The recent United Nations climate treaty achieved unprecedented international support. Representatives from 195 countries met in Paris in December 2015 and agreed to lower their greenhouse gas emissions—an important step towards avoiding many impacts of climate change later this century (Karliner 2015). Climate change affects many natural and social systems and processes necessary for civilizat...

Background Climate change has been recognised as the most pressing environmental problem humans will face in the 21st century. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the global mean surface temperature has increased 0.74°C between 1905 and 2005, and predicts an increase of 2 to 4.5°C over the next 100 years. In Malaysia, observed surface temperature data for the last fo...

As the debate over global warming rages, actuaries may be able to play a greater role in evaluating the merits of the opposing views and contributing to climate research itself. Since hurricanes Hugo and Andrew, insurance companies have had to fundamentally rethink pricing, underwriting and financing for catastrophic weather-related coverage. Insurers also have had to consider whether these eve...

A new generation of an Earth system model now includes a number of land-surface processes directly relevant to analyzing potential impacts of climate change. This model, HadGEM2-ES, allows us to assess the impacts of climate change, multiple interactions, and feedbacks as the model is run. This paper discusses the results of centuryscale HadGEM2-ES simulations from an impacts perspective – spec...

Abstract In the climate change arena, assessments of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), while not policy prescriptive, are important for informing international negotiations and decisions practice communities. Since 2015, when Paris Agreement was adopted, there has been an increasing demand action calls inclusion a broader base stakeholders in global assessments. We use publicly ...

This paper outlines a range of scenarios describing what the world’s energy system might look like in the middle of the century, and what nuclear energy’s role might be. The starting point is the 40 non-greenhouse-gas-mitigation scenarios in the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Four illustrative marker scenarios are selected a...

A guide to facts and fictions about climate change It has become fashionable in some parts of the UK media to portray the scientific evidence that has been collected about climate change and the impact of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities as an exaggeration. Some articles have claimed that scientists are ignoring uncertainties in our understanding of the climate and the factors tha...

Egg-burying reptiles need relatively stable temperature and humidity in the substrate surrounding their eggs for successful development and hatchling emergence. Here we show that egg and hatchling mortality of leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) in northwest Costa Rica were affected by climatic variability (precipitation and air temperature) driven by the El Niño Southern Oscillation (EN...

The number of hot days and nights very likely has increased globally in recent years, according to a special report 1 focused solely on extreme weather events from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2 while the number of cold days has decreased. The future looks similar, the IPCC panel says: If countries continue to increase emissions of carbon dioxide (CO 2)—the greenhouse g...

The potential impacts of climate change are of great practical concern to those interested in coastal wetland resources. Among the areas of greatest risk in the United States are low-lying coastal habitats with easily eroded substrates which occur along the northern Gulf of Mexico and southeast Atlantic coasts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the World Meteorological Or...