Volume 3 Issue 10, October 2013

Climate protection advocacy can learn from the success of the International AIDS Conference in forging a powerful global movement of scientists, non-governmental organizations and civil society.

China has recently pushed for investments in large-scale coal-fuelled synthetic natural gas plants. The associated carbon emissions, water needs and wider environmental impacts are, however, mostly neglected and could lock the country into an unsustainable development path.

A substantial fraction of the terrestrial carbon sink, past and present, may be incorrectly attributed to environmental change rather than changes in forest management.

Human lives can be saved when climate disaster prevention is part of international development aid.

Ecuador's president has called time on the Yasuní–ITT Initiative. Anna Petherick asks what the world can learn from it.

Efforts to tackle climate change have met significant financial and political barriers that have been difficult to overcome. Research now shows that such measures are justified on grounds other than mitigation of climate change.

The traditional view of the open ocean is that surface waters should change faster and that the deep waters should be relatively stable. Now research shows that the depths of the Southern Ocean are also rapidly freshening and warming, and that these changes are spreading towards the Equator.

The fate of permafrost soil carbon following thaw depends on hydrology.

The amount of organic material that microbes assimilate into their biomass is critical in regulating whether soils, the planet's main pool of organic matter, will absorb or emit carbon in a warmer world.

Trees can provide a multitude of ecosystem services. The current push to plant trees, motivated by the goal of sequestering carbon, raises the question of how tree diversity affects carbon sequestration and other services offered by afforestation/reforestation projects. This Perspective examines the potential benefits of mixed tree planting over a monoculture approach.

Satellite remote sensing has advanced the understanding of the climate system in the short period of observations. This study highlights remote sensing discoveries that were not detected by climate models or conventional observations, and suggests future challenges for the robust determination of climate trends.

Mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions often reduces co-emitted air pollutants, with advantages for human health. Avoided mortality from air pollution, a co-benefit of CO₂ abatement, is estimated under global climate change mitigation scenarios to be in the range of US$50–US$380 per tonne of CO₂. This exceeds the projected mitigation costs for 2030 and 2050, and is within the lower range of costs expected in 2100.

The long-term loss of carbon from thawing permafrost in Northeast Greenland is quantified for 1996–2008 by repeated sediment sampling and incubation. Although the active layer has increased by >1 cm per year, there has not been a detectable decline in carbon stocks. Laboratory studies highlight the potential for fast carbon mobilization under aerobic conditions, but indicate that carbon at near-saturated conditions may remain largely immobilized for decades.

Albedo is a key component in the energy budget of the Arctic region, and a thorough understanding of it is essential for climate modelling. An analysis of the changes in Arctic sea-ice from 1982 to 2009 indicates that late summer sea-ice albedo is becoming dimmer. The rate of albedo decrease is shown to be accelerating over the study period.

The Iberian lynx has suffered severe population declines in the twentieth century. An ecological modelling study that accounts for the effects of climate change, prey availability and management intervention now shows that lynx are likely to become extinct in the wild in the next 50 years. However, a carefully planned reintroduction program could avert extinction this century.

Increasing volatility in food markets and the rising incidence of climatic extremes could lead to more frequent spikes in food prices. A global assessment of the reliability of crop simulations in reproducing past failures in major crop types suggests that seasonal forecasts can be useful for monitoring global food production.

Earth system models (ESMs) generally have crude representations of the responses of soil carbon responses to changing climate. Now an ESM that explicitly represents microbial soil carbon cycling mechanisms is able to simulate carbon pools that closely match observations. Projections from this model produce a much wider range of soil carbon responses to climate change over the twenty-first century than conventional ESMs.

Extreme weather, rising seas and degraded coastal ecosystems all play a part in escalating the risks that coastal regions are exposed to. Now research into hazards facing the contiguous USA indicates that the likelihood and magnitude of losses can be reduced by intact reefs and coastal vegetation.

Research that combines all available studies of biological responses to regional and global climate change shows that 81–83% of all observations were consistent with the expected impacts of climate change. These findings were replicated across taxa and oceanic basins.

There is no single correct procedure for the attribution of responsibility for growth in atmospheric CO₂ concentrations because results are closely dependant on how carbon sinks are accounted for and linked to emissions. Now research that uses two different approaches—one assuming geographically constrained sinks and the other unconstrained—unambiguously attributes the largest share of the historical increase in CO₂ to developed countries.

Communities of boreal species are spreading northwards as tundra communities recede under climate change in the Arctic. Concurrently, human activities in the Arctic are increasing. This study takes a multidisclinary approach to investigate the potential future distribution of tundra species and to relate the location of refugial areas to disparate land-use practices in northern Alaska.