Weather and climate extremes are identified as major areas necessitating further progress in climate research and have thus been selected as one of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Grand Challenges. Here, we provide an overview of current challenges and opportunities for scientific progress and cross-community collaboration on the topic of understanding, modeling and predicting extre...

Global climate change is having marked influences on species distributions, phenology and ecosystem composition and raises questions as to the effectiveness of current conservation strategies. Conservation planning has only recently begun to adequately account for dynamic threats such as climate change. We propose a method to incorporate climate-dynamic environmental domains, identified using s...

BACKGROUND Hydro-meteorological disasters are the focus of this paper. The authors examine, to which extent climate change increases their frequency and intensity. METHODS Review of IPCC-projections of climate-change related extreme weather events and related literature on health effects. RESULTS Projections show that climate change is likely to increase the frequency, intensity, duration, ...

For variety of reasons, extreme events are thought of as propelling adaptation to climate change (Füssel, 2007; IPCC, 2012). In the simplest formulation of this logical assertion, extreme weather and climate events transcend the signal-to-noise threshold and make climate risks starkly evident to decision-makers. Similarly, they make latent societal vulnerability manifest, and overcome economic ...

There are various climate risks that are caused or influenced by climate change. They are known to have a wide range of physical, economic, environmental and social impacts. Apart from damages to the physical environment, many climate risks (climate variability, extreme events and climate-related hazards) are associated with a variety of impacts on human well-being, health, and life-supporting ...

BACKGROUND Although many climate-sensitive environmental exposures are related to mortality and morbidity, there is a paucity of estimates of the public health burden attributable to climate change. OBJECTIVE We estimated the excess current and future public health impacts related to respiratory hospitalizations attributable to extreme heat in summer in New York State (NYS) overall, its geogr...

E very year, the Bulletin of the AMS publishes an annual report on the State of the Climate [e.g., see the Blunden and Arndt (2012) supplement to this issue]. That report does an excellent job of documenting global weather and climate conditions of the previous year and putting them into accurate historical perspective. But it does not address the causes. One of the reasons is that the scientis...