The term 'carbon lock-in' refers to the tendency for certain carbon-intensive technological systems to persist over time, 'locking out' lower-carbon alternatives, and owing to a combination of linked technical, economic, and institutional factors. These technologies may be costly to build, but relatively inexpensive to operate and, over time, they reinforce political, market, and social factors that make it difficult to move away from, or 'unlock' them.

ARIES, acronym for Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences, located in the Central Gangetic Himalayan (CGH) region is emerging as one of the unique sites for climate change studies. The long-term, in situ, precise measurements of aerosols and trace gases obtained from this region provide valuable inputs for climate studies.

Original Source

Albedo modification (AM) is sometimes characterized as a potential means of avoiding climate threshold responses, including large-scale ice sheet mass loss. Previous work has investigated the effects of AM on total sea-level rise over the present century, as well as AM's ability to reduce long-term (Gt103 yr) contributions to sea-level rise from the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS). These studies have broken new ground, but neglect important feedbacks in the GIS system, or are silent on AM's effectiveness over the short time scales that may be most relevant for decision-making (<103 yr).

The historical orogenesis and associated climatic changes of mountain areas have been suggested to partly account for the occurrence of high levels of biodiversity and endemism. However, their effects on dispersal, differentiation and evolution of many groups of plants are still unknown. In this study, we examined the detailed diversification history of Primula sect.

The climate of the past millennium provides a baseline for understanding the background of natural climate variability upon which current anthropogenic changes are superimposed. As this period also contains high data density from proxy sources (e.g. ice cores, stalagmites, corals, tree rings, and sediments), it provides a unique opportunity for understanding both global and regional-scale climate responses to natural forcing.

Volcanic eruptions contribute to climate variability, but quantifying these contributions has been limited by inconsistencies in the timing of atmospheric volcanic aerosol loading determined from ice cores and subsequent cooling from climate proxies such as tree rings. Here we resolve these inconsistencies and show that large eruptions in the tropics and high latitudes were primary drivers of interannual-to-decadal temperature variability in the Northern Hemisphere during the past 2,500 years.

Relief of iron (Fe) limitation in the Southern Ocean during ice ages, with potentially increased carbon storage in the ocean, has been invoked as one driver of glacial–interglacial atmospheric CO2 cycles. Ice and marine sediment records demonstrate that atmospheric dust supply to the oceans increased by up to an order of magnitude during glacial intervals. However, poor constraints on soluble atmospheric Fe fluxes to the oceans limit assessment of the role of Fe in glacial–interglacial change.

Currently, little is known on how volcanic eruptions impact large-scale climate phenomena such as paleo-ITCZ position or South American summer monsoon behavior. In this paper, an analysis of observations and model simulations is employed to assess the influence of large volcanic eruptions on the climate of South America. This problem is considered both for historically recent volcanic episodes, for which more comprehensive global observations exist, as well as reconstructed volcanic events for the period 850 C.E.

Some animals have the remarkable capacity to acclimate across generations to projected future climate change however, the underlying molecular processes are unknown. We sequenced and assembled de novo transcriptomes of adult tropical reef fish exposed developmentally or transgenerationally to projected future ocean temperatures and correlated the resulting expression profiles with acclimated metabolic traits from the same fish. We identified 69 contigs representing 53 key genes involved in thermal acclimation of aerobic capacity.