Volume 2 Issue 3, March 2012

Soulless economics as well as corporate and personal greed constrain climate-friendly behaviour. But explaining climate change in cultural and artistic terms may soften hardened hearts.

The claimed economic benefits of exploiting the vast Alberta oil-sand deposits need to be weighed against the need to limit global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions.

In 2001, British artist David Buckland founded Cape Farewell to bridge a communication gap between the science of climate change and the societal shift required. He explains why we need a cultural response to climate change.

Carbon dioxide is not the only air pollutant to cause warming and, in the race to combat global temperature rise, policymakers are now focusing on the other culprits, as Sonja van Renssen finds out.

Big money will soon flow from rich countries to poor ones that are particularly susceptible to the effects of climate change. Safeguarding this cash against corruption will be an exceptionally tough job, argues Anna Petherick.

The impact of climate change on economic losses from tropical cyclones is a major concern. New research shows that — like changes in population and assets — climate change may double global losses from hurricanes.

Identification of an enhanced centennial warming trend in ocean subtropical boundary currents has important implications for our understanding of how climate change is happening.

Ecosystems regulate climate through biogeochemistry and biophysics, but current policies only recognize biogeochemical influences. A new proposal to include biophysical effects changes the climate value of ecosystems, and sets the stage to expand the suite of climate regulation services considered in global policies and carbon markets.

Extreme heat can accelerate wheat aging — an effect that reduces crop yields and is underestimated in most crop models. Climate warming may, therefore, present even greater challenges to wheat production than current models predict.

Climate change threatens crop production and food security in many parts of the world. But planned adaption may turn the negative effects of climate change on agriculture into gains.

Complex ecological and social settings make the programme on reducing emissions through avoided deforestation, forest degradation and other forestry activities in developing countries (also known as REDD) a challenging policy to design. Research shows the advantages of a modular policy framework able to distinguish, and adequately compensate, the different outcomes of any forest carbon initiative.

An analysis indicates that the warm, powerful currents that flow along the western edges of ocean basins warmed more than twice as quickly than the global ocean as a whole over the past century. This enhanced warming could have important effects on climate because these currents affect the air–sea exchange of heat, moisture and carbon dioxide.

Increasing carbon dioxide emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution have caused widespread ocean acidification and concomitant changes in ocean chemistry, with potential ramifications for major marine ecosystems. A study shows that recent trends in ocean acidification are detectable against natural variability with virtual certainty, even on regional scales.

It is unclear how global warming will affect the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), in part because the instrumental record is too short to understand how ENSO has changed in the past. Now a 700-year-long tree-ring record indicates that ENSO-related climate variability may increase in New Zealand with continued warming.

This study combines previous work on quantifying the greenhouse gas value of ecosystems with models of the effects of biophysical processes to produce an integrated metric of climate-regulation services. The approach is used to quantify climate-regulation values of natural and managed ecosystems across the Western Hemisphere.

Deforestation contributes 6–17% of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. However, much uncertainty in the calculation of deforestation emissions stems from the inadequacy of forest carbon-density and deforestation data. Now an analysis provides the most-detailed estimate so far of the carbon density of vegetation and the associated carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation for ecosystems across the tropics.

One difficulty in anticipating the effects of climate change on agriculture is accounting for crop responses to extremely high temperatures. Now a remote-sensing study demonstrates accelerated ageing of wheat in northern India in response to extreme heat (>34 °C); an effect that reduces crop yields but is underestimated in most crop models.

A study advocates the efficient production of cellulosic biofuel using waste nitrogen through wastewater treatment with constructed wetlands in China. The analysis suggests that the net life-cycle energy output of constructed wetlands is higher than many other biofuel production systems.

A long-term field study establishes a link between reduced snowfall and bird and tree declines in montane Arizona. Excluding elk from experimental sites reversed these declines and also lowered nest predation. This experiment shows that climate change, operating through increased winter herbivory, can negatively affect diverse species occupying such ecosystems.

A study of two species of coral reef fish demonstrates that the anticipated increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide directly interferes with neurotransmitter function in their larvae, a hitherto unrecognized problem for marine fishes.

Greenhouse-gas emissions are likely to have an impact on the damage caused by extreme weather events, such as tropical cyclones. A study predicts that climate change will increase the frequency of these high-intensity storms in selected ocean basins and double their economic damage. Almost all tropical cyclone damage tends to be concentrated in North America, East Asia and the Caribbean-Central American region.

Environmental economist Jonah Busch worked with a team of economists, geographers and policy specialists to assess different incentive structures for reducing emissions from deforestation in Indonesia.