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Snowpacks absorb more sunlight as they warm. The Antarctic Plateau may buck this trend over the twenty-first century as increased snowfall there inhibits the snowpack from dimming.
Successful nutrient management has helped many lakes recover from the effects of phosphorus pollution. Now research suggests that climate warming can cause some of the same problems to return.
Mangroves are being lost at an alarming rate as their conversion for aquaculture and other uses is profitable. Research, however, suggests that valuing the deep reserves of carbon in mangrove sediments may be the key to their survival.
As climate models improve, decision-makers' expectations for accurate climate predictions are growing. Natural climate variability, however, limits climate predictability and hampers the ability to guide adaptation in many regions such as North America. Scientists, policymakers and the public need to improve communication and avoid raising expectations for accurate regional predictions everywhere.
Mitigating climate change requires directed innovation efforts to develop and deploy energy technologies. An analysis of these directed efforts finds that efficient end-use technologies contribute large potential emission reductions and provide higher social returns on investment than do energy supply technologies. Yet public institutions, policies and financial resources pervasively privilege energy supply technologies.
This Review focuses on how policymakers and others deal with scientific information about the climate, with the aim of understanding how potentially useful information becomes used (or usable) in practice. A conceptual model of the path between usefulness and usability is presented.
This study uses satellite data to study snow grain size–albedo relationships over the whole Antarctic Plateau. The findings suggest that increased precipitation resulting from climate change will effectively compensate for the decreased albedo that should have resulted from warming, thereby inhibiting the expected ice–albedo feedback.
An isotopic analysis of well-dated massive corals in New Caledonia is used to reconstruct sea surface temperature variability in the southwest tropical Pacific from 1649 to 1999. The findings will be important for climate modelling studies and for studies that predict future climatic change.
By experimentally manipulating atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, drought, air and soil temperature, and herbivory simultaneously, this study provides evidence that climate change affects interactions between above- and belowground organisms through changes in nutrient availability under field conditions.
Evidence is presented that climate change-induced lake warming may cause the same undesired effects as have formerly emerged from excess nutrients (eutrophication). Stronger thermal stratification and reduced mixing has favoured blooming of a toxic cyanobacterium in a large temperate lake previously thought to be successfully ‘restored’ after decades of pollution.
Using models and ecological data, this study shows that the eastern Pacific Ocean population of leatherback sea turtles could well face extirpation owing to climate change. However, the findings indicate that it may be possible to sustain a viable nesting population in Costa Rica throughout this century by cooling nests.
Lush meadows of the seagrass Posidonia oceanica represent an important coastal marine ecosystem in the Mediterranean Sea and a major carbon sink. However, an analysis predicts that, in the absence of mitigation, climate change will lead to the functional extinction of P. oceanica meadows by the middle of the twenty-first century.
