Climate-change impacts articles within Nature

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  • Article |

    Permanently ice-free areas, home to almost all of Antarctica’s biodiversity, are projected, in the worst case, to expand by over 17,000 km2 as a result of climate change by the end of this century, with potentially deleterious consequences for the continent’s biodiversity.

    • Jasmine R. Lee
    • , Ben Raymond
    •  & Aleks Terauds

  • Letter |

    A freely available dataset produced from three million Landsat satellite images reveals substantial changes in the distribution of global surface water over the past 32 years and their causes, from climate change to human actions.

    • Jean-François Pekel
    • , Andrew Cottam
    •  & Alan S. Belward

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    Aerosol particles can form in the atmosphere by nucleation of highly oxidized biogenic vapours in the absence of sulfuric acid, with ions from Galactic cosmic rays increasing the nucleation rate by one to two orders of magnitude compared with neutral nucleation.

    • Jasper Kirkby
    • , Jonathan Duplissy
    •  & Joachim Curtius

  • Letter |

    Population-weighted analysis of US weather conditions shows that the nation’s weather has generally become more pleasant since 1974, possibly explaining the lack of broad public support for action on climate change; projections of future US weather indicate that conditions will probably worsen.

    • Patrick J. Egan
    •  & Megan Mullin

  • Letter |

    Reconstruction of the activity of ice streams operating during the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet reveals that the number of ice streams and their total discharge decreased as the total volume of the ice sheet decreased, suggesting that ice stream activity did not accelerate the collapse of the ice sheet.

    • C. R. Stokes
    • , M. Margold
    •  & L. Tarasov

  • Letter |

    Analyses of the effects of extreme weather disasters on global crop production over the past five decades show that drought and extreme heat reduced national cereal production by 9–10%, whereas no discernible effect at the national level was seen for floods and extreme cold; droughts affect yields and the harvested area, whereas extreme heat mainly affects yields.

    • Corey Lesk
    • , Pedram Rowhani
    •  & Navin Ramankutty

  • Letter |

    Recent work has suggested that sections of the West Antarctic ice sheet are already rapidly retreating, raising concerns about increased sea-level rise; now, an ice-sheet model is used to simulate the mass loss from the entire Antarctic ice sheet to 2200, suggesting that it could contribute up to 30 cm of sea-level rise by 2100 and 72 cm by 2200, but is unlikely to contribute more.

    • Catherine Ritz
    • , Tamsin L. Edwards
    •  & Richard C. A. Hindmarsh

  • Letter |

    Economic productivity is shown to peak at an annual average temperature of 13 °C and decline at high temperatures, indicating that climate change is expected to lower global incomes more than 20% by 2100.

    • Marshall Burke
    • , Solomon M. Hsiang
    •  & Edward Miguel

  • Letter |

    This study identifies statistically significant trends in mid-atmospheric circulation patterns that partially explain observed changes in extreme temperature occurrence over Eurasia and North America; although the underlying cause of circulation pattern trends remains uncertain, most extreme temperature trends are shown to be consistent with thermodynamic warming.

    • Daniel E. Horton
    • , Nathaniel C. Johnson
    •  & Noah S. Diffenbaugh

  • Review Article |

    A review of western boundary currents in the Pacific Ocean explores their far-reaching influence on the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, the Indonesian Throughflow, Asian monsoons, and ocean circulation in the South China Sea, and concludes that major conceptual and technical progress will be needed to close the regional mass budget and provide robust projections of Pacific western boundary currents in a changing climate.

    • Dunxin Hu
    • , Lixin Wu
    •  & William S. Kessler

  • Letter |

    The circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean, interpreted via the sea level gradient along the US coast, is found to respond to atmospheric drivers from the North Atlantic Oscillation, and in turn influences the oceanic temperature changes characterized by Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation; in this way, ocean circulation acts as the intermediary between atmospheric and ocean oscillations.

    • Gerard D. McCarthy
    • , Ivan D. Haigh
    •  & David A. Smeed

  • Letter |

    An ensemble of climate models shows that by the end of the twenty-first century the coastal upwelling season near the eastern boundaries of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans will start earlier, end later and become more intense at high latitudes, thus becoming more homogeneous; these changes may affect the geographical distribution of marine biodiversity.

    • Daiwei Wang
    • , Tarik C. Gouhier
    •  & Auroop R. Ganguly

  • Letter |

    Observations of rapid, persistent elevation gains that occur on the ice surface above a subglacial lake as the lake is refilled with surface meltwater during the summer melt period in Greenland show that surface meltwater may be trapped and stored at the bed of an ice sheet, affecting ice dynamics downstream.

    • Michael J. Willis
    • , Bradley G. Herried
    •  & Robin E. Bell

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • Camilo Mora
    • , Abby G. Frazier
    •  & Thomas W. Giambelluca

  • Letter |

    Analysis of global historical data in the Northern and Southern hemispheres reveals a statistically significant, poleward migration of 1° per decade in the average latitude at which tropical cyclones have achieved their lifetime-maximum intensity over the past 30 years.

    • James P. Kossin
    • , Kerry A. Emanuel
    •  & Gabriel A. Vecchi

  • Letter |

    The largest assemblage so far of published data shows that C3 crops have decreased zinc and iron levels under CO2 conditions predicted for the middle of this century, with worldwide nutritional implications.

    • Samuel S. Myers
    • , Antonella Zanobetti
    •  & Yasuhiro Usui

  • Letter |

    Soil samples collected from 224 dryland sites around the world show that aridity affects the concentration of organic carbon and total nitrogen differently from the concentration of inorganic phosphorus, suggesting that any predicted increase in aridity with climate change could uncouple the carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles in drylands and negatively affect the services provided by these ecosystems.

    • Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo
    • , Fernando T. Maestre
    •  & Eli Zaady

  • Review Article |

    A review of the past six years of research on ice-sheet mass-balance change shows that accelerated loss from Greenland is a robust finding, but that loss from Antarctica is probably far lower than previously thought.

    • Edward Hanna
    • , Francisco J. Navarro
    •  & H. Jay Zwally

  • Letter |

    The resilience of a global sample of ecosystems to an increase in drought conditions is assessed, comparing data from the early twenty-first with the late twentieth century; results indicate a cross-ecosystem capacity for tolerating low precipitation and responding to high precipitation during recent warm drought and yet suggest a threshold to resilience with prolonged warm drought.

    • Guillermo E. Ponce-Campos
    • , M. Susan Moran
    •  & Patrick J. Starks

  • News |

    Transmission of infectious parasites slows with rising temperatures, researchers find.

    • Zoë Corbyn

  • Comment |

    Northern soils will release huge amounts of carbon in a warmer world, say Edward A. G. Schuur, Benjamin Abbott and the Permafrost Carbon Network.

    • Edward A. G. Schuur
    •  & Benjamin Abbott

  • News & Views |

    A recent surge in the intensity of tropical cyclones in the Arabian Sea has brought unprecedented damage and loss of life. Anthropogenic air pollution might be increasing the destructiveness of these storms. See Letter p.94

    • Ryan L. Sriver

  • Comment |

    Drought is the most pressing problem caused by climate change. It receives too little attention, says Joseph Romm.

    • Joseph Romm

  • News & Views |

    Rising concentrations of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may already be influencing the intensity of rainfall and increasing the risk of substantial damage from the associated flooding. See Letters p.378 & p.382

    • Richard P. Allan

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