If adaptive evolution cannot keep up with rapid climate change, populations and even species may decline or go extinct. Such adaptational lag is predicted, but evidence is scarce. We tested for lagging adaptation to warming climate in banked seeds of the annual weed Arabidopsis thaliana in common garden experiments in four sites across the species’ native European climate range. Genotypes originating in climates historically warmer than the planting site had higher relative fitness than native genotypes in every site.

Through an examination of shallow ice cores covering a wide area of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS), we show that the same mechanism drove two widespread melt events that occurred over 100 years apart, in 1889 and 2012. We found that black carbon from forest fires and rising temperatures combined to cause both of these events, and that continued climate change may result in nearly annual melting of the surface of the GIS by the year 2100.

The timing of phenological events exerts a strong control over ecosystem function and leads to multiple feedbacks to the climate system. Phenology is inherently sensitive to temperature (although the exact sensitivity is disputed and recent warming is reported to have led to earlier spring, later autumn and increased vegetation activity. Such greening could be expected to enhance ecosystem carbon uptake, although reports also suggest decreased uptake for boreal forests.

Temporally inconsistent and potentially unreliable global historical data hinder the detection of trends in tropical cyclone activity. This limits our confidence in evaluating proposed linkages between observed trends in tropical cyclones and in the environment. Here we mitigate this difficulty by focusing on a metric that is comparatively insensitive to past data uncertainty, and identify a pronounced poleward migration in the average latitude at which tropical cyclones have achieved their lifetime-maximum intensity over the past 30 years.

Synoptic-scale African easterly waves (AEWs) impact weather throughout the greater Atlantic basin. Over the African continent, AEWs are instrumental in initiating and organizing precipitation in the drought-vulnerable Sahel region. AEWs also serve as the precursors to the most intense Atlantic hurricanes, and contribute to the global transport of Saharan dust. Given the relevance of AEWs for the climate of the greater Atlantic basin, we investigate the response of AEWs to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations.

Catastrophic floods such as those that southern Britain experienced earlier this year are now more likely, owing to climate change caused by greenhouse-gas emissions. Simulations presented last week at the annual assembly of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna show that the risk of extremely wet winters in the region has increased by about 25% compared to the pre-industrial era.

The global climate has been experiencing significant warming at an unprecedented pace in the past century. This warming is spatially and temporally non-uniform, and one needs to understand its evolution to better evaluate its potential societal and economic impact. Here, the evolution of global land surface air temperature trend in the past century is diagnosed using the spatial–temporally multidimensional ensemble empirical mode decomposition method. We find that the noticeable warming (>0.5 K) started sporadically over the global land and accelerated until around 1980.