Articles

The authors use stomach contents from six fish species sampled for 12 years to show that warming shifts foraging behaviour to favour consumption of less energetically rewarding prey. Using food web models, they show that this flexible foraging could lead to reduced community biodiversity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How the climate system reacts to stabilized or decreasing CO₂ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The authors use experimental data from 332 sites across all major global biomes to evaluate the drivers of soil microbial respiration response to warming. They demonstrate a key role of the soil microbiome, highlighting the need to account for this in assessments of soil respiration under change.

It has been suggested that Antarctic ice sheets can become unstable and undergo irreversible retreat, but so far observational evidence for this mechanism is missing. Here, the authors show evidence that such an irreversible retreat occurred at Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica in the 1970s.

Climate change is expected to strengthen atmospheric jet streams. Here the authors show that the fastest upper-level jet stream winds accelerate about 2.5 times faster under climate change than average winds, which could influence aviation and severe weather events.