Volume 4 Issue 9, September 2014

Climate change communication is trapped between the norms that govern scientific practice and the need to engage the public. Overcoming this tension requires new societal institutions where the science and politics of climate change can co-exist.

There is a gap between the current role of the climate science community and the needs of society. Closing this gap represents a necessary but insufficient step towards improved public discourse and more constructive policy formulation on climate change.

Climate policy has gained focus with the adoption of the 2 °C target, but action to avoid dangerous climate change has not occurred as expected. It is time to reconsider the target, and most importantly, the relationship between climate science and policy.

Raising basic living standards and growing affluence aren't equivalent, and neither are their respective climate impacts.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports reflect evolving attitudes in adapting to sea-level rise by taking a systems approach and recognizing that multiple responses exist to achieve a less hazardous coast.

Reducing dependence on Russian gas imports and increasing energy efficiency will have ramifications for Europe's climate policy, explains Sonja van Renssen.

City-level policies have often been unable to limit natural disaster losses. Research on New York City now shows progress in devising flexible adaptation policies that accept uncertainty about future climate-related risks and work around it.

Increasing temperatures are expected to increase decomposition rates in soils, potentially reducing ecosystem carbon storage. Research now indicates that — in a tropical montane forest — soil carbon stocks are unaffected by higher temperatures despite substantially increased rates of CO₂ release from the soil.

How the global change science community is currently portraying the character and role of the social sciences and humanities is problematic, according to this Perspective. Measures needed to bring other visions and voices into the debate about global environmental change are identified.

The winter of 2013–14 witnessed severe flooding across much of the UK putting pressure on policy makers to improve future planning for periods of torrential rainfall. This Perspective puts the flooding in the context of historical records, critically examines a range of potential causes, and sets out research directions needed to achieve a definitive assessment on the possible human contribution to the flooding.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline to connect Canadian oil sands with US refineries and ports has attracted much controversy. Based on an economic model, this study finds that the biggest emissions impact of the pipeline may be due to its effect of lowering global oil prices and, in turn, increasing global oil consumption (and related emissions). The analysis therefore points to a gap in existing assessments of the Keystone XL project.

Internal variability in the climate system makes it difficult to determine the rate of regional sea-level rise. This study uses satellite altimetry data and corrects for natural variability to determine the anthropogenic contribution to sea-level rise in the tropical Pacific region.

The impacts of climate change on certain aspects of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) have been established. However, the change in sea surface temperature, commonly used to represent ENSO amplitude, remained uncertain. Now, the sea surface response is shown to be time-varying, with an increasing trend to 2040 followed by a decreasing trend. The previous uncertainty is attributed to the expectation of unidirectional behaviour and unrealistic model representations.

Africa is sometimes called ‘the burning continent’ owing to the prevalent use of fire for landscape management. This study shows that precipitation changes associated with El Niño/Southern Oscillation help explain fire trends in Africa over the period 2001–2012. However, a shift in land use from savannah to cropland also reduced fire prevalence in the northern half of the continent.

Earth system models do not currently account for unforced variability in land–atmosphere CO₂ flux when simulating the responses of the terrestrial carbon cycle to anthropogenically forced changes in climate and atmosphere. Now, research shows that this unforced variability is larger than the forced response in many areas of the world, precluding detection of the forced carbon-cycle change for decades.

Nitrous oxide (N₂O) is a greenhouse gas and an important ozone-depleting substance. Microbial nitrogen cycling in agricultural soils is a major source of atmospheric N₂O. Now, research shows that the capacity of soils to take up N₂O is mostly explained by the abundance and diversity of a newly described N₂O-reducing microbial group.

European forest disturbance—due to wind, bark beetles and wildfires—has increased in association with climate changes, but future disturbance-response remains highly uncertain. Now, research based on an ensemble of climate change scenarios indicates that an increase in forest disturbance is probable in the coming decades, with implications for forest carbon storage.

Biologically relevant metrics of global change are needed for risk assessment, to assess species exposure, and for adaptation planning. This paper presents a new measure of global change velocity that incorporates both climate and land-use change, and explores the implications of the observed velocities for conservation planning in the US.

This study shows that climate change has the potential to substantially increase undernourishment rates and threaten food security in developing countries through crop damage, but that ozone regulation can significantly offset climate impacts, depending on the scenario. The findings should help policymakers devise optimal strategies for food production under global climate change.

Reduced soil-carbon storage in response to warming is a potential reinforcing feedback that could enhance climate change. A study now shows that for tropical montane wet forest, long-term warming (represented by an altitudinal gradient) accelerates below-ground carbon processes but has no apparent impact on soil-organic-carbon storage.

Technology is expected to play an important role in climate change adaptation, but little is known about whether it is actually being transferred to developing countries. Research now shows that in most of the adaptation projects managed by the Global Environment Facility, technology transfer is occurring mainly in the form of early deployment of existing technologies.

The current slowdown in global warming has raised questions about the accuracy of climate model projections. This work selects models that are largely in phase with the natural variability, in this case the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, of the climate system. The selected models are able to predict the recent Pacific Ocean temperature and spatial trends.