Reviews & Analysis

Observed vegetation change in the Northern Hemisphere can, with a high degree of confidence, be attributed to human-caused global change.

Recent observations of Earth's energy budget indicate low climate sensitivity. Research now shows that these estimates should be revised upward, resolving an apparent mismatch with climate models and implying a warmer future.

Oil prices are notoriously tricky to predict. This uncertainty could slow climate mitigation unless policymakers implement stringent climate policy.

A long-term goal for climate policy can only be agreed through political processes, but science can inform these through mapping policy choices and the risks they create. Recommendations for the practical use of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report are provided.

Strong positive selection on cold hardiness and relaxed selection on heat hardiness experienced by range-expanding populations may help to explain why ectothermic animals generally have broader thermal tolerance towards the poles, and shed new light on their climate vulnerabilities.

The ratio of global temperature change to cumulative emissions is relatively constant up to two trillion tonnes of carbon emissions. Now a new modelling study suggests that the concept of a constant ratio is even applicable to higher cumulative carbon emissions, with important implications for future warming.

Reducing energy usage is important for climatechange mitigation. This Perspective focuses on the use and promise of agent-based modelling to understand the complexities of energy demand, including consumer behaviour.

This Perspective describes a decision science approach to applying sociological and behavioural research to the design of effective climate- and energy-related policies.

Deep international cooperation will be needed to tackle climate change. This Perspective looks at how decentralized policy coordination involving partial efforts to build confidence and reduce emissions could foster such cooperation.

Building bridges between three analytical approaches with quite different foundational bases should lead to a more comprehensive understanding of low-carbon transitions, in turn leading to more informed and effective policy decisions.

This Perspective introduces a special Collection titled Energy, Climate and Society—jointly produced by Nature Energy and Nature Climate Change—that focuseson the social science insights into the linked problems of energy sustainability and climate change.

The Earth's climate evolves in response to both externally forced changes and internal variability. Now research suggests that both drivers combine to set the pace of Arctic warming caused by large-scale sea-ice loss.

Expert judgement is often used to assess uncertainties in model-based climate change projections. This Perspective describes a statistical approach to formalizing the role of expert judgement, using Antarctic ice loss as an illustrative example.

A review of climatic changes reported by subsistence-oriented communities around the world highlights the contribution that such local observations can make to our understanding of the impact of climate change on ecosystems and societies.

The unprecedented recent intensification of the Pacific trade winds cannot simply be explained by natural variability alone. Now research finds that the more local influence of sulfate aerosols of human and volcanic origin play a significant role, in addition to the Pacific's coupling to the Atlantic Ocean via the 'atmospheric bridge'.

Detection and attribution of sea-level rise is hampered by the lack of historical model estimates for the individual components. Now research bridges this gap and uncovers an accelerating anthropogenic contribution over recent decades.

After the global financial crisis, regulators turned their attention to non-traditional threats to financial assets, including the impacts of climate change. A new study estimates the magnitude of that threat, and shows investors should take it seriously.

Reducing deforestation and forest degradation offers a quick win for climate mitigation. Using satellite data we are now able to better constrain pantropical estimates of forest loss, reshaping our understanding of the annual to decadal variability in land sources and sinks in the global carbon cycle.

A high-impact weather event that occurred at the end of a decade of weather extremes led to the emergence of extreme event attribution science. The challenge is now to move on to assessing the actual risks, rather than simply attributing meteorological variables to climate change.