In his popular 2008 book Climate Wars, the US journalist and military historian Gwynne Dyer laid out a daunting scenario. Climate change would put growing pressure on fresh water and food over the coming century, he wrote, triggering social disorder, mass migration and violent conflict.

Meticulous reconstruction of the former extent of a glacier high in the mountains of New Zealand will help in interpreting global-scale climatic adjustments that occurred at the end of the last glaciation.

The Younger Dryas

The main consumer-targeted certification scheme for sustainable fisheries is failing to protect the environment and needs radical reform, say Jennifer Jacquet, Daniel Pauly and colleagues.

With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But the unusually low winter temperatures experienced by the country's tropical region in July and August hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins.

Now you see it, now you don't. According to news reports the plume of oil in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico is no more. But just days earlier, the subsurface plume had been proclaimed a long-lived menace.

The humble Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) bears a heavy burden. It may be just a small, shrimp-like crustacean, but its sheer abundance makes it one of the largest protein sources on Earth, eagerly sought by fish, penguins, whales

Review recommends better governance and transparency for the IPCC in the face of more public scrutiny.

Bacteria regularly evolve antibiotic resistance, but little is known about this process at the population level. Here, a continuous culture of Escherichia coli facing increasing antibiotic levels is followed. Most isolates taken from this population are less antibiotic resistant than the population as a whole.

China has tremendous climatic and ecological diversity, so the impacts of climate change on natural and managed systems might likewise be expected to be diverse. Yet so far systematic studies have been rare. Here, the impacts of historical and future climate change on water resources and agriculture in China are assessed.