Articles in 2013

By exerting a drag on the atmosphere, wind turbines convert a fraction of the atmosphere's kinetic energy to electrical energy. To find the point of diminishing returns, a new study adds so much drag to a simulated atmosphere that the winds slow to a crawl.

Disputes over intellectual property rights can delay the spread of clean technologies to the developing world, but they are not wholly to blame.

Economic arguments, such as saving money, are often used to promote pro-environmental actions — for example, reducing energy use. However, research shows that people's environmental motives are sometimes better drivers of behavioural change.

Relationships between hosts, parasites and pathogens may be strongly affected by changing patterns of temperature variation.

With proper forethought, climate finance could cut gender inequity and consequentially become more economically efficient. But the opposite may happen if funds ignore the issue, warns Anna Petherick.

Climate change vulnerability assessments are becoming mainstream decision support tools for conservation in the US, but they may be doing migratory species a disservice.

Research shows that incorporating energy consumption in a global climate model can explain past surface temperature changes of as much as 1 K in mid and high latitudes in winter and autumn over most part of North America and Eurasia. This study concludes that energy use should be considered as an additional forcing in simulations to project future climate change.

Soils are the largest repository of organic carbon in the terrestrial biosphere. Nevertheless, relatively little is known about the factors controlling the efficiency with which microbial communities utilize carbon, and its effect on soil–atmosphere CO₂ exchange. Now research using long-term experimental plots suggests that climate warming could alter the decay dynamics of more stable organic-matter compounds with implications for carbon storage in soils and ultimately climate warming.

Changing wind-wave climate has the potential to exacerbate, or negate, the impacts of sea-level rise in coastal zones. Results from the first community-derived multi-model ensemble of wind-wave climate projections show agreement over extended regions of the global ocean. Large uncertainty in available wave-climate projections is found to be due to downscaling methods.

Climate mitigation policies are rarely assessed in terms of the proportion of climate impacts they can avoid both regionally and globally. Research shows that policies with a 50% chance of remaining below a 2 °C rise in temperature may reduce the impacts of climate change by 20–65% by 2100, relative to pathways with a temperature rise of 4 °C.

Many plant species used for biofuel emit more isoprene—an ozone precursor—than the traditional crops they are replacing. A modelling study now indicates the potential for significant human mortality and crop losses due to changes in ground-level ozone concentrations that could arise from large-scale biofuel cultivation in Europe. These findings suggest that biofuel policies could have adverse consequences that should be evaluated alongside carbon-budgeting considerations before large-scale policies are implemented.

Climate models struggle to reproduce the amplitude of polar temperature change observed in palaeoclimatic archives. A synthesis of observational and model data was used to reconstruct atmospheric dust concentrations in the Holocene and Last Glacial Maximum. The impact of aerosols in polar areas is underestimated in simulations for dustier-than-modern conditions; the inclusion of the amplified response to aerosols at high latitudes would improve model predictions.

This study uses a formalized pooling of expert views on uncertainties in the future contributions of melting ice sheets to sea-level rise, using a structured elicitation approach. The median estimate obtained is substantially larger than that found by previous studies. Expert opinion is shown to be both very uncertain and undecided on the key issue of whether recent ice-sheet behaviour is a long-term trend or due to natural variability.