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Avoiding losses from climate change requires socially engaged research that explains what people value highly, how climate change imperils these phenomena, and strategies for embracing and managing grief.
It has been predicted, by theory and models, that heavy precipitation will increase with climate change and this is now being seen in observations. Emergence of signals such as this will enable testing of predictions, which should increase confidence in them.
Understanding the influence of the changing Arctic on mid-latitude weather is complex, and a challenge for researchers. This Perspective considers current approaches and proposes a way forward based on accepting the chaotic nature of the atmospheric circulation.
The Arctic winter polar vortex has weakened in recent years: this study shows that there has also been a shift in the location of the vortex towards Eurasia. This is related to cryospheric changes, with implications for mid-latitude weather.
Photoperiod is only an important leaf-out regulator for woody plants in areas with short winters and in lineages that derive from lower latitudes. Consequently, photoperiod constraint on range expansion should be limited to these areas and species.
Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are at the highest level for around 15 million years. Accurate accounting is crucial for informed decision-making on how to curb the rise.
Three IPCC special reports are scheduled, which will require the Working Groups to harmonize approaches and potentially influence the formulation of the sixth Assessment Report (AR6).
Hot on the heels of last year's Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement, representatives from the global conservation community met to set the conservation agenda that will help to implement these targets.
The imbalance of observations and knowledge of impacts between developed and developing countries leads to a procedural injustice in the attribution of responsibility for climate change.
The use of long-term ecological proxies in conservation planning is currently very limited. Recent advances offer exciting prospects for enhanced use of retrospective knowledge to forecast and manage ecological outcomes under global change.
Antarctic climate trends observed in the satellite record are compared with a two hundred year paleoclimate record. The satellite record is found to be too short to attribute changes to anthropogenic forcing, with natural variability overwhelming the forced signal.