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The Fukushima disaster sounds yet another warning call of the need for safe and clean energy sources, but the need to mitigate climate change will keep nuclear in the picture for some time yet.
Scientific observations made by everyday people are forming an increasingly valuable resource for scientists who research global change. But how reliable is citizen science?
Having served as President of Ireland and as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson has now returned home with a new mission — to bring a human face to climate change.
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.
Instrumental records show that El Niño is highly variable in space and time. Now a thousand-year-long record from trees in the southwestern United States reveals even greater extremes, and a possible link between El Niño activity and climate warming.
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.
Carbon capture and storage demonstration projects are focused on learning about technologies through conventional 'learning by doing'. Analysis of three case studies indicates that including other types of learning could bring significant rewards.
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.
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.
The timing of seasonal events such as flowering and migration is changing as the climate warms, reshuffling the order in which such events take place each year. Now research sheds light on the causes of changes in the timing of butterfly emergence.
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.
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.
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.
Geographer Robert McDonald gathered a team of hydrologists, freshwater ecologists, urban planners and demographers to estimate the impacts of urban growth and climate change on future water availability for major cities in the developing world.
