Articles in 2013

For the past six months Nature Climate Change has been offering authors the option of double-blind peer review. Here we report on some preliminary findings from the trial.

Limited progress was made in Warsaw towards a universal agreement on action over climate change.

Europe must come up with effective climate, environment and energy policies that do not jeopardize economic competitiveness. Sonja van Renssen explores worries voiced within industry.

To understand what social learning approaches can offer the sciences of adaptation and mitigation, we need to assemble an appropriate evidence base.

It is assumed that the monsoon is the dominant influence on Himalayan glaciers. However, a study now investigates the importance of the mid-latitude Westerlies and shows that glacier changes can be triggered from afar.

Greenhouse gas emissions from ruminant meat production are significant. Reductions in global ruminant numbers could make a substantial contribution to climate change mitigation goals and yield important social and environmental co-benefits.

Recent studies have produced conflicting results about the impacts of climate change on drought. In this Perspective, a commonly used drought index and observational data are examined to identify the cause of these discrepancies. The authors indicate that improvements in the quality and coverage of precipitation data and quantification of natural variability are necessary to provide a better understanding of how drought is changing.

This Review considers the evolving relationship between land-use change and greenhouse gas emissions in Brazil. Despite the intensification of agriculture over the past decade or so, deforestation has decreased, resulting in reduced greenhouse gas emissions. However, inequality in land ownership and city growth fuelled by rural–urban migration remain pressing issues for policymakers.

Caribou populations that have experienced a relatively stable climatic history have high genetic diversity and occur in regions where climate stability is expected to continue. These findings, based on analyses of molecular data, predicted species distributions and a diffusion model, provide insight into the role of past and future climate change in controlling species’ genetic structure and evolutionary potential.

Evidence indicates that the continued loss of Arctic sea-ice and snow cover may influence weather at lower latitudes. Now correlations between high-latitude cryosphere changes, hemispheric wind patterns and mid-latitude extreme events are shown for the Northern Hemisphere.

Early warning systems can alert societies about coming irreversible climatic changes, but can they trigger action to avoid them? Research now suggests that to prompt social action, uncertainty about when the changes will occur must be reduced.

Studies about early warning signals of a climate tipping point suggest that collective action to avoid a catastrophe will only take place if uncertainty about the threshold for dangerous climate change is reduced. An experiment now finds that behaviour changes dramatically either side of a dividing line for this threshold uncertainty—when uncertainty is only slightly larger, catastrophe is not averted.