A selection of new climate related research articles is shown below.
"Focusing on the "hiatus" period 1998-2012 as identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, the SAT has increased at 0.45 °C/decade, which captures more than 90% of the regional trend for 1951-2012. We suggest that sparse in-situ measurements are responsible for underestimation of the SAT change in the gridded datasets."
2. Extreme warming in the Kara Sea and Barents Sea during the winter period 2000 to 2016
"The maximum warming occurs north of Novaya Zemlya in the Kara Sea and Barents Sea between March 2003-2012 and is responsible for up to 20°C increase. Land-based observations confirm the increase but do not cover the maximum regions that are located over the ocean and sea-ice."
3. Tropical semi-arid regions expanding over temperate latitudes under climate change
"We show that a global expansion of this climatic domain has already started according to climate observations in the twentieth century (about + 13% of surface increase, i.e. from 6 to 7% of the global land surface). Models project that this expansion will continue throughout the twenty-first century, whatever the scenario..."
4. Representation of mid-latitude North American coastal storm activity by six global reanalyses
"All reanalyses are found to successfully represent most aspects of mid-latitude North American coastal strong storm activity, annually and seasonally, along both coasts. Nevertheless, ERA-Interim, MERRA, and CFSR provide the better representations of mid-latitude North American coastal strong storm activity, with ERA-Interim performing best overall."
5. Is Nitrogen the Next Carbon?
"The increased use of nitrogen has been critical for increased crop yields and protein production needed to keep pace with the growing world population. However, similar to carbon, the release of fixed nitrogen into the natural environment is linked to adverse consequences at local, regional, and global scales. Anthropogenic contributions of fixed nitrogen continue to grow relative to the natural budget, with uncertain consequences."
6. Annual and seasonal tornado activity in the United States and the global wind oscillation
"Combined, these analyses suggest that seasons with more low atmospheric angular momentum days, or phase 2, 3, and 4 days, tend to have greater tornado activity than those with fewer days, and that this relationship is most evident in winter and spring."
"Using a simple conceptual model for the occurrence of extreme weather events, we show that if the objective is to minimize forecast error, an alternative approach wherein likelihoods of impact are continually updated as data become available is preferable. Using a simple “proof-of-concept,” we show that such an approach will, under rather general assumptions, yield more accurate forecasts."
8. Trends in extreme temperature indices in Huang-Huai-Hai River Basin of China during 1961–2014
9. Is the choice of statistical paradigm critical in extreme event attribution studies?
11. Improved Sea Ice Forecasting Through Spatiotemporal Bias Correction
17. Causal Pathways for Temperature Predictability from Snow Depth
18. Spatial patterns of summer speedup on south-central Alaska glaciers
20. Consistently estimating internal climate variability from climate-model simulations
22. Seasonal temperature is associated with Parkinson’s disease prescriptions: an ecological study
"The prescribed LED was 4.2% greater in January and 4.5% lower in July. Statistical analysis showed that temperature was associated with the prescription of Parkinson medications. Our results suggest seasonality exists in Parkinson’s disease symptoms and this may be related to temperature."
23. The effects of hot nights on mortality in Barcelona, Spain
"The estimated associations for both exposure variables and mortality shows a relationship with high and medium values that persist significantly up to a lag of 1–2 days. In mortality due to natural causes, an increase of 1.1% per 10% (CI95% 0.6–1.5) for hot night hours and 5.8% per each 10° (CI95% 3.5–8.2%) for hot night degrees is observed."
"Bristlecone pine juveniles establishing above treeline share some environmental associations with bristlecone adults. Limber pine above-treeline juveniles, in contrast, are prevalent across environmental conditions and share few environmental associations with limber pine adults. Strikingly, limber pine is establishing above treeline throughout the region without regard to site characteristic such as soil type, slope, aspect, or soil texture. Though limber pine is often rare at treeline where it coexists with bristlecone pine, limber pine juveniles dominate above treeline even on calcareous soils that are core bristlecone pine habitat. Limber pine is successfully “leap-frogging” over bristlecone pine, probably because of its strong dispersal advantage and broader tolerances for establishment."
"Specifically, we show that in the combined presence of OA and a cubozoan predator, populations of the most abundant member of the zooplankton community (calanoid copepods) were reduced 27% more than it would be predicted based on the effects of these stressors in isolation, suggesting that OA increases the susceptibility of plankton to predation. Our results indicate that the ecological consequences of OA may be greater than predicted from single-species experiments, and highlight the need to understand future marine global change from a community perspective."
26. Future reef growth can mitigate physical impacts of sea-level rise on atoll islands
"Comparatively, vertical reef accretion in response to SLR will prevent any significant increase in shoreline wave energy and mitigate wave driven flooding volume by 72%."
28. The relationship between extreme weather events and crop losses in central Taiwan
30. Long-term Ecological Changes in Marine Mammals Driven by Recent Warming in Northwestern Alaska
32. County-level climate change information to support decision-making on working lands
34. Metabolic compensation constrains the temperature dependence of gross primary production
36. Modeling Arctic sea-ice algae: Physical drivers of spatial distribution and algae phenology
37. Evaluating the classical versus an emerging conceptual model of peatland methane dynamics
38. Patterns and biases of climate-change threats in the IUCN Red List
39. Heat stress mortality and desired adaptation responses of healthcare system in Poland
40. Quantifying climate change induced threats to wetland fisheries: a stakeholder-driven approach
41. Does the world have low-carbon bioenergy potential from the dedicated use of land?
ABSTRACT: "While some studies find no room for the dedicated use of land for bioenergy because of growing food needs, other studies estimate large bioenergy potentials, even at levels greater than total existing human plant harvest. Analyzing this second category of studies, we find they have in various ways counted the carbon benefits of using land for biofuels but ignored the costs. Basic carbon opportunity cost calculations per hectare explain why alternative uses of any available land are likely to do more to hold down climate change. Because we find that solar power can provide at least 100 times more useable energy per hectare on three quarters of the world's land, any “surplus” land could also provide the same energy and mitigate climate ~ 100 times more if 1% were devoted to solar and the rest to carbon storage. Review of large bioenergy potential estimates from recent IAMs shows that they depend on many contingencies for carbon benefits, can impose many biodiversity and food costs, and are more predictions of what bioenergy might be in idealized than plausible, future scenarios. At least at this time, policy should not support bioenergy from energy crops and other dedicated uses of land."
42. Who Wins from Emissions Trading? Evidence from California
"Importantly, conditional on race and ethnicity, we find that higher income areas receive larger reductions in pollution under cap-and-trade. Furthermore, conditional on income (or poverty rates), we find that Blacks benefit while Hispanics lose relative to whites under RECLAIM."
43. Climate change and the re-evaluation of cost-benefit analysis
"In this essay, I discuss the shortcomings of CBA framed by its historical development and argue that its relatively recent application to climate change has contributed to growth in the literature re-evaluating its normative foundations."
44. The Value of Energy Efficiency and the Role of Expected Heating Costs
"Results suggest that heating cost considerations are less relevant than previously thought."
45. Some problems in storing renewable energy
"Our results show that the calculation of daily temperature based on the average of minimum and maximum daily readings leads to an overestimation of the daily values of ~ 10+ % when focusing on extremes and values above (below) high (low) thresholds. Moreover, the effects of the data processing method on trend estimation are generally small, even though the use of the daily minimum and maximum readings reduces the power of trend detection (~ 5–10% fewer trends detected in comparison with the reference data)."
Posted by Ari Jokimäki on Monday, 11 September, 2017
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