Volume 4 Issue 1, January 2014

For the past six months Nature Climate Change has been offering authors the option of double-blind peer review. Here we report on some preliminary findings from the trial.

Greenhouse gas emissions from ruminant meat production are significant. Reductions in global ruminant numbers could make a substantial contribution to climate change mitigation goals and yield important social and environmental co-benefits.

To understand what social learning approaches can offer the sciences of adaptation and mitigation, we need to assemble an appropriate evidence base.

Europe must come up with effective climate, environment and energy policies that do not jeopardize economic competitiveness. Sonja van Renssen explores worries voiced within industry.

Evidence indicates that the continued loss of Arctic sea-ice and snow cover may influence weather at lower latitudes. Now correlations between high-latitude cryosphere changes, hemispheric wind patterns and mid-latitude extreme events are shown for the Northern Hemisphere.

It is assumed that the monsoon is the dominant influence on Himalayan glaciers. However, a study now investigates the importance of the mid-latitude Westerlies and shows that glacier changes can be triggered from afar.

Early warning systems can alert societies about coming irreversible climatic changes, but can they trigger action to avoid them? Research now suggests that to prompt social action, uncertainty about when the changes will occur must be reduced.

Recent studies have produced conflicting results about the impacts of climate change on drought. In this Perspective, a commonly used drought index and observational data are examined to identify the cause of these discrepancies. The authors indicate that improvements in the quality and coverage of precipitation data and quantification of natural variability are necessary to provide a better understanding of how drought is changing.

Recent reports of a lower climate sensitivity to CO₂ emissions have been used to suggest that the need for mitigation is not as urgent as previously thought. This Perspective investigates how quickly committed peak warming would increase ifmitigation is delayed. Peak warming is found to increase in line with cumulative CO₂ emissions, faster than current observed warming.

This Review considers the evolving relationship between land-use change and greenhouse gas emissions in Brazil. Despite the intensification of agriculture over the past decade or so, deforestation has decreased, resulting in reduced greenhouse gas emissions. However, inequality in land ownership and city growth fuelled by rural–urban migration remain pressing issues for policymakers.

Studies about early warning signals of a climate tipping point suggest that collective action to avoid a catastrophe will only take place if uncertainty about the threshold for dangerous climate change is reduced. An experiment now finds that behaviour changes dramatically either side of a dividing line for this threshold uncertainty—when uncertainty is only slightly larger, catastrophe is not averted.

Stopping anthropogenic carbon emissions will not result in a sudden decrease in temperature. Earth system models are used to show that there may be an increase in warming after an initial decrease. This is a result of feedbacks from decreased ocean heat uptake, which exceed the cooling from decreased atmospheric CO₂.

The Northern Hemisphere has seen record declines in the summer sea-ice and snow cover at high latitudes, as well as a recent increase in extreme summer events at mid latitudes. The connection between these has been unclear; however, changes in atmospheric circulation attributable to the reduced cryosphere are now shown to be linked to the summer extremes.

The combination of climatic warming and wetting can increase the CO₂ sink strength of High Arctic semi-deserts by an order of magnitude, according to a long-term climate manipulation experiment in northwest Greenland. These findings indicate that parts of the High Arctic have the potential to remain a strong carbon sink under future global warming.

The water chemistry in reef systems can be significantly different from that of the open ocean. Now research based on observations from Bermuda shows that the responses of coral reef communities to ocean acidification could partially offset changes in seawater pH and aragonite saturation.

The marine environment is under threat from climate change. This study finds that marine reserves can maintain biodiversity and abundance of large-bodied individuals in a warming environment. They also protect against colonization by range-shifting species when compared with fished sites.

The tropical monsoon is thought to play a key role in glacier change in High Asia. The mass balance of a glacier in the southern Tibetan Plateau is found to be due to May/June precipitation, which is controlled by mid-latitude climate and the tropical monsoon. Further attention should be paid to mid-latitude climate to understand glacier changes.