Volume 8 Issue 10, October 2018

Climate change will almost certainly cause millions of deaths. Climate engineering might prevent this, but benefits — and risks — remain mostly unevaluated. Now is the time to bring planetary health research into climate engineering conversations.

Climate change mitigation scenarios are finding a wider set of users, including companies and financial institutions. Increased collaboration between scenario producers and these new communities will be mutually beneficial, educating companies and investors on climate risks while grounding climate science in real-world needs.

Biological communities beneath Antarctic ice shelves remain a mystery, hampering assessment of ecosystem development after ice-shelf collapse. Here we highlight major gaps in understanding of the patterns and processes in these areas, and suggest effective ways to study the ecological impacts of ice-shelf loss under climate change.

The 2014 IPCC Assessment expresses doubt that the global surface temperature increase will remain within the 2 °C target without deploying risky carbon-capturing or solar radiation-deflecting technologies. New behavioural research suggests that, if the IPCC is right, citizens and policymakers will support such risk-taking.

A new estimate of the costs of CO₂ emissions at the country level identifies the winners and losers under climate change.

Recent years have seen increased melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, contributing to accelerated rates of sea-level rise. New research suggests that this melting occurred due to an increased frequency of atmospheric rivers, narrow filaments of moist air moving polewards.

Earth’s future climate depends, in part, on rapid soil microbial processes that may add up to long-term impacts. Observations from a geothermal gradient reveal decadal increases in soil-carbon loss due to persistent increases in microbial activity.

Meeting the Paris Agreement climate goals requires increasingly ambitious climate policy. A framework for ratcheting up stringency through policy sequencing is proposed and illustrated using the cases of Germany and California, USA.

Global ocean oxygen concentrations have been declining, with rates varying regionally. The retreat of the Labrador Current, allowing more low-oxygen subtropical waters to the coastal and shelf waters, drives the rapid decline observed in the northwest Atlantic Ocean.

Deep reefs and their inhabitants are diverse, but environmental change, in particular warming, will cause these reefs found along southeastern Australia to tropicalize with different responses across functional groups, resulting in novel communities by the 2060s.

Vegetation in the Windmill Islands, East Antarctica, is changing rapidly in response to a drying climate. Mosses provide potentially important indicators of coastal climate change in the region.

Soil microbial activity is accelerated by warming and does not acclimate over periods of at least 50 years. Resulting soil carbon loss is nevertheless temporary because substrate depletion reduces microbial biomass and constrains the influence of microbes over the ecosystem.

In economic games, players shift to riskier contributions when targets that prevent catastrophic losses cannot be met otherwise, suggesting people are willing to invest in riskier technology when more certain options will not be sufficient to mitigate climate change.

Global estimates of the economic impacts of CO₂ emissions may obscure regional heterogeneities. A modular framework for estimating the country-level social cost of carbon shows consistently unequal country-level costs.

The connections between global mean temperature and precipitation responses to CO₂ doubling (equilibrium climate and hydrological sensitivity) are driven through low-cloud responses to surface warming, according to MIROC5 perturbation experiments.

Analysis of peatland carbon accumulation over the last millennium and its association with global-scale climate space indicates an ongoing carbon sink into the future, but with decreasing strength as conditions warm.

The model–inventory discrepancy in net land-use carbon emissions mainly results from conceptual differences in estimating anthropogenic forest sinks. A revised disaggregation of global land model results allows greater comparability with inventories.