Research articles

Climate change induced warming, hypoxia and acidification threaten marine species. Experimental work shows that the susceptibility of clades to climate-related stressors in the modern ocean is related to their extinction risk in the fossil record, which could allow prediction of future responses.

Anthropogenic aerosol emissions decreased over North America and Europe but increased over Asia since the 1970s. This caused jet stream winds to shift poleward over the Atlantic, decreasing planetary wave activity and partially inhibiting extreme winter weather over northern Eurasia.

The stability of climatic conditions since the Last Glacial Maximum has contributed to current global patterns of species richness. Changes in patterns of climate stability this century reveal areas where climate change could reduce biodiversity, with largest losses in past climatic safe havens.

Ozone forms in the atmosphere when other anthropogenically emitted gases react with sunlight and negatively impacts terrestrial gross primary productivity (GPP). Reducing emissions of ozone precursors by 50%, particularly in the road transportation and energy sectors, could increase GPP by 750 TgC yr^–1.

The rapid growth of climate change research presents challenges for IPCC assessments and their stated aim of being comprehensive, objective and transparent. Here the authors use topic modelling to map the climate change literature, and assess how well it is represented in IPCC reports.

Mountain forest drought can paradoxically increase evapotranspiration (green water), helping vegetation at the expense of runoff (blue water). This is quantified for the 2003 event in the European Alps, highlighting underappreciated vulnerability of blue-water resources to future warmer summers.

Changes in ocean temperature and pH will impact on species, as well as impacting on community interactions. Here warming and acidification cause a clam species to change their feeding mode, with cascading effects for the marine sedimentary food web.

Crustose coralline algae help build coral reef structures through calcification, a process threatened under ocean acidification. Juvenile algae were highly sensitive on initial exposure to ocean acidification, but continued exposure over six generations showed a gain of tolerance.

Arctic warming is attributed to GHGs and feedbacks, but the specific contribution of ozone-depleting substances (ODS)—also potent GHGs—has never been quantified. Here, model simulations suggest ODS contributed 0.8°C of Arctic warming and led to considerable sea-ice loss during the period 1955–2005. [This summary has been amended to reflect the addendum published 28 January 2020]

An Earth system model estimates that natural halogens, of marine biotic and abiotic origin, remove about 13% of present-day global tropospheric O₃. Projections suggest this ratio is stable through 2100, with high spatial heterogeneity, despite increasing natural halogens.

The relative roles of local and remote processes in determining equatorial warming are still debated. Model simulations show that coupled feedbacks strongly damp the equatorial surface temperature response to local equatorial forcing, while amplifying the response to remote off-equatorial forcing.

Detection and attribution typically aims to find long-term climate signals in internal, often short-term variability. Here, common methods are extended to high-frequency temperature and humidity data, detecting instantaneous, global-scale climate change since 1999 for any year and 2012 for any day.