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The European Union faces the challenge of integrating new measures to achieve energy efficiency with existing climate policies, reports Sonja van Renssen.
After an earthquake and a huge wave damaged three nuclear reactor cores in Japan, energy and carbon markets around the world were hit with a surge of activity. Anna Petherick traces the wave.
Comparing changes in temperature and solar radiation on centennial timescales can help to constrain the Sun's impact on climate. New findings regarding the minimum activity level of the Sun reveal that comparisons made so far may have been too simplistic.
Mounting evidence that climate change will impact food security demonstrates the need to adapt food systems to future conditions. New work sheds light on the measures that will be needed to do so, and what the gains of implementing them might be.
Scientific observations made by everyday people are forming an increasingly valuable resource for scientists who research global change. But how reliable is citizen science?
Our ability to predict El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) activity is hampered by the relatively short length of the instrumental record. An annually resolved record of ENSO variability over the past millennium based on tree rings indicates that ENSO amplitude varies on a 50–90 year cycle, providing an important constraint for improving predictions.
Thaw-lake expansion is enhanced by climate warming, potentially feeding back to boost warming further. A new landscape-scale modelling study of the life cycle of Siberian thaw lakes indicates that drainage strongly limits lake expansion. This results in methane-emission estimates that are substantially lower than previously suggested.
Laboratory studies indicate that warming can eventually push cold-blooded organisms past their physiological limits, with detrimental effects on growth. Now evidence from the field indicates that this phenomenon is occurring in the Tasman Sea.
The climate impact of biofuels is usually considered in terms of their net effect on greenhouse-gas emissions. The expansion of sugar cane into pastureland for biofuel production is now shown to also exert a direct local cooling effect.
Expanding biofuel production into agricultural land reduces the need to clear natural ecosystems and can benefit the global climate through reduced greenhouse-gas emissions. A remote-sensing study of the Brazilian cerrado now provides empirical evidence that sugar-cane expansion also cools local climate directly by altering surface reflectivity and evapotranspiration.
Small temperature increases will benefit the growth of many cold-blooded animals, but laboratory studies indicate that warming can eventually exceed physiological limits, resulting in reduced growth. Evidence shows that this may have already happened for a fish species—the banded morwong—in the Tasman Sea.
A global private carbon-labelling scheme for consumer products could fill the climate-policy gap by influencing the behaviour of consumers and corporate supply chains.
Warming of the upper ocean may stimulate plankton metabolism, enhancing photosynthesis. This effect has received little attention, but new research suggests that it could be important enough to spur a net increase in global ocean productivity.
The Clean Development Mechanism was designed to allow emissions reductions and sustainable development to proceed hand-in-hand. Analysis now addresses the question of whether — 14 years after its creation — it can be reformed sufficiently to serve current needs.
NASA scientist Drew Shindell teamed up with experts in health, agriculture and economics to investigate the potential impacts of imposing tight vehicle-emission standards in developing countries.
