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The success of Nature Climate Change in attracting an increasing number of high-quality submissions necessarily means that editorial criteria for publication are becoming steadily more demanding.
Increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere support greater plant biomass in grasslands, but this response is constrained in the long term by soil nitrogen availability.
Phytoplankton support most marine food webs, but little is known about their intraspecific diversity. Research shows the strains that are most responsive to changes in CO2 concentration may outcompete less flexible types in an acidifying ocean.
Clothing containing recycled bottles and food industry by-products is a funky alternative now available in shopping malls. But it may generate only minor environmental benefits.
Individual labour capacity has reduced to 90% in peak months owing to environmental heat stress over the past few decades. Under the highest climate change scenario considered, model projections indicate a reduction in labour capacity to less than 40% by 2200 in peak months, with most tropical and mid-latitude regions experiencing extreme heat stress.
As the Earth continues to warm over the coming decades, spatially extensive or ‘mass’ coral bleaching events—induced by persistently high water temperature—are expected to threaten the survival of coral reef ecosystems. Bleaching ‘hazard’ maps based on ensembles of the latest climate models and emissions pathways quantify the potential for mitigation activities to buy these ecosystems a temporary respite from this threat.
At Rio+20, the United Nations established global targets for energy access, renewable energy and energy efficiency in the context of sustainable development and eradication of poverty, as well as climate risk mitigation. This Perspective discusses the consistency of these targets with the overarching goal of limiting global temperature increase to below 2 °C.
A study that couples a barrier-island model with an agent-based model of real-estate markets shows that, relative to people with little belief in model predictions on climate change, informed property owners invest heavily in defensive measures in the short term. They then abandon coastal real estate when price volatility becomes significant.
An increasingly ice-free Arctic Ocean could have significant implications for greenhouse-gas sources and sinks in the Northern high latitudes. In this Review, the impact of diminishing sea-ice extent on greenhouse-gas exchange in both marine and terrestrial Arctic environments is synthesised and discussed.
There is a widespread assumption that changes in reported anthropogenic global CO2 emissions are indicative of changes in climate and ocean chemistry. However, examination of atmospheric CO2 measurements from the past two decades challenges this idea. A new study develops and advocates use of CO2 measurement practices that reduce uncertainty in atmospheric verification of emissions, and identifies modelling inadequacies.
Seamless quantification of past and present climate variability is needed to understand the Earth’s climate well enough to make accurate predictions for the future. This study addresses whether tree-ring-dominated proxy data properly represent the frequency spectrum of true climate variability. The results challenge the validity of detection and attribution investigations based on these data.
Earthworms play an essential part in determining the greenhouse-gas balance of soils worldwide but whether their activity moves soils towards being a net source or sink remains controversial. This Review of the overall effect of earthworms on the greenhouse-gas balance of soils suggests that although beneficial to fertility, earthworms tend to increase the net soil emissions of such gases.
