A fundamental aspect of greenhouse-gas-induced warming is a global-scale increase in absolute humidity. Under continued warming, this response has been shown to pose increasingly severe limitations on human activity in tropical and mid-latitudes during peak months of heat stress. One heat-stress metric with broad occupational health applications is wet-bulb globe temperature.
How climate change science is conducted, communicated and translated into policy must be radically transformed if 'dangerous' climate change is to be averted.
Comprehensive computer simulations show that coral reefs are likely to suffer extensive long-term degradation resulting from mass bleaching events even if the expected increase in global mean temperature can be kept well below 2 °C. Without major mitigation efforts to limit global warming significantly, the fate of coral reef ecosystems seems to be sealed.
Increased dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) concentrations in sea water have been linked to a reduction of the temperature threshold at which corals bleach, however, the mechanism underlying this change is not known. This phenomenon is now explained in terms of increased phosphatase activities and imbalanced DIN supply resulting in phosphate starvation of algael symbionts.
Ocean acidification can alter competitive dynamics between species. Although calcareous species recruited and grew at similar rates to fleshy seaweeds in ambient and low pH conditions, at later stages, in low pH, they were rapidly overgrown. These results suggest that changes in competitive balance could indirectly lead to profound ecosystem changes in an acidified ocean.
Blanket bog—characterized by an almost complete landscape covering of undecayed organic peat—is a highly distinctive biome restricted to regions that experience hyperoceanic climatic conditions. Bioclimatic modelling suggests there will be a dramatic shrinkage of the available climatic space for blanket bogs with only a few, restricted areas of persistence.
Few studies have considered the effects of changes in climatic variability on disease incidence. Now research based on laboratory experiments and field data from Latin America shows that frog susceptibility to the pathogenic chytrid fungus is influenced by temperature variation and predictability through effects on host and parasite acclimation.
Climate-induced range shifts have been detected in a number of European species for which long-term survey data are available. In North America, well-organized long-term data needed to document such shifts are much less common. Now observations made by ‘citizen scientists’ help to demonstrate that a major, climate-induced shift of North American butterflies is underway.
Prediction of how climate-altered flooding regimes will affect stream channels and their communities has been limited by a lack of long-term baseline data sets across different organismal groups. Research based on 30 years of monitoring data now shows that salmon, macroinvertebrate and meiofauna communities display markedly different responses following a major flooding event.
Emissions from landscape fires affect both climate and air quality. This study uses satellite-derived fire estimates and atmospheric modelling to quantify the effects on health from fire emissions in southeast Asia from 1997 to 2006. Strong El Nino years are found to increase the incidence of fires, in addition to those caused by anthropogenic land use change, leading to an additional 200 days per year when the WHO atmospheric particle target is exceeded and increase adult mortality by 2%.
