Climatic Change

Today, a major challenge for climate science is to overcome what is called the "usability gap" between the projections derived fromclimate models and the needs of the end-users. Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are expected to provide usable information concerning a variety of impacts and for a wide range of end-users. It is often assumed that the development of more accurate, more complex RCMs with higher spatial resolution should bring process understanding and better local projections, thus overcoming the usability gap...

Climate models predict meteorological variables for outdoor spaces. Nevertheless, most people work indoors and are affected by heat indoors. We present an approach to transfer climate projections from outdoors to climate projections of indoor air temperature ( T i ) and thermal comfort based on a combination of indoor sensors, artificial neural networks (ANNs), and 22 regional climate projections. Human thermal comfort and T i measured by indoor sensors at 90 different workplaces in the Upper Rhine Valley were used as training data for ANN models predicting indoor conditions as a function of outdoor weather...

UNLABELLED: Effective climate change adaptation requires a thorough understanding of whether and how affected populations perceive climatic and environmental changes. Existing research has been inconclusive regarding the consistency of these perceptions compared to objective meteorological indicators. Moreover, no systematic comparison has been done for the perception of discrete environmental events such as floods or erosion. This study relies on novel panel survey data of approximately 1700 households residing along the Jamuna River in Bangladesh as well as on unique individual-level, satellite-based erosion data...

UNLABELLED: Water regulation has contributed to the decline in Pacific salmon in British Columbia (Canada) despite attempts to manage reservoir operations to achieve operational requirements while meeting environmental needs to limit fish thermal stress. The ability of reservoir managers to meet these trade-offs in a changing climate is unknown. Here, we examine the reliability and vulnerability of the Nechako Reservoir to meet hydropower production commitments and fisheries needs under two projected Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenarios (SSP2-4...

Landslides are an important natural hazard in mountainous regions. Given the triggering and preconditioning by meteorological conditions, it is known that landslide risk may change in a warming climate, but whether climate change has already affected individual landslide events is still an open question, partly owing to landslide data limitations and methodological challenges in climate impact attribution. Here, we demonstrate the substantial influence of anthropogenic climate change on a severe event in the southeastern Alpine forelands with some estimated 952 individual landslides in June 2009...

UNLABELLED: The geographic distribution of natural ecosystems is affected by both climate and cropland. Discussions of future land use/land cover usually focus on how cropland expands and displaces natural vegetation especially as climate change impacts become stronger. Less commonly considered is the direct influence of climate change on natural ecosystems simultaneously with cropland incursion. We combine a natural vegetation model responsive to climate with a cropland allocation algorithm to assess the relative importance of climate change compared to cropland incursion...

Parameterization and parameter tuning are central aspects of climate modeling, and there is widespread consensus that these procedures involve certain subjective elements. Even if the use of these subjective elements is not necessarily epistemically problematic, there is an intuitive appeal for replacing them with more objective (automated) methods, such as machine learning. Relying on several case studies, we argue that, while machine learning techniques may help to improve climate model parameterization in several ways, they still require expert judgment that involves subjective elements not so different from the ones arising in standard parameterization and tuning...

In recent years, countries like France, UK, Germany, and Denmark have all carried out climate citizens' assemblies where a group of representatively selected citizens come together to discuss issues around climate politics and provide policy recommendations to decision-makers. The hope is that these deliberative-democratic innovations can circumvent the flaws of representational politics and help break the existing gridlock around climate politics. In this article, relying on the case of the Danish climate citizens' assembly that began its work in 2020, we argue that to truly realize the democratic potentials of climate citizens' assemblies, there is a need to think about how citizens' assemblies might come to multiply and proliferate in political spaces away from, or at least in addition to, those in and around the state, so they can become local drivers of democratic action and community empowerment...

UNLABELLED: Public and scientific consensus about climate change do not align. Problematically, higher scientific knowledge has been associated with lower acceptance of climate information among those with more conservative socio-political ideologies. Positive attitudes towards science can attenuate this effect. We investigated the association between endorsement of scientific inquiry (ESI) and decision-making with scientific evidence about climate policies. Participants rated support for 16 climate policies accompanied by weaker or stronger evidence...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The global food system, and animal agriculture in particular, is a major and growing contributor to climate change, land system change, biodiversity loss, water consumption and contamination, and environmental pollution. The copious production and consumption of animal products are also contributing to increasingly negative public health outcomes, particularly in wealthy and rapidly industrializing countries, and result in the slaughter of trillions of animals each year. These impacts are motivating calls for reduced reliance on animal-based products and increased use of replacement plant-based products...

UNLABELLED: As Arctic sea ice continues to retreat, the seasonally navigable Arctic expected by mid-century or earlier is likely to facilitate the growth of polar maritime and coastal development. Here, we systematically explore the potentials for opening of trans-Arctic sea routes across a range of emissions futures and multi-model ensembles on daily timescales. We find a new Transpolar Sea Route in the western Arctic for open water vessels starting in 2045 in addition to the central Arctic corridor over the North Pole, with its frequency comparable to the latter during the 2070s under the worst-case scenario...

Moving beyond technocratic approaches to climate action, climate justice articulates a paradigm shift in how organizations think about their response to the climate crisis. This paper makes a conceptual contribution by exploring the potential of this paradigm shift in higher education. Through a commitment to advancing transformative climate justice, colleges and universities around the world could realign and redefine their priorities in teaching, research, and community engagement to shape a more just, stable, and healthy future...

Climate change and indebtedness have been repeatedly highlighted as major causes of distress for rural households in India. However, despite the close connection between climate conditions and rural livelihoods, there has been little attempt to systematically examine the association between the two. To address this gap, we combine national-level longitudinal data from IHDS, MERRA-2, and the Indian Ministry of Agriculture to study the impact of climate anomalies on household indebtedness across rural India. Using a longitudinal approach that accounts for potential confounders at household, village, and district levels, we find pervasive effects of season-specific, five-year climate anomalies on multiple dimensions of household debt, particularly in arid and semi-arid areas...

National Climate Change Risk Assessments (CCRAs) have a key role in informing priorities for adaptation policy but face significant challenges due to multiple facets of risk and adaptation. Issues are especially pronounced for meeting goals of environmental sustainability due to the complex dynamics of socio-ecological systems. In practice, a CCRA can therefore differ from its original conceptual blueprint. These challenges are explored from a knowledge systems perspective, focusing on the role of stakeholders/policymakers, risk descriptors, methods, evidence sources, and scientists...

We investigate whether communication strategies that portray climate change as a nonlinear phenomenon provoke increases in laypeople's climate change risk perceptions. In a high-powered, preregistered online experiment, participants were exposed to linear or nonlinear predictions of future temperature increases that would be expected if global greenhouse gas emissions were not reduced. We hypothesized that the type of climate change portrayal would impact perceptions of qualitative risk characteristics (catastrophic potential, controllability of consequences) which would, in turn, affect laypeople's holistic risk perceptions...

A key question in understanding barriers to climate and environmental policy is whether changing economic conditions weaken individuals' support for climate and environmental action. The large body of literature examining this question, however, has come to contradictory results, with studies measuring changes within individuals typically finding no such effect (e.g. Mildenberger and Leiserowitz, Env Polit 26(5):801-824 2017). In this letter, I use the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic to provide a stringent test of how economic shocks affect concern for climate change and the environment...

Climate change-exacerbated flooding has renewed interest in property buyouts as a pillar of managed retreat from coastal zones and floodplains in the United States. However, federal buyout programs are widely critiqued for being inaccessible and inequitable. To learn whether and how subnational buyout programs overcome these limitations, we examined five leading US state, county, and local buyout programs to see what they teach us about redesigning future federal policies. Our mixed-methods research used interviews and document analysis to develop case studies, juxtaposed subnational strategies against a review of critiques of federal buyouts, and focus group discussions with subnational buyout managers and experts to identify limitations of their programs...

Current impacts and escalating risks of climate change require strong and decisive action to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. They also highlight the urgency of research to enhance safety for human and natural systems, especially for those most vulnerable. This is reflected in two recent US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine studies that recommended a national focus on advancing our understanding of how to manage urgent current and future climate risks, and the study of approaches for increasing the reflection of sunlight from the atmosphere to reduce global warming, a process referred to as sunlight reflection modification (SRM)...

Climate models, by accurately forecasting future weather events, can be a critical tool in developing countermeasures to reduce crop loss and decrease adverse effects on animal husbandry and fishing. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of various regional versions of the climate models, RCMs, and the commonly available weather datasets in Kenya in predicting extreme weather patterns in northern and western Kenya. We identified two models that may be used to predict flood risks and potential drought events in these regions...