How robust are global conservation priorities to climate change?

International conservation organisations have identified priority areas for biodiversity conservation. These global-scale prioritisations affect the distribution of funds for conservation interventions. As each organisation has a different focus, each prioritisation scheme is determined by different decision criteria and the resultant priority areas vary considerably. However, little is known about how the priority areas will respond to the impacts of climate change. In this paper, we examined the robustness of eight global-scale prioritisations to climate change under various climate predictions from seven global circulation models. We developed a novel metric of the climate stability for 803 ecoregions based on a recently introduced method to estimate the overlap of climate envelopes. The relationships between the decision criteria and the robustness of the global prioritisation schemes were statistically examined. We found that decision criteria related to level of endemism and landscape fragmentation were strongly correlated with areas predicted to be robust to a changing climate. Hence, policies that prioritise intact areas due to the likely cost efficiency, and assumptions related to the potential to mitigate the impacts of climate change, require further examination. Our findings will help determine where additional management is required to enable biodiversity to adapt to the impacts of climate change.     

How the aggressiveness of rainfalls in the Mediterranean lands is enhanced by climate change

Rainfall and overland flow are fundamental processes for Earth’s ecosystems but can also be land disturbing forces, particularly when triggered by extreme hydro-meteorological events. Examples of these extremes are rainstorms and related phenomena due to rainfall aggressiveness. They produce high-impact land processes such as soil erosion and nutrient losses. Economic and social consequences of these processes can be quite severe. However, hydrological extremes and their environmental implications are still poorly understood, particularly if analyzed in the context of climate change. Here, we analyze a 300 year long times series of historical rainfall patterns across the Mediterranean in the last three centuries and we investigate changes in the erosive forcing as related to climate changes. Our results show that the erosive forcing increased towards the end of the Little Ice Age (~1850) over western and central Mediterranean and that has been increasing in the recent warming period at low Mediterranean latitudes, due to a higher frequency of intensive storms. Such increased concentrated precipitation may lead to an intensification of land degradation processes triggered by soil erosion and transport across a range of scales from hillslopes to small catchments.     

How qualitative approaches matter in climate and ocean change research: Uncovering contradictions about climate concern

There is growing acknowledgement of the need for both quantitative and qualitative methods to unravel complex human-environment interactions and inform a more advanced move towards global sustainability. Nonetheless, qualitative methods still play an understated role in climate and ocean change research. One important reason for this are continuing tendencies in the natural sciences to value ‘hard’ and value-free quantitative approaches over ‘soft’ and value-laden qualitative approaches. This paper argues that to overcome such methodological reservations, it is necessary to inform not only about the key characteristics of qualitative research but also – and this has received little attention – about the concrete empirical insights that can be gained from qualitative as opposed to quantitative data, despite sharing the same research focus.The environmental literature still lacks relevant examples from fieldwork that explain in detail how exactly decisive information is elicited from specific qualitative datasets, thereby illustrating how qualitative approaches matter. This paper seeks to help fill this gap by demonstrating to sceptical quantitative researchers the necessity and added value of integrating qualitative data in global environmental change research and highlighting impeding factors. This is done by presenting empirical findings about climate and ocean change adaptation in Norwegian coastal fisheries and elucidating how different qualitative interview techniques reveal that fishers who initially state that they do not worry about climate change actually do worry, and vice versa. Self-categorisation theory from social psychology is used to better explain such contradictory statements. Detecting salient but masked climate concern and understanding the reasons behind it are crucial for avoiding misleading conclusions and effectively tailoring adaptation strategies to the requirements of specific audiences.     

Beyond false balance: How interpretive journalism shapes media coverage of climate change

This study explores two pre-eminent features of transnational media coverage of climate change: The framing of climate change as a harmful, human-induced risk and the way that reporting handles contrarian voices in the climate debate. The analysis shows how journalists, and their interpretations and professional norms, shape media debates about climate change. The study links an analysis of media content to a survey of the authors of the respective articles. It covers leading print and online news outlets in Germany, India, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland. It finds that climate journalism has moved beyond the norm of balance towards a more interpretive pattern of journalism. Quoting contrarian voices still is part of transnational climate coverage, but these quotes are contextualized with a dismissal of climate change denial. Yet niches of denial persist in certain contexts, and much journalistic attention is focused on the narrative of ‘warners vs. deniers,’ and overlooks the more relevant debates about climate change.     

When worry about climate change leads to climate action: How values,worry and personal responsibility relate to various climate actions

The IPCC's report on Global Warming of 1.5°C positioned climate change as one of the most worrying issues mankind has ever faced. Although many people worry about climate change, there is still much unknown about the origins and outcomes of worry about climate change; particularly, whether and how it can motivate specific and personal climate actions. The current paper investigates this critical relationship with data from the European Social Survey Round 8 (44,387 respondents from 23 countries). As expected, the more individuals worried about climate change, the more likely they were to take and support climate action. Yet, the process through which this association occurred differed between actions. Specifically, worry was both directly and indirectly, via feelings of personal responsibility to reduce climate change, associated with climate policy support; whereas worry was mostly indirectly associated with personal climate mitigation behaviours, via personal responsibility. In addition, worry about climate change appears partly rooted in biospheric values (i.e., caring about nature and the environment), and biospheric values were also clearly, directly and positively related to personal climate mitigation behaviours. The relationships were highly consistent across countries but varied somewhat in size. The results show how generic feelings about climate change can directly and indirectly affect both climate policy support and personal climate mitigation behaviours, thereby providing critical insights for science and policy making.     

Interdecadal variability of regional climate change: implications for the development of regional climate change scenarios

Summary Illustrative examples are discussed of the interdecadal variability features of the regional climate change signal in 5 AOGCM transient simulations. It is shown that the regional precipitation change signal is characterized by large variability at decadal to multidecadal scales, with the structure of the variability varying markedly across regions. Conversely, the regional temperature change signal shows low interdecadal variability. Results are compared across scenarios, models and different realizations with the same model. Our analysis indicates that, at the decadal scale, linear scaling of the regional climate change signal by the global temperature change works relatively well for temperature but less so for precipitation. The nonlinear fraction of the climate change signal tends to decrease with the magnitude of the signal. The implications of interdecadal variability for the generation of regional climate change scenarios are discussed, in particular concerning the use of multi-experiment ensembles to produce such scenarios.     

湖南气候对全球气候变化的响应

利用湖南省96个台站1960—2010年逐日气象观测资料,在进行均一性检验和订正的基础上对湖南省气候变化事实进行检测分析。结果表明:湖南气候与全球气候变化一致,呈现以变暖为主要特征的变化,且变暖存在季节、地域上的差异,冬、春、秋气温变暖趋势显著,增暖幅度最大的区域在湘北地区;对气候变暖响应敏感的要素主要是与平均气温、冬季气温相关密切的要素,如季平均气温、年平均最低气温、活动积温等;湖南气温在突变时间上具有较好的时间逻辑关系;湖南降水量无显著趋势变化,但极端降水增加,地域性差异明显,湖南东部地区降水量呈现明显增加趋势,日降水量大于等于100 mm的日数呈显著增加趋势;湖南日照时数、风速、相对湿度均呈现显著减少的变化趋势。     

Framing the way to relate climate extremes to climate change

The atmospheric and ocean environment has changed from human activities in ways that affect storms and extreme climate events. The main way climate change is perceived is through changes in extremes because those are outside the bounds of previous weather. The average anthropogenic climate change effect is not negligible, but nor is it large, although a small shift in the mean can lead to very large percentage changes in extremes. Anthropogenic global warming inherently has decadal time scales and can be readily masked by natural variability on short time scales. To the extent that interactions are linear, even places that feature below normal temperatures are still warmer than they otherwise would be. It is when natural variability and climate change develop in the same direction that records get broken. For instance, the rapid transition from El Ni?o prior to May 2010 to La Ni?a by July 2010 along with global warming contributed to the record high sea surface temperatures in the tropical Indian and Atlantic Oceans and in close proximity to places where record flooding subsequently occurred. A commentary is provided on recent climate extremes. The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.     

Climate change in the northeastern US: regional climate model validation and climate change projections

A high resolution regional climate model (RCM) is used to simulate climate of the recent past and to project future climate change across the northeastern US. Different types of uncertainties in climate simulations are examined by driving the RCM with different boundary data, applying different emissions scenarios, and running an ensemble of simulations with different initial conditions. Empirical orthogonal functions analysis and K-means clustering analysis are applied to divide the northeastern US region into four climatologically different zones based on the surface air temperature (SAT) and precipitation variability. The RCM simulations tend to overestimate SAT, especially over the northern part of the domain in winter and over the western part in summer. Statistically significant increases in seasonal SAT under both higher and lower emissions scenarios over the whole RCM domain suggest the robustness of future warming. Most parts of the northeastern US region will experience increasing winter precipitation and decreasing summer precipitation, though the changes are not statistically significant. The greater magnitude of the projected temperature increase by the end of the twenty-first century under the higher emissions scenario emphasizes the essential role of emissions choices in determining the potential future climate change.     

It's political: How the salience of one's political identity changes climate change beliefs and policy support

Previous research has demonstrated a striking difference in climate change beliefs and policy support between people who identify with the right-wing of politics and with the left-wing of politics. But are we destined to continue with this divergence? We suggest that there is movement around these differences based on the politicization of climate change and we conducted two experimental studies with 126 and 646 people, respectively, to examine this effect. We found that those people whose political identity was made salient were less likely to believe in an anthropogenic cause of climate change and less likely to support government climate change policies than those whose identity was not made salient; particularly when those people were aligned with the right-wing of politics. The results demonstrate the importance of the salience of one's political identity in determining attitudes and beliefs even for scientific facts such as climate change. Our research also identifies some ways forward in dealing with climate change-based on depoliticizing the issue.     

Learning and climate change

Abstract

Learning—i.e. the acquisition of new information that leads to changes in our assessment of uncertainty—plays a prominent role in the international climate policy debate. For example, the view that we should postpone actions until we know more continues to be influential. The latest work on learning and climate change includes new theoretical models, better informed simulations of how learning affects the optimal timing of emissions reductions, analyses of how new information could affect the prospects for reaching and maintaining political agreements and for adapting to climate change, and explorations of how learning could lead us astray rather than closer to the truth. Despite the diversity of this new work, a clear consensus on a central point is that the prospect of learning does not support the postponement of emissions reductions today.     

Security and climate change

Despite it being the most studied and arguably most profound of global environmental change problems, there is relatively little research that explores climate change as a security issue. This paper systematically explores the range of possible connections between climate change and security, including national security considerations, human security concerns, military roles, and a discussion of the widely held assumption that climate change may trigger violent conflict. The paper explains the ways in which climate change is a security issue. It includes in its discussion issues to do with both mitigation and adaptation of climate change.     

Text-mining the signals of climate change doubt

Climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that the Earth is getting warmer and that the rise in average global temperature is predominantly due to human activity. Yet a significant proportion of the American public, as well as a considerable number of legislators in the U.S. Congress, continue to reject the “consensus view.” While the source of the disagreement is varied, one prominent explanation centres on the activities of a coordinated and well-funded countermovement of climate sceptics. This study contributes to the literature on organized climate scepticism by providing the first systematic overview of conservative think tank sceptical discourse in nearly 15 years. Specifically, we (1) compile the largest corpus of contrarian literature to date, collecting over 16,000 documents from 19 organizations over the period 1998–2013; (2) introduce a methodology to measure key themes in the corpus which scales to the substantial increase in content generated by conservative think tanks over the past decade; and (3) leverage this new methodology to shed light on the relative prevalence of science- and policy-related discussion among conservative think tanks. We find little support for the claim that “the era of science denial is over”—instead, discussion of climate science has generally increased over the sample period.     

Human control of climate change

The use of analogies and repeated feedback might help people learn about the dynamics of climate change. In this paper, we study the influence of repeated feedback on the control of a carbon-dioxide (CO₂) concentration to a goal level in a Dynamic Climate Change Simulator (DCCS) using the “bathtub” analogy. DCCS is a simplification of the complex climate system into its essential elements: CO₂ concentration (stock); man-made CO₂ emissions (inflow); and natural CO₂ removal or absorption in the atmosphere (outflow). In a laboratory experiment involving DCCS, we manipulated feedback delays in two ways: the frequency of emission decisions and the rate of CO₂ absorption from the atmosphere (climate dynamics). Our results revealed that participants’ ability to control the CO₂ concentration generally remained poor even in conditions where they were allowed to revise their emission decisions frequently (i.e., every 2?years) and where the climate dynamics were rapid (i.e., 1.6% of CO₂ concentration was removed every year). Participants’ control of the concentration only improved with repeated feedback in conditions of lesser feedback delay. Moreover, the delay due to climate dynamics had a greater effect on participants’ control than the delay due to emission decisions frequency. We provide future research directions and highlight the potential of using simulations like DCCS to help people learn about dynamics of Earth’s climate.     

Self-assessed understanding of climate change

Survey researchers often treat self-assessed understanding of climate change as a rough proxy for knowledge, which might affect what people believe about this topic. Self-assessments can be unrealistically high, however, and correlated with politics, so they deserve study in their own right. Turning the usual perspective around to view self-assessed understanding as dependent variable, problematically related to actual knowledge, casts self-assessments in a new light. Analysis of a 2016 US survey that carried a five-item test of very basic, belief-neutral but climate-relevant knowledge (such as knowing about the location of North and South Poles) finds that, at any given level of knowledge, people saying they “understand a great deal” about climate change are more likely to be older, college-educated, and male. Self-assessed understanding exhibits a U-shaped political pattern: highest among liberals and the most conservative, but lowest among moderate conservatives. Among liberal and middle-of-the-road respondents, self-assessed understanding of climate change is positively related to knowledge. Among the most conservative, however, understanding is unrelated or even negatively related to knowledge. For that group in particular, high self-assessed understanding reflects confidence in political views, rather than knowledge about the physical world.