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Recent scientific advances make it possible to assign extreme events to human-induced climate change and historical emissions. These developments allow losses and damage associated with such events to be assigned country-level responsibility.
In anticipation of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report we look back at our evolving understanding of atmospheric CH4. Though sources, sinks, and atmospheric burden are now well known, apportionment between the myriad sources and sinks, and forecasting natural emissions, remains a challenge.
Ice losses from Antarctica and Greenland are the largest uncertainty in sea-level projections. Nevertheless, improvements in ice-sheet models over recent decades have led to closer agreement with satellite observations, keeping track with their increasing contribution to global sea-level rise.
Since 1990, the wide range in model-based estimates of equilibrium climate warming has been attributed to disparate cloud responses to warming. However, major progress in our ability to understand, observe, and simulate clouds has led to the conclusion that global cloud feedback is likely positive.
The treatment of agriculture has evolved over the lifetime of the IPCC, as tracked by the assessment reports. Efforts to quantify crop yield impacts and mitigation potentials have increased significantly, as has adaptation research. However, there remains a dearth of experimental and observational studies.
Solar geoengineering is no substitute for cutting emissions, but could nevertheless help reduce the atmospheric carbon burden. In the extreme, if solar geoengineering were used to hold radiative forcing constant under RCP8.5, the carbon burden may be reduced by ∼100 GTC, equivalent to 12–26% of twenty-first-century emissions at a cost of under US$0.5 per tCO2.
Changing climates are outpacing some components of our food systems. Risk assessments need to account for these rates of change. Assessing risk transmission mechanisms across sectors and international boundaries and coordinating policies across governments are key steps in addressing this challenge.
To enable society to better manage the risks and opportunities arising from changes in climate, engagement between the users and the providers of climate information needs to be much more effective and should better link climate information with decision-making.
Policymakers are beginning to understand the scale of carbon dioxide removal that is required to keep global warming “well below 2 °C”. This understanding must now be translated into policies that give business the incentive to research, develop and deploy the required technologies.
Traditional moral arguments fail to persuade conservative climate sceptics. Pope Francis' gifting of his climate encyclical to President Trump prior to his leaving the Paris Agreement shows that even a religious leader's persuasive power is constrained by how his message resonates with conservative moral values.
A giant iceberg has calved off the Larsen-C Ice Shelf, the largest remaining ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, reducing its total area by ~10%. Whilst calving events are a natural phenomenon and thus not necessarily indicative of changing environmental conditions, such events can impact ice-shelf stability.
Following President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, cities worldwide have pledged support to combat climate change. Along with a growing coalition of businesses and institutions, cities represent a beacon of hope for carbon reduction in politically tumultuous times.
Discriminating the climate impacts of half-degree warming increments is high on the post-Paris science agenda. Here we argue that evidence from the observational record provides useful guidance for such assessments.
The dramatic switch from extreme drought to severe flooding in California, and the accompanying flip from atmospheric ridge to trough in the northeastern Pacific, exemplifies the pathways to an intensified water cycle under a warming climate.
There is no longer a choice between climate policy and no climate policy. G20 finance ministers have to play a key role in implementing smart climate policies like carbon pricing. Yet they remain reluctant to take advantage of the merits of carbon pricing for sound fiscal policy.
Increasing demand for solution-oriented environmental assessments brings significant opportunities and challenges at the science–policy–society interface. Solution-oriented assessments should enable inclusive deliberative learning processes about policy alternatives and their practical consequences.
Early-stage capital providers and clean energy technology incubators are supporting a new wave of innovations focused on end-use efficiency and demand control. This wave complements expanding investments in supply technologies required for electricity sector decarbonization.
Continued US membership in the Paris Agreement on climate would be symbolic and have no effect on US emissions. Instead, it would reveal the weaknesses of the agreement, prevent new opportunities from emerging, and gift greater leverage to a recalcitrant administration.
Decision scientists have identified remedies for various cognitive biases that distort climate-change risk perceptions. Researchers must now use the same empirical methods to identify strategies for reproducing — in the tumult of the real world — results forged in the tranquillity of their labs.
In the emerging post-Paris climate governance regime, the role of scientific expertise is radically changing. The IPCC in particular may find itself in a new role, where projections of future climate function as a kind of regulatory science. This poses great challenges to conventional ideals of scientific neutrality.