This study looks at changes in North Atlantic tropical storm occurrence in the twenty-first century, and finds that over the first half of the century, storm frequency increases were caused by radiative forcing changes, not increasing carbon dioxide. The chaotic nature of the climate system and the climate response to radiative forcing are the largest uncertainties in North Atlantic tropical storm frequency.

In 2010 and 2011, Republicans and Democrats in the United States proposed mandating clean electricity generation. Research has now analysed public support for a national clean energy standard (NCES) and found that the average US citizen is willing to bear an annual 13% increase in electricity bills in support of a NCES that requires 80% clean energy by 2035.

More than one billion people live in regions affected by the South Asian summer monsoon. This Review provides an overview of our understanding of summer monsoon rainfall variability and its causes, and considers how the monsoon will change as a consequence of global warming.

Human stress on the environment has long been debated and different views about the human drivers of greenhouse-gas emissions have emerged. Now research synthesizes the debate by looking at empirical evidence and offers new insights on the role of human population, affluence, urbanization, trade, culture and institutions on greenhouse-gas emissions trends.

A modelling study shows that cutting greenhouse-gas emissions has the potential to stabilize global temperature increases, but predicts that sea level will continue to rise for centuries, and rapidly so, unless aggressive mitigation measures are set in place.

Full implementation of the European Union's new energy-efficiency law faces many hurdles, explains Sonja van Renssen.

Cynthia Rosenzweig heads the Climate Impacts Group at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Recently she has taken on another role co-leading the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project. She explains that task to Nature Climate Change.

Carbon emissions from cities represent the single largest human contribution to climate change. Here we present a vision, strategy and roadmap for an international framework to assess directly the carbon emission trends of the world's megacities.

The potential for power generation from geothermal energy in China is vast but as yet largely untapped.

Rising ocean temperatures have reduced rates of coral calcification and increased rates of coral mortality, thereby negatively impacting the health of coral reef ecosystems. Nevertheless, the response of corals to thermal stress seems to vary spatially across the reef environment. Here, we show that between 1982 and 2008 in the western Caribbean Sea, skeletal extension within forereef colonies of the reef-building coral Siderastrea siderea declined with increasing seawater temperature, whereas extension rates of backreef and nearshore colonies were not impacted.

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