Environmental social sciences articles within Nature

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  • Summer Books |

    David Orr explains how two environmentalists' manifestos bracket the debate on climate change — one favouring technological solutions, the other local interventions.

    • David Orr

  • Letter |

    Climate change does not occur symmetrically; instead, in a process called polar amplification, polar areas warm faster than the tropics. Recent work indicated that transport processes in the upper atmosphere account for much of the recent polar amplification, but this conclusion proved controversial. Here, updated reanalysis data have been used to show that reductions in sea ice are instead responsible.

    • James A. Screen
    •  & Ian Simmonds

  • News |

    Researchers fail to come up with clear guidelines for experiments that change the planet's climate.

    • Jeff Tollefson

  • Letter |

    Soil respiration (RS) is the flux of microbial- and plant-respired carbon dioxide from the soil surface to the atmosphere, and constitutes the second-largest terrestrial carbon flux. It has been suggested that RS should change with climate, but this has been difficult to confirm observationally. It is shown here, however, that the air temperature anomaly (the deviation from the 1961–1990 mean) correlates significantly and positively with changes in RS.

    • Ben Bond-Lamberty
    •  & Allison Thomson

  • Books & Arts |

    Four books by prominent global-warming pundits illustrate that exhortation and authority are not enough to solve the climate crisis — it is time for some humility, concludes Roger Pielke Jr.

    • Roger Pielke Jr

  • News Feature |

    Last year, functional magnetic resonance imaging made its debut in court. Virginia Hughes asks whether the technique is ready to weigh in on the fate of murderers.

    • Virginia Hughes

  • Editorial |

    The integrity of climate research has taken a very public battering in recent months. Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.

  • Books & Arts |

    In Country Driving, the final book in his China trilogy, Peter Hessler recounts his 11,000-kilometre drive across China to see at first hand the effects of rapid industrialization. The New Yorker journalist explains how mass migration to cities brings out people's resourcefulness, but also how the speed of social and environmental change leads them to seek meaning in their lives.

    • Jane Qiu

  • Editorial |

    Transparency and quality control are essential in the highly uncertain business of assessing the impact of climate change on a regional scale.

  • News & Views |

    When environmental temperatures rise, plants seek help from their core molecular mechanisms to adapt. The chromatin protein H2A.Z, which regulates gene expression, is one such rescue molecule.

    • Roger B. Deal
    •  & Steven Henikoff

  • Letter |

    Anthropogenic global warming is likely to be amplified by positive feedback from the global carbon cycle; however, the magnitude of the climate sensitivity of the global carbon cycle, and thus of its positive feedback strength, is under debate. By combining a probabilistic approach with an ensemble of proxy-based temperature reconstructions and pre-industrial CO2 data from three ice cores, this climate sensitivity is now shown to be much smaller than previously thought.

    • David C. Frank
    • , Jan Esper
    •  & Fortunat Joos

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