Climatic Change最新文献

For over 30 years, detection and attribution (D&A) studies have informed key conclusions in international and national assessments of climate science, providing compelling evidence for the reality and seriousness of the human effects on the global climate. In the early 21st century, D&A methods were adapted to assess the contribution of climate change to longer-term trends in earth system processes and extreme weather events. More recently, attribution research helped quantify the health and economic impacts of climate change. Here we provide guidance for transdisciplinary collaboration in designing, conducting, interpreting, and reporting robust and policy-relevant attribution analyses of human health outcomes. This guidance resulted from discussions among experts in health and climate science. Recommended steps include co-developing the research question across disciplines; establishing a transdisciplinary analytic team with fundamental grounding in the core disciplines; engaging meaningfully with relevant stakeholders and decision-makers to define an appropriate study design and analytic process, including defining the exposure event or trend; identifying, visualizing, and describing linkages in the causal pathway from exposure to weather/climate variables to the health outcome(s) of interest; choosing appropriate counterfactual climate data, and where applicable, to evaluate the skill of the climate and process or empirical health model(s) used in D&A research; quantifying the attributable changes in climate variables; quantifying the attributable health impacts within the context of other determinants of exposure and vulnerability; and reporting key results, including a description of how recommendations were incorporated into the analytical plan. Implementation of guidance would benefit diverse stakeholders including researchers, research funders, policymakers, and climate litigation by harmonizing methods and increasing confidence in findings.

Art x Climate was the first-ever gallery of visual art to be included in the National Climate Assessment. This letter outlines the purpose and process of Art x Climate and highlights three Art x Climate artists and their work. The letter concludes with lessons learned from this project: the need for cross-disciplinary respect among the arts and sciences, the wide range of themes and artworks centered around climate change, and the ability of art to facilitate new collaborations and bring more people into the climate change conversation.

Climate activist groups aim to address climate change by informing citizens about its risks and potential solutions, and by providing a way for citizens to engage in collective action to change policy. The effectiveness of climate activist groups, some of which engage in disruptive protests, is influenced by how they are portrayed by the news media. Using frequency analysis and GPT-4, we analysed all online news articles from major German newspapers in 2022 and 2023 about the two most prominent climate activist groups, Fridays for Future and Last Generation. A substantial proportion of the articles provides little information about the risks and solutions of climate change, especially when reporting on the more disruptive Last Generation compared to Fridays for Future, which primarily engages in legal protest. Last Generation is also portrayed more negatively, as more violent, and as more polarising. Right-leaning newspapers provide the least information about climate change and portray activist groups most negatively. We discuss the implications of our results for the media, activist groups, and future research.

Heat-related deaths occur throughout the summer months, peak during heatwaves, and are affected by temperature and exposed populations' sensitivities to meteorological conditions. Previous studies found that climate change is increasing heat-related mortality worldwide. We build on existing epidemiological methods to shed light on the adverse effects of climate change on human health. We address limitations in existing methods and apply refined approaches to assess heat mortality attributable to human-induced climate change in Zürich, Switzerland, over 50 years (1969-2018) including a case study of summer 2018. Our methodological refinements affect how counterfactual climate scenarios are derived, and facilitate accounting for changing vulnerability, and assessing impacts during and outside heatwaves. We find nearly 1,700 heat-related deaths attributable to human-induced climate change between 1969 and 2018. Declining vulnerability to heat avoided at least 700 heat-related deaths. The approach described here could be applied elsewhere to quantify the effect of climate change on other health outcomes.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10584-025-04011-5.

Comprehensive assessments of scientific knowledge are essential to inform efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change impacts. The Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5), released in late 2023, adopted clear diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion (DEAI) goals and trainings, which helped diversify expert participation, broaden the types of knowledge included, and widen public engagement. This Letter, written by NCA5 authors, reflects on the impacts and limitations of these efforts and suggests specific actions to further promote collaboration, honor and recognize the knowledge of frontline communities, and guide more just and holistic climate assessments.

Despite continuous investigation, reasons for both the abandonment of Roman Britain around 410 CE, and the separate collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE remain unclear. Here, we use tree ring-based climate reconstructions and written documentary sources to show that a sequence of severe summer droughts from 364 to 366 CE not only contributed to prolonged harvest failures and food shortages, but also played a role in the 'Barbarian Conspiracy', a catastrophic military defeat for Roman Britain in 367 CE. In line with contemporary reports from the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, this pivotal event in pre-modern history coincided with anomalous coin hoarding, and a gradual depopulation of Roman villas and towns. Expanding our climate-conflict analysis from Roman Britain as a case study to the entire Roman Empire and the period 350-476 CE reveals clear linkages between years in which battles occurred and preceding warm and dry summers. Based on these findings, we develop a mechanistic model to explain the vulnerability of agrarian societies to climate variability, whereby prolonged droughts cause harvest failures and food shortages (dependant on societal resilience) that lead to systematic pressure, societal instability, and eventually outright conflict.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10584-025-03925-4.

This article looks at the inclusion of the social sciences in recent climate assessment reports from national and sub-national jurisdictions (state, territory, district) of the United States. It compares and contrasts interdisciplinary integration based on three criteria: inclusion of societal topics; the use of social science frameworks, theory, and literature to interpret findings; and processes of knowledge production. National and sub-national climate assessments serve different societal purposes and decision-making goals, and are produced in distinct knowledge governance contexts. While climate focused social sciences are increasingly incorporated into assessments, the nature of this incorporation varies across assessment types. The greatest advancements for interdisciplinary integration in the Fifth National Climate Assessment are in the robust treatment of economics, equity and environmental justice, and social systems and the addition of core concepts to the climate lexicon. In sub-national assessments, alternative organizational formats open up space to examine climate-society interactions for sectoral or geographic topics of interest. However, their analysis often is limited to vulnerability mapping and dollar values instead of the broader social and economic systems that shape climate drivers, hazards, impacts, and responses. Most social sciences are present in climate impacts chapters. There is opportunity to engage additional social science in analysis of climate hazards, drivers of climate change, mitigation and adaptation efforts, and the underlying social causes of vulnerability. Better integration of the social and biogeophysical sciences can help assessments expand the language of climate response and universe of potential interventions, enabling them to inform decision-making at national to local scales.

Climate assessments have long been key scientific inputs that inform the development of productive and impactful climate policy in the United States and around the world. This introduction sets the stage for the suite of papers in the Topical Collection "Advancements in U.S. Climate Assessments." Inspired and informed by the release of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, the papers within this issue document lessons learned over the past 30+ years and leverage the perspectives of previous assessment authors and staff to aid those interested in developing their own climate assessments. This paper reviews the evolution of climate assessments and the factors that make for useful, usable, and used scientific products to support societal choices. Evolving user needs over the last 30+ years also reflect a shift in demand towards more localized or more context-specific climate data that integrates social science information, tools, and frameworks. To meet these needs, we highlight three areas of potential opportunity and challenge for future assessments: continued and strengthened conversations between assessment developers across geographic scale to share innovations and lessons learned in the development process; working with knowledge holders in under-represented areas of expertise to alter assessment governance and guidelines to better incorporate diverse perspectives; and seizing opportunities for using innovative communication and engagement mediums.

Climate and land-use changes influence the transmission of vector-borne diseases by affecting the distribution and survival of disease vectors. Numerous diseases are transmitted by phlebotomine sand flies (Diptera: Psychodidae: Phlebotominae), including leishmaniasis. Several major sand fly-borne diseases are responsible for high global disease burdens and high socio-economic costs. In Europe, over 20 known sand fly vector species are largely confined to the Mediterranean Basin, yet records of sand fly presence further north increase. Global warming is predicted to drive the spread of sand flies to large areas of Europe in the 21th century, an effect likely to be exacerbated by anthropogenic factors. However, the constraints to the geographic distributions of sand flies are not well understood. This study aims to increase the understanding of the drivers of the geographic distributions of sand flies, using species distribution modelling to systematically test links between sand fly occurrences and climatic, land-use, lithological, biodiversity and human population variables in Europe and adjacent Mediterranean regions. We found that moisture is the most important environmental variable both in explaining and in predicting sand fly occurrences. The projected suitable habitats are larger than the current known sand fly distributions, and these habitats are expected to expand due to changes in climate and land-use.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10584-025-04009-z.

Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) is a renewable energy system that harnesses the thermal gradient between surface and deep waters. Many multi-century simulations with a fully coupled climate-carbon cycle model are presented to explore the amount of extractable energy and the climate change mitigation potential from the widespread implementation of OTEC. The sustainability of OTEC power generation was assessed for present and possible future climate states. A warmer climate reduced the sustainable power potential of OTEC. OTEC could briefly produce over 35 TW of power and, depending on the climate state, maximum power production rates of 5 to 10 TW were found to be sustainable on multi-millennial timescales. Over 500 years of simulation, with a high emission scenario (equivalent to RCP8.5), the power from OTEC deployments, with peak power generation ranging from 3 to 15 TW at the year 2100, resulted in cumulative emission reductions equivalent to 36% to 111% of historical carbon emissions from 1750 to 2023 relative to the scenario without OTEC. Such significant emissions reductions coupled with sustained OTEC-induced mixing led to globally averaged atmosphere temperature decreases of up to 2.5 ºC by the year 2100 and up to 4 ºC by the year 2500 compared to a scenario without OTEC. While caution is required, and the engineering challenges would be large, early indications suggest that the large-scale implementation of OTEC could make a substantial contribution to climate change mitigation.