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Observational data from long-term monitoring plots show that the carbon sink of remaining, undisturbed African and Amazonian tropical rainforest is declining. A study now finds that simulations from Earth system models cannot reproduce this decline.
Combining previous estimates in a multimethod approach, extreme sea levels are assessed under global warming levels of 1.5–5 °C at over 7,000 coastal sites worldwide. By 2100 or before, about 50% of locations exhibit present-day 100-year extreme sea levels at least once per year, even at 1.5 °C of warming.
The impact of climate warming on El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) amplitude is uncertain in centennial-scale model projections due to internal variability, but an ensemble of millennial-scale simulations suggests decreased ENSO amplitude in the equilibrium response to greenhouse gas forcing.
Climate models disagree on how the year-to-year variability of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation will change in a warmer world. Using a high-resolution climate model with an improved tropical Pacific mean state, research now suggests that El Niño activity tends to get weaker under GHG-induced warming.
High-resolution climate models exhibit reduced tropical Pacific mean-state biases due to better representation of ocean mesoscale processes, like tropical instability waves. With climate warming, these improved dynamics project weaker El Niño/Southern Oscillation sea surface temperature variability.
The authors investigate temperature and pH effects on fitness of an abundant marine crustacean (copepod) across 25 generations. Reduced fitness under combined warming and acidification was recovered rapidly, but incompletely, due to interactions between warming and acidification effects.
Changes in river discharge due to climate change are highly uncertain, and a recent study used a global streamflow dataset to assess whether such trends are detectable. Streamflow changes occurred more often in basins impacted by human disturbances than in pristine ones, and there was no clear signal from climate change alone.