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Volume 5 Issue 5, May 2015

Editorial

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Correspondence

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Commentary

  • The hiatus in warming has led to questions about the reliability of long-term projections, yet here we show they are statistically unchanged when considering only ensemble members that capture the recent hiatus. This demonstrates the robust nature of twenty-first century warming projections.

    • Matthew H. England
    • Jules B. Kajtar
    • Nicola Maher
    Commentary
  • The models used by the IPCC are yet to provide realistic predictions for nitrogen emissions from the land to the air and water. Natural isotopic benchmarks offer a simple solution to this emerging global imperative.

    • Benjamin Z. Houlton
    • Alison R. Marklein
    • Edith Bai
    Commentary
  • Accelerated oxygen loss in both coastal and open oceans is generating complex biological responses; future understanding and management will require holistic integration of currently fragmented oxygen observation and research programmes.

    • Lisa A. Levin
    • Denise L. Breitburg
    Commentary
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News Feature

  • Health improvement and nutritional change could be an innovative route to emissions reduction. It makes sense to combine these previously divorced aims by measuring the carbon impacts of diet.

    • Elisabeth Jeffries
    News Feature
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Books & Arts

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Research Highlights

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News & Views

  • The Atlantic overturning circulation plays a key role in large-scale climate but how it varies is not well known. Now a study proposes that the weakening it may have experienced in the late 1970s is unprecedented over the last millennium.

    • Didier Swingedouw
    News & Views
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Perspective

  • This Perspective assesses the global balance between fossil-fuel carbon supply and the sufficiency of carbon stores for climate-change mitigation.

    • Vivian Scott
    • R. Stuart Haszeldine
    • Andreas Oschlies
    Perspective
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Review Article

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Letter

  • Assessments of emissions mitigation patterns have largely ignored differences in investment risk across technologies and regions. With a model accounting for such differences in the electricity generation sector, research now finds that mitigation costs are higher than with no risk variation, and highlights the importance of institutional reforms to lower investment risks.

    • Gokul C. Iyer
    • Leon E. Clarke
    • David G. Victor
    Letter
  • Analysis of the uncertainty associated with the timing of climate tipping points suggests that carbon taxes need to be increased by a minimum of 50%. If considering a rapid, high-impact tipping event, these taxes should be more than 200% higher. This implies that the discount rate to delay stochastic tipping points is much lower than that for deterministic climate damages.

    • Thomas S. Lontzek
    • Yongyang Cai
    • Timothy M. Lenton
    Letter
  • Although the correlation between greenhouse gases and temperature is well documented, it is difficult to show causality from the data. This study uses insight from dynamical systems theory to show that internal Earth system mechanisms largely control climate dynamics, rather than orbital forcing, and temperature does have a reinforcing feedback on greenhouse-gas concentrations.

    • Egbert H. van Nes
    • Marten Scheffer
    • George Sugihara
    Letter
  • The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report revised estimates of equilibrium climate sensitivity as a result of the ongoing warming hiatus. This study investigates how accumulating observations affect climate sensitivity estimates and finds that although there is a small downwards adjustment in the sensitivity, the lower bound of the 90% range is unchanged.

    • Daniel J. A. Johansson
    • Brian C. O’Neill
    • Olle Häggström
    Letter
  • Stomatal conductance is a land-surface attribute that links the water and carbon cycles. Analysis of a global database covering a wide range of plant functional types and biomes now provides a framework for predicting the behaviour of stomatal conductance that can be applied to model ecosystem productivity, energy balance and ecohydrological processes in a changing climate.

    • Yan-Shih Lin
    • Belinda E. Medlyn
    • Lisa Wingate
    Letter
  • Vegetation change is a key component of the carbon cycle, but quantifying these changes is challenging. Research using passive microwave observations now provides global estimates for forest and non-forest biomass trends over the past two decades.

    • Yi Y. Liu
    • Albert I. J. M. van Dijk
    • Guojie Wang
    Letter
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Article

  • Cooling has been observed over the past century in the northern Atlantic, and this study presents multiple lines of evidence that suggest it may be a result of a reduction in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. The decrease in this circulation, particularly after 1970, seems to be unprecedented in the past millennium and melt from the Greenland Ice Sheet may be a contributing factor.

    • Stefan Rahmstorf
    • Jason E. Box
    • Erik J. Schaffernicht
    Article
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