Research articles

The ocean absorbs atmospheric heat; understanding this process is needed to predict climate change impacts. Model analysis shows the influence of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on Southern Ocean heat uptake—projections with larger (smaller) ENSO amplitude show less (more) ocean warming.

Ice that melts at high elevation often refreezes and, therefore, does not contribute to the shrinking of ice sheets. Here, the authors show that the elevation at which melting ice starts to contribute to runoff has increased over recent years in Greenland, expanding the runoff area by 29%.

Changes in wave climate can pose substantial risk to coastal areas. Here transitional wave climate regions—areas where a wave climate will increase its frequency of occurrence—are identified and classified with implications for understanding future coastal risk.

Food demand is increasing, while climate change is impacting the magnitude and stability of crop yields. High-quality soils are able to buffer the negative impacts of climate change and lead to smaller yield reduction and higher yield stability, indicating a potential adaptation strategy.

Companies commonly use renewable energy certificates to report progress towards emission reduction targets. However, this use of certificates is unlikely to result in actual emission reductions, which undermines the credibility of corporate emission reduction claims and their alignment with the Paris Agreement goal.

Changes to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) will have substantial regional impacts but more remote effects are unclear. Here, model analysis shows that AMOC collapse causes excess heat to accumulate in the tropical south Atlantic Ocean, resulting in atmospheric changes globally.

Halting emissions does not immediately stop warming as atmospheric concentrations continue to warm the planet. This study shows society may already be committed to exceeding 1.5 °C peak warming with 42% probability; delaying cuts increases this to 66% in 2029 for all scenarios.

The authors analyse four decades of distribution data for various taxonomic groups to understand the shift of species within their climatic niches and the changing influences of different climate factors. The diverse and diverging climate imprints raise concerns about future ecosystem integrity.

Vegetation productivity in the Northern Hemisphere has increased under climate change since the 1980s. However, the correlations between productivity and summer temperature are projected to decrease by the end of the century, with implications for the magnitude of the terrestrial carbon sink.

The necessary and rapid transition to a low-carbon economy will lead to massive stranded assets, which could risk the stability of financial markets and the economy. Through a global equity network, most risk and responsibility is owned by investors, such as pension funds, in developed countries.

Southern mid-latitude winter storms are expected to intensify with emission increases, but it is unknown if such intensification has already emerged. Here, storms are shown to have intensified in recent decades, and current models considerably underestimate this, indicating more risk than projected.

South Asian agriculture depends on water from rains, meltwater and groundwater, but climate change impacts the timing of these water sources’ availability. Projections indicate that meltwater and groundwater will become more important and will need to offset reduced rainfall during drier years.

Young people around the world have joined the school climate strikes and shared belief of the unfair climate threat or proper future actions. However, different adolescents still have divergent opinions on the image, effectiveness or motivation of the protest activities.

The authors show earlier future phytoplankton bloom initiation timing in most oceans, while shifts in bloom peak timing will vary widely by region. In the extratropics, these phenological changes will exceed background natural variability by the end of the twenty-first century.

The coastal regions of the Western North Pacific have seen large increases in tropical cyclone heavy rainfall frequency. Statistical fingerprint analysis shows that this observed geographical change in heavy rainfall is related to anthropogenic climate change.

The authors demonstrate that a vegetation system’s ability to recover from disturbances—its resilience—can be estimated from its natural variability. Global patterns of resilience loss and gains since the early 1990s reveal shifts towards widespread resilience loss since the early 2000s.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is predicted to slow with climate change. Sea surface temperature data and climate model analysis show that since 1900 natural variability has been dominant in AMOC changes; anthropogenic forcing is not yet reliably detectable by this method.

Climate change is causing more frequent and intense precipitation extremes, yet the changes are difficult to project. Here, climate models are used to develop an emergent constraint; applying this suggests a 32% increase in the frequency of precipitation extremes by the end of the century.

Satellite observations show slight increases in Antarctic sea-ice extent, yet climate models predict declines. Here sea-ice expansion is shown to occur when the Southern Ocean surface cools from natural climate variability, primarily linked via teleconnections with the tropical Pacific Ocean.

The authors consider the complex effects of climate change on winter wheat in the United States. They show that snow cover insulation weakened yield sensitivity to freezing stress by 22% from 1999 to 2019, but project that future reduced snow cover will offset up to one-third of the yield benefit from reduced frost.