Volume 6 Issue 4, April 2016

Insurance is gaining importance in and beyond the climate negotiations and offers many opportunities to improve climate risk management in developing countries. However, some caution is needed, if current momentum is to lead to genuine progress in making the most vulnerable more resilient to climate change.

The past five years have been an interesting time for the climate and for climate policy. But how has climate science evolved since Nature Climate Change first launched?

Climate researchers and educators must recognize legitimate disagreements about the risks of climate change, and should support informed dialogue about value-laden choices.

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.

Understanding the potential social and economic damage and loss wrought by tropical cyclones requires not only understanding how they will change in frequency and intensity in a future climate, but also how these hazards will interact with the changing exposures and vulnerabilities associated with social change.

The recent slowdown in global warming challenged our understanding of climate dynamics and anthropogenic forcing. An early study gave insight to the mechanisms behind the warming slowdown and highlighted the ocean's role in regulating global temperature.

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.

Indigenous knowledge and experience have historically been under-represented in the IPCC's reports. New guidelines, policies and more nuanced content are needed to develop culturally relevant and appropriate adaptation policies.

An application of network science reveals the institutional and corporate structure of the climate change counter-movement in the United States, while computational text analysis shows its influence in the news media and within political circles.

Modelling of over 25,000 hydro- and thermoelectric power plants shows water constraints are likely to severely reduce usable capacity after 2040. Fuel switching, increasing efficiency and new cooling systems can reduce power plants’ vulnerability.

Global river flood risk is expected to increase substantially over coming decades due to both climate change and socioeconomic development. Model-based projections suggest that southeast Asia and Africa are at particular risk, highlighting the need to invest in adaptation measures.

The response of climate to external forcing is known as climate sensitivity, and its estimates are calculated from historical observations. This study estimates the efficacy of individual forcings and revises climate sensitivities accordingly.

Surface melt of the Greenland ice sheet is retained through storage in the surface porous ice. This study shows that successive melt events have caused the formation of near-surface ice layers, preventing this storage and increasing meltwater runoff.

Changes in ocean heat content over the industrial era are investigated from a range of observations. Using this data as input to climate models shows that nearly half of the increase occurred in recent decades, and more than a third occurs below 700 m.

A statistical analysis of rainfall records over Europe compared with climate reconstructions based on sediment and pollen time series data suggests that proxy records can be reliable descriptors of long-term precipitation variability.

The chemical breakdown of rocks can be enhanced by spreading silicate granules over land. Research suggests that this measure, which increases the rate at which CO₂ is locked up in ocean carbonates, could lower atmospheric CO₂ by 30–300 ppm by 2100.

Incorporating temperature acclimation of photosynthesis and foliar respiration into Earth system models improves their ability to reproduce observed net ecosystem exchange of CO₂, and reduces the temperature sensitivity of terrestrial carbon exchange.

The US aviation sector is the world’s largest single air transportation system. Modelling shows that fuel burn strategies could reduce emissions from narrow-body passenger aircraft by 2% per kilometre travelled, at zero marginal cost.

An analysis of the distribution of deforestation in Mato Grosso, Brazil, suggests that policies and incentives to protect carbon stocks should focus on large privately owned farms and ranches, where most of the remaining forests are located.

Optimized infrared hyperspectral imaging can now detect methane gradients on a sub-m² scale. This can facilitate remote assessment of methane sources and sinks to improve understanding of the cycling of this important greenhouse gas.