Research articles

A systematic analysis reveals a steep decline in the costs of battery packs for electric vehicles, with market-leading manufacturers setting the pace.

Analysis of the uncertainty associated with the timing of climate tipping points suggests that carbon taxes need to be increased by a minimum of 50%. If considering a rapid, high-impact tipping event, these taxes should be more than 200% higher. This implies that the discount rate to delay stochastic tipping points is much lower than that for deterministic climate damages.

The sensitivity of surface ozone, a major pollutant, to climate warming is shown to be positive but variable over the southeast United States.

An analysis shows that generation of solar power within the existing built environment could easily meet California’s current energy demand.

As the atmosphere warms it can hold more water so precipitation is expected to increase. This study uses palaeoclimate data and modelling results to investigate what this means for Antarctic mass balance and sea-level rise, as more snowfall will increase the water stored as ice on the continent.

Africa’s savannahs and shrublands have been assumed to provide a large area for the expansion of cropland with relatively little damage to the environment. Research now shows that conversion would be likely to have high carbon and biodiversity costs.

How regional sea level will change in response to ocean dynamics is investigated by altering initial atmosphere and ocean conditions in model projections. Internal variability in the ocean is found to cause large differences in projected changes.

Knowledge of the near-term rate of change is needed for adaptation. The rate at which climate change is occurring, over 40-year periods, is found to be unprecedented in the past 1,000 years. Regionally, Europe, North America and the Arctic are above the global average.

Living plants maintain a balance of multiple chemical elements for optimal growth and reproduction. A meta-analysis now shows that terrestrial plant N:P ratios decrease with increased atmospheric CO₂, rainfall, and P fertilization, but increase with warming, drought, and N fertilization.

Assessments of emissions mitigation patterns have largely ignored differences in investment risk across technologies and regions. With a model accounting for such differences in the electricity generation sector, research now finds that mitigation costs are higher than with no risk variation, and highlights the importance of institutional reforms to lower investment risks.

A consumption-based carbon accounting method that takes into account how national policy changes affect emissions redraws the global emissions map.

Our knowledge of long-term changes in vegetation activity is incomplete, hindering understanding of Earth system dynamics. A comprehensive global assessment of vegetation phenology now shows that vegetation activity changed severely on 54% of the global land surface between 1981 and 2012.

Stomatal conductance is a land-surface attribute that links the water and carbon cycles. Analysis of a global database covering a wide range of plant functional types and biomes now provides a framework for predicting the behaviour of stomatal conductance that can be applied to model ecosystem productivity, energy balance and ecohydrological processes in a changing climate.

The probability of a hiatus in global warming is calculated, with a 10-year event having a probability of ∼10%, but a 20-year event less than 1%. The current 15-year event is found to have up to 25% chance of continuing for another 5 years.

Analysis of a 6,750-year coral core from Pacific Panamá identifies the environmental conditions associated with abrupt reef shutdown.

Policies designed to encourage adaptation to climate change may conflict with regulation aimed at protecting environmental quality. This paper analyses the trade-offs between two fundamental ecosystem services that will be impacted by climate change: provisioning services derived from agriculture and regulating services in the form of freshwater quality.

Thermal stresses associated with climate change have contributed to the spread of white-band disease in important reef-building corals in the Caribbean.

Over-reliance on charcoal sourced from native forests rather than plantations doubled CO₂ emissions from Brazil’s steel industry between 2000 and 2007.

Climate models predict an increase in intense rainfall events due to a warmer atmosphere retaining more moisture. This study looks at observations from the central USA and reports that there has been an increase in the frequency of flooding, but little evidence for larger flood peaks.

This study investigates the relative contributions to Arctic warming from natural and anthropogenic forcers—greenhouse gases and aerosols. About 60% of greenhouse-gas warming is found to be offset by other anthropogenic forcings, which is greater than observed on a global scale.