Climate change impacts on human health span the trajectory of time—past, present, and future. The key finding from the Working Group II, Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that health impacts due to climate change have already occurred in the past, are currently occurring and will continue to occur, at least for the foreseeable future, e...

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...

Exchanges Risk (21 st C) / Risk (20 th C) Figure 1 from paper 'Quantifying risk in a changing climate': by T. Palmer and J. Räisänen: Upper left: the probability of a wet winter defined from the control CMIP2 ensemble with 20th century levels of CO 2 and based on the event E: DJF rainfall greater than the mean plus one standard deviation. Upper right: the probability of E but using data from th...

The world is getting warmer, both in the atmosphere and in the oceans. The year 2005 was the warmest year in over a century, according to a recent NASA report (2006A). Data gathered from 1995 to 2006 have revealed that 11 of the past 12 years have ranked among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record. Observations since 1961 have shown that the average ocean temperature has increased to ...

We consider estimation of quantile curves for a general class of nonstationary processes. Consistency and central limit results are obtained for local linear quantile estimates under a mild short-range dependence condition. Our results are applied to environmental data sets. In particular, our results can be used to address the problem of whether climate variability has changed, an important pr...

Supporting material prepared for consideration by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This supporting material has not been subject to formal IPCC review process. Preface The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) completed its Second Assessment Report in 1995. The IPCC has three Working Groups that focus on different aspects of climate change, viz. natural science, impacts...

On 31 March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on the impacts of climate change on humans and ecosystems (see go.nature.com/ad5v1b). These are real risks that need to be accounted for in planning for adaptation and mitigation. Pricing the risks with integrated models of physics and economics lets their costs be compared to those of limiting climate ...