Research articles

Quality of life improves with economic growth and hence requires increasing greenhouse-gas emissions. Little is known, however, about the role of international trade. Now research shows that most socio-economic benefits are actually accruing to carbon-importing countries. It also finds that high life expectancy is compatible with low carbon emissions, but high incomes are not.

Deflection of sunlight could compensate for the warming induced by increased greenhouse gases. However, the effects of such geoengineering on food security are highly uncertain. Now research using high-carbon-dioxide, geoengineering and control climate simulations suggests that solar-radiation management in a high-carbon-dioxide world generally causes crop yields to increase.

Greenhouse-gas emissions are likely to have an impact on the damage caused by extreme weather events, such as tropical cyclones. A study predicts that climate change will increase the frequency of these high-intensity storms in selected ocean basins and double their economic damage. Almost all tropical cyclone damage tends to be concentrated in North America, East Asia and the Caribbean-Central American region.

Previous research has examined temperature-related excess deaths or mortality risks. A study now uses years of life lost to provide a new measure of the impact of temperature on mortality, and finds an increase in the years of life lost for cold and hot temperatures. The loss will greatly increase further if future temperature rise goes beyond 2 °C above pre-industrial levels.

A study of two species of coral reef fish demonstrates that the anticipated increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide directly interferes with neurotransmitter function in their larvae, a hitherto unrecognized problem for marine fishes.

Focusing on mountain plant communities across Europe, a study shows that ongoing climate change causes a gradual decline in cold-adapted species and a corresponding increase in warm-adapted species, which could be an early sign that mountain plant diversity is at risk.

An analysis of annual variations in ecological community composition in several thousand plots distributed across Europe over two decades reveals that European birds and butterflies do not keep up with temperature increase and that climate change is resulting in rapid de-synchronization of the two groups at a continental scale.

A study finds tension between mitigating sea-level rise and reducing the rate of temperature change through solar-radiation management. The rapid warming that would occur if solar-radiation management were to be phased out is shown to depend critically on timescales, potentially committing future generations to its long-term use once started.

Global climate models cannot resolve hailstorms explicitly, so it is unclear whether a warmer climate will change hailstorm frequency and intensity. Now a study using high-resolution model simulations capable of resolving hail indicates the near-elimination of hail at the surface in future simulations for Colorado—a major centre of hailstorms in the United States.

This study combines previous work on quantifying the greenhouse gas value of ecosystems with models of the effects of biophysical processes to produce an integrated metric of climate-regulation services. The approach is used to quantify climate-regulation values of natural and managed ecosystems across the Western Hemisphere.

A long-term field study establishes a link between reduced snowfall and bird and tree declines in montane Arizona. Excluding elk from experimental sites reversed these declines and also lowered nest predation. This experiment shows that climate change, operating through increased winter herbivory, can negatively affect diverse species occupying such ecosystems.

Future changes in the Indian monsoon could affect millions of people, yet even the ways in which it might have changed over recent years remain uncertain. Statistical analysis indicates that during the second half of the twentieth century there were no spatially uniform changes in the frequency or intensity of heavy rainfall events over India, but there was an increase in the spatial variability of these characteristics.

A study based on a long-term manipulation experiment in a grassland ecosystem describes the microbial mechanisms controlling feedbacks to carbon and nutrient cycling under warming. The findings suggest that ecosystem models should more explicitly consider microbial feedbacks to climate change.

An analysis shows that the coral endosymbiont Symbiodinium—a dinoflagellate genus underpinning the ecological and evolutionary success of reef corals—can adapt to local thermal regimes, thereby shaping the fitness of coral hosts. This may explain why many corals show fidelity for single Symbiodinium types over wide thermal ranges.

Perturbed-physics climate modelling experiments simulate past and future climate scenarios using a wide combination of model parameters consistent with past climate. Using such an approach, a study examines variations in the response of climate to solar-radiation management under different climate sensitivities.

Adult fish seem relatively resilient to increased carbon dioxide levels, but how early-life-stage fish fare remains less clear. In a study, the estuarine fish Menidia beryllina experienced severely reduced survival and growth rates in its early life stages under levels of ocean acidification expected later this century. This suggests that ocean acidification may affect fish populations, because small changes in early-life survival can generate large fluctuations in adult-fish abundance.

Biofuels are often promoted as a way of mitigating climate change, but their impacts on climate and air quality remain uncertain. Estimates of air-pollutant emissions from the production and use of sugar-cane ethanol in Brazil indicate that this biofuel may have larger impacts on regional climate and human health than previously thought.

Ocean acidification—resulting from anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere—has been shown to affect fish growth rates and reproduction. Now research shows detrimental effects of ocean acidification on the development of Atlantic cod larvae—a mass-spawning fish species of high commercial importance—suggesting that ocean acidification could cause additional larval mortality, affecting populations of already exploited cod stocks.

Tropical species are considered especially sensitive to climate change, but research now shows that a tropical reef fish can rapidly acclimate over multiple generations. Acute exposure to a 1.5 °C and 3.0 °C temperature rise decreased an individual’s ability to perform aerobic activities such as swimming or foraging by 15% and 30% respectively, but this did not occur when both parents and offspring were reared at the higher temperature.

One of the impacts of ocean warming is a decrease in dissolved oxygen, with implications for valuable pelagic fish species. A study shows that the oxygenated upper ocean layer in the tropical northeast Atlantic thinned at a rate of around one metre per year between 1960 and 2010, and, by tracking individually tagged fish, demonstrates that this contraction in the oxygenated layer limited the movement of blue marlin.