The El Niño/Southern Oscillation is Earth’s most prominent source of interannual climate variability, alternating irregularly between El Niño and La Niña, and resulting in global disruption of weather patterns, ecosystems, fisheries and agriculture. The 1998–1999 extreme La Niña event that followed the 1997–1998 extreme El Niño event switched extreme El Niño-induced severe droughts to devastating floods in western Pacific countries, and vice versa in the southwestern United States.
Over half of all wood harvested worldwide is used as fuel, supplying ~9% of global primary energy. By depleting stocks of woody biomass, unsustainable harvesting can contribute to forest degradation, deforestation and climate change. However, past efforts to quantify woodfuel sustainability failed to provide credible results. The researchers present a spatially explicit assessment of pan-tropical woodfuel supply and demand, calculate the degree to which woodfuel demand exceeds regrowth, and estimate woodfuel-related greenhouse-gas emissions for the year 2009.
Integrated assessment models compare the costs of greenhouse gas mitigation with damages from climate change to evaluate the social welfare implications of climate policy proposals and inform optimal emissions reduction trajectories. However, these models have been criticized for lacking a strong empirical basis for their damage functions, which do little to alter assumptions of sustained gross domestic product (GDP) growth, even under extreme temperature scenarios.
Vietnamese communities in the Mekong Delta are faced with the substantial impacts of rising sea levels and salinity intrusion. The construction of embankments and dykes has historically been the principal strategy of the Vietnamese government to mitigate the effects of salinity intrusion on agricultural production. A predicted sea-level rise of 30 cm by the year 2050 is expected to accelerate salinity intrusion.
The Ganges–Brahmaputra river delta, with 170 million people and a vast, low-lying coastal plain, is perceived to be at great risk of increased flooding and submergence from sea-level rise. However, human alteration of the landscape can create similar risks to sea-level rise. Here, we report that islands in southwest Bangladesh, enclosed by embankments in the 1960s, have lost 1.0–1.5 m of elevation, whereas the neighbouring Sundarban mangrove forest has remained comparatively stable.
Pacific salmon provide critical sustenance for millions of people worldwide and have far-reaching impacts on the productivity of ecosystems. Rising temperatures now threaten the persistence of these important fishes, yet it remains unknown whether populations can adapt. Here, we provide the first evidence that a Pacific salmon has both physiological and genetic capacities to increase its thermal tolerance in response to rising temperatures.
Crop models are essential tools for assessing the threat of climate change to local and global food production. Present models used to predict wheat grain yield are highly uncertain when simulating how crops respond to temperature. Here we systematically tested 30 different wheat crop models of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project against field experiments in which growing season mean temperatures ranged from 15 °C to 32 °C, including experiments with artificial heating. Many models simulated yields well, but were less accurate at higher temperatures.
Socio-economic stress from the unequivocal warming of the global climate system could be mostly felt by societies through weather and climate extremes. The vulnerability of European citizens was made evident during the summer heatwave of 2003 when the heat-related death toll ran into tens of thousands. Human influence at least doubled the chances of the event according to the first formal event attribution study, which also made the ominous forecast that severe heatwaves could become commonplace by the 2040s.
Recent studies show that current IUCN Red List assessment methods can identify species vulnerable to extinction because of climate change. But species must be assessed more completely and more regularly, and adaptation actions initiated swiftly once threatened species are identified.
The large uncertainty in soil carbon–climate feedback predictions has been attributed to the incorrect parameterization of decomposition temperature sensitivity and microbial carbon use efficiency. Empirical experiments have found that these parameters vary spatiotemporally, but such variability is not included in current ecosystem models. Here we use a thermodynamically based decomposition model to test the hypothesis that this observed variability arises from interactions between temperature, microbial biogeochemistry, and mineral surface sorptive reactions.
