The surface warming due to emissions of black-carbon aerosols over the second half of the twentieth century has been identified in observations. These findings will inform debate over the climatic effects of controlling such emissions.

Climate change is affecting the world in many ways. But attempts to directly link local changes in species distribution and biodiversity to climate warming hold little promise, ecologists warn in Nature Climate Change. First author Camille Parmesan, a population biologist at the University of Texas in Austin, explains why.

Coarse resolution palaeoclimate proxy evidence has suggested that the Pliocene warm period (PWP) between 3 million and 5 million years ago was characterized by permanent El Niño conditions in which the equatorial Pacific was uniformly warm, instead of having the modern-day 'cold tongue' extending westward from South America.

Birth-cohort studies offer invaluable data on the links between childhood development and later life, but today's efforts could learn something from a pioneering project that turns 65 this week.

Counting the cost of decades of breakneck development, Chinese scientists and policy-makers outlined the daunting challenges they face in trying to halt the country's environmental degradation.

 In 1946, scientists started tracking thousands of British children  born during one cold March week. On their 65th birthday, the study members find themselves more scientifically valuable then ever before.
 

Palaeontologists characterize mass extinctions as times when the Earth loses more than three-quarters of its species in a geologically short interval, as has happened only five times in the past 540 million years or so. Biologists now suggest that a sixth mass extinction may be under way, given the known species losses over the past few centuries and millennia.

A novel explanation for the long-term temperature record in Antarctic ice cores invokes local solar radiation as the driving agent. This proposal will prompt palaeoclimate scientists to pause and to go back to basics.

Summer sea-ice extent in the Arctic has decreased greatly during recent decades. Simulations of twenty-first-century climate suggest that the ice can recover from artificially imposed ice-free summer conditions within a couple of years.

A Nature survey shows the pernicious impact of activism on biomedical scientists. More institutions must offer researchers the training they need to stand up for their work. (Editorial)