse S. Stoetzer
- Florian Zimmermann
Production vulnerability to wheat blast disease under climate change
The authors estimate the global vulnerability of wheat crops to wheat blast under current and future climates. They show that warmer, more humid climates can increase wheat blast infection, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere, subsequently reducing global wheat production.
- Diego N. L. Pequeno
- Thiago B. Ferreira
- Senthold Asseng
Emergent climate change patterns originating from deep ocean warming in climate mitigation scenarios
How the climate system reacts to stabilized or decreasing CO 2 concentrations is not yet well understood. Here, the authors show that deep ocean warming and its slower heat release lead to unique patterns of ocean surface warming and precipitation.
- Jong-Seong Kug
- Jongsoo Shin
Intensification of Pacific tropical instability waves over the recent three decades
Tropical instability waves (TIWs) are an important component of the equatorial Pacific climate. Here the authors show that TIW activity has intensified in the central equatorial Pacific at ∼12 ± 6% per decade over the recent three decades.
- Minyang Wang
- Shang-Ping Xie
Warming causes contrasting spider behavioural responses by changing their prey size spectra
The authors show shifts in predatory spider web mesh size under experimental warming in an alpine meadow. Web mesh size decreased for a large spider species, but increased for a small species, with changes linked to altered prey size spectra following soil moisture and plant community shifts.
Towards an increasingly biased view on Arctic change
The authors investigate the impacts of excluding ecosystem data from Russian stations in the Arctic. While the current network of Arctic stations is already biased, the exclusion of Russian stations lowers representativeness and creates further biases that can rival end-of-century climate change shifts.
- Efrén López-Blanco
- Elmer Topp-Jørgensen
- Niels M. Schmidt
Eddy activity in the Arctic Ocean projected to surge in a warming world
Ocean eddies impact circulation, heat and gas fluxes between the ocean and the atmosphere. Modelling how warming will alter their occurrence in the Arctic shows that sea ice decline and increased baroclinic instability drive an increase in eddy kinetic energy.
- Thomas Jung
Hydrological cycle amplification reshapes warming-driven oxygen loss in the Atlantic Ocean
Oxygen loss has been observed in the world’s oceans, due mainly to warming temperatures that reduce oxygen solubility and increase stratification. This study shows climate-induced salinity changes also impact oxygen patterns with effects either accelerating or counteracting warming-driven changes.
- Allison Hogikyan
- Laure Resplandy
- Gabriel Vecchi
African rice cultivation linked to rising methane
The increase in atmospheric methane has been accelerating since 2007, and identifying drivers is critical for climate mitigation. In this study, the authors show that the expansion of rice cultivation in Africa accounts for 7% of rising emissions.
- Zichong Chen
- Nicholas Balasus
- Daniel J. Jacob
Climate warming restructures food webs and carbon flow in high-latitude ecosystems
The authors quantify changes in carbon flow to Arctic tundra and boreal forest consumers under warming. Small-mammal specimens separated by 30 years and wolf spiders from short-term warming experiments show similar patterns of change, switching from plant-based to fungal-based food webs.
- Philip J. Manlick
- Nolan L. Perryman
- Seth D. Newsome
The social costs of hydrofluorocarbons and the benefits from their expedited phase-down
Hydrofluorocarbons are a class of important greenhouse gases, and quantitative estimates of their social cost are still lacking. This research develops a set of direct estimates of their economic costs and shows their rapid phase-down could lead to large climate benefits.
- Lisa Rennels
- Bryan Parthum
Responses of soil organic carbon to climate extremes under warming across global biomes
Warming temperatures associated with climate change are expected to impact soil carbon stocks, yet the effect of more frequent and intense extreme climate events on soil carbon is yet unclear. This study shows that most extremes enhance soil carbon loss globally, with variation across ecosystems.
- Mingming Wang
- Shuai Zhang
- Zhongkui Luo
Increase in MJO predictability under global warming
The Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO) is a key feature of tropical weather on a multi-weekly timescale. Here, the authors show that the MJO becomes more predictable with climate change, potentially allowing better subseasonal-to-seasonal forecasting.
- Aneesh C. Subramanian
- Elizabeth Bradley
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IMAGES
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COMMENTS
05 January 2022 How researchers can help fight climate change in 2022 and beyond COP26 energized the global effort to halt global warming. Research is now crucial to monitoring progress...
300 years of sclerosponge thermometry shows global warming has exceeded 1.5 °C Understanding temperature change since the pre-industrial period is essential for climate action.
The report provides new estimates of the chances of crossing the global warming level of 1.5°C in the next decades, and finds that unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach.
Nancy Knowlton Published: 27 January 2020 https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0104 Abstract The rapid anthropogenic climate change that is being experienced in the early twenty-first century is intimately entwined with the health and functioning of the biosphere.
This article provides an overview of the scientific background related to the subject of global warming. It considers the causes of rising near-surface air temperatures, the influencing factors, the process of climate research and forecasting, and the possible ecological and social impacts of rising temperatures.