Volume 2 Issue 4, April 2012

Nature Climate Change is one year old. Here we reflect on the aims and scope of the journal, using articles from this issue as illustrative examples.

Despite the decision by supermarket-giant Tesco to delay its plan to add carbon-footprint information onto all of its 70,000 products, carbon labelling, if carefully designed, could yet change consumer behaviour. However, it requires a new type of thinking about consumers and much additional work.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could solve our waste and energy problems at the same time, by turning one into the other? Attempts have been made to do just that, by making fuel from waste through pyrolysis.

Kate Raworth, a senior researcher at the aid charity Oxfam, has created a doughnut-shaped concept for achieving 11 societal goals within the framework of 9 planetary boundaries. She talks to Nature Climate Change about a safe and just operating space for humanity.

The European Union has proposed an impressive budget that 'mainstreams' its climate commitments across funding sectors, but will it reduce carbon emissions, asks Sonja van Renssen.

As poor nations put together their climate change budgets and strategies, Anna Petherick looks at the challenges of calculating national costs of adapting to global warming.

In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will report on the next set of future greenhouse-gas emission scenarios, offering a rational alternative pathway for avoiding dangerous climate change.

It has long been known that temperature extremes are associated with an increased risk of death. Research now directly relates future climate warming to people's lifetime.

Fungal-based food webs of undisturbed grasslands resist and adapt to the effects of drought more than bacterial-based food webs of agricultural soils, indicating how soil biota might be able to withstand long-term climate change.

Exposure to scientific information cannot explain entirely the levels of public concern about global warming in the United States. Now research shows that US views on climate change are largely affected by the actions of political groups.

Shifts in the geographic distribution of species caused by climate change could detrimentally affect ecosystems and biodiversity. This Perspective highlights the importance of adaptations to day length in predicting the latitudinal range shifts of different species under global warming.

Converging evidence from the behavioural and brain sciences suggests that climate change fails to generate strong moral intuitions and therefore it does not stimulate an urgent need for action. However, adequate communication strategies could enhance moral intuitions about climate change and therefore motivate greater support for ameliorative actions and policies.

Models and scenarios on which climate projection are based vary between IPCC reports. To facilitate meaningful comparison, this study provides probabilistic climate projections for different scenarios in a single consistent framework, incorporating the overall consensus understanding of the uncertainty in climate sensitivity, and constrained by the observed historical warming.

A study shows that regional atmospheric change driven by land-cover change contributes little to glacier mass loss on Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro. More generally, this finding suggests that local land-cover change may have limited impact on mountain glaciers in the tropics and elsewhere, compared with that of global climate change.

Trends in phenological phases associated with climate change are widely reported, yet attribution remains rare. Attribution analysis of trends in wine-grape maturity in Australia indicates that two climate variables—warming and declines in soil water content—are driving a major portion of the earlier-ripening trend. Crop-yield reductions and evolving management practices have also contributed.

Previous research has examined temperature-related excess deaths or mortality risks. A study now uses years of life lost to provide a new measure of the impact of temperature on mortality, and finds an increase in the years of life lost for cold and hot temperatures. The loss will greatly increase further if future temperature rise goes beyond 2 °C above pre-industrial levels.

There has been concern that climate change may cause increases in harmful algal blooms (HABs). Research now shows that previously abundant HAB and non-HAB dinoflagellates have decreased since 2006, whereas common diatoms, including both HAB and non-HAB species, have recently increased in abundance.

A study shows that soil food webs directly help mitigate the effects of drought on soil nutrients. The fungal-based food webs of grassland were more resistant to bouts of drought than the bacterial-based food webs of intensively managed wheat, and retained more carbon and nitrogen in the soil.

Feedbacks between the living and non-living components of the terrestrial carbon cycle present a major source of uncertainty in climate predictions. Now research using materially closed soil-vegetation-atmosphere chamber experiments with carbon amounts proportional to the main terrestrial carbon pools suggests that short-term biotic responses could potentially buffer a temperature increase of 2.3 °C without significant positive feedbacks to atmospheric carbon dioxide.

A comparison of specimens collected from the same locations but nearly a century apart shows that an alpine chipmunk has suffered reduced genetic diversity and gene flow as a result of climate-driven habitat loss in Yosemite National Park, USA. This study highlights one important impact of climate change on biodiversity

Assessments of tropical cyclone risk trends are typically based on reported losses, which are biased by improvements in information access. Now research based on thousands of physically observed events and contextual factors shows that, despite projected reductions in tropical cyclone frequency, projected increases in demographic pressure and tropical cyclone intensity can be expected to exacerbate disaster risk.

In collaboration with experts in agroforestry, agricultural economics and policy, development economist Utkur Djanibekov estimated the viability of small-scale Clean Development Mechanism afforestation in Uzbekistan.

In celebration of the journal's first anniversary this month, we are giving free access for a limited period of one month to one article selected from each of the first 12 issues. The articles have been chosen to illustrate the breadth and depth of the journal's content, including primary research, interviews, commentaries and features. We take this opportunity to thank our readers and authors and we look forward to contributing further to the climate change debate over future years. Meanwhile, we hope that the climate change community finds this collection of articles both thought-provoking and interesting.