Natural and anthropogenic climate change

China is the world's most populous country and a major emitter of greenhouse gases. Consequently, much research has focused on China's influence on climate change but somewhat less has been written about the impact of climate change on China. China experienced explosive economic growth in recent decades, but with only 7% of the world's arable land available to feed 22% of the world's population, China's economy may be vulnerable to climate change itself. We find, however, that notwithstanding the clear warming that has occurred in China in recent decades, current understanding does not allow a clear assessment of the impact of anthropogenic climate change on China's water resources and agriculture and therefore China's ability to feed its people. To reach a more definitive conclusion, future work must improve regional climate simulationsespecially of precipitation-and develop a better understanding of the managed and unmanaged responses of crops to changes in climate, diseases, pests and atmospheric constituents.

This essay argues that the tendency to invoke modern historical thinking in trying to make sense of the Anthropocene amounts to an untenable, self-contradictory, and self-defeating enterprise. There is a fundamental contradiction between the prospect of unprecedented change as entailed by the Anthropocene and the deep continuity of a processual historical change. On the one hand, conceiving the Anthropocene as the prospect of the unprecedented creates a demand for immediate action to prevent future catastrophe. On the other hand, pointing out the inequalities in the historical process of bringing about the Anthropocene creates a demand for social justice. Although both are legitimate and important demands, they are incompatible. They represent different temporalities, different conceptions of change, and different modes of action. Inasmuch as the Anthropocene appears as unprecedented, it does not have a processual history; and inasmuch as it has a processual history, it is not the Anthropocene.

BRAZIL – Back in 2008, a report titled Nature, Not Human Activity, Controls the Climate was published by the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). The report was an analysis of peer-reviewed papers and other published literature which purportedly studied climate change and how humanity contributed to the phenomenon. A total of 24 independent scientists participated in the review, which resulted in a 50 page document on the causes and consequences of climate change. This study was different because it included papers that the IPCC ignored and also because it did not start with the assumption that human activity is the main cause of climate change or global warming.

The international coalition of independent scientists hit the nail on the head on two aspects. First, point out the fact that the IPCC, a political organization, “is pre-programmed to produce reports to support the hypotheses of anthropogenic warming and the control of greenhouse gases, as envisioned in the Global Climate Treaty.” In other words, the IPCC is not a scientific organization, but a cheerleader of what the United Nations sees as the human threat to enhancing naturally occurring climate change. The IPCC does not objectively analyze data in order to reach a scientific conclusion. Instead, it cherry picks material that best supports its theory of man-made global warming.

The conclusion of the 2008 report was clear, as its title states: Nature, Not Human Activity, Controls the Climate. What does the NIPCC bases its conclusion on? The analysis states that although facts such as melting glaciers and disappearing Arctic sea ice are irrelevant when explaining the causes of any warming, because any kind of warming, either anthropogenic or natural would cause melting. “The hockey-stick analysis was beset with methodological errors, as has been demonstrated by McIntyre and McKitrick [2003, 2005] and confirmed by statistics expert Edward Wegman [Wegman et al. 2006],” reads the report. This statement refers to the infamous Hockey Stick Theory used by Al Gore in his disinformation piece “An Inconvenient Truth”. Instead of judging human influence on climate as the only cause of severe change, the NIPCC study shows that there have been periods of extreme warming and precede the Little Ice Age, such as the Medieval Climate Optimum, which, without any human influence, experienced much warmer temperatures than on the 20th or 21st centuries.

Another important point that NIPCC makes in its report, is the weak relation between CO2 emissions and planetary warming. “The IPCC affirms that there is a correlation of global mean temperature with increases in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the twentieth century to support its conclusion. The argument sounds plausible; after all, CO2 is a GH gas and its levels are increasing. However, the correlation is poor and, in any case, would not prove causation,” says the document.

To explain its conclusion, the NIPCC provides the trend recorded from climate behavior back in 1940-1975. According to data from satellites, while the amount of CO2 rose rapidly, the planet did not experience a warming trend. In fact, there hasn’t been any increase in warming since about 2001, even though CO2 emissions are continuing to rise. Besides analyzing the relation between CO2 emissions and warming, the NIPCC also studied the role of computer models in predicting global warming. The conclusion was that such models do not give any evidence of global warming  The reason for this conclusion is that the parameters used in computer models are very limited in comparison with the total number of factors. Each computer model uses as few as 6 parameters of a total of 100 or more. Incidentally, the IPCC models always choose the ones that better justify the commonly publicized theory of anthropogenic warming, leaving out the rest. “The IPCC undervalues the forcing arising from changes in solar activity (solar wind and its magnetic effects) – likely much more important than the forcing from CO2. Uncertainties for aerosols, which tend to cool the climate and oppose the GH effect, are even greater, as the IPCC recognizes in atable on page 32 of the AR4 report,” says the NIPCC report.

In 2009, the organization led by an international panel of nongovernment scientists and scholars published another report to rebut of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The 2009 rebuttal took three years to be put together before being released in June of that year. The document was coauthored and edited by S. Fred Singer, Ph.D., and Craig Idso, Ph.D. and complemented by the work of contributions and reviews by a group of scientists from around the world. The paper titled “Climate Change Reconsidered” not only described the limitations of the IPCC’s attempt to forecast future climate, but also studied empirical data on past temperatures, reviewed observational data on glacier melting, sea ice area, variation in precipitation, and sea level rise, summarized the research of a growing number of scientists who say variations in solar activity, not greenhouse gases, are the true driver of climate change, investigated and debunked the widespread fears that global warming could cause more extreme weather, examined the biological effects of rising CO2 concentrations and warmer temperatures, examined the IPCC’s claim that CO2 increases in air temperature will cause unprecedented plant and animal extinctions and challenged the IPCC’s unscientific claim that CO2-induced global warming is harmful to human health.

In their analysis, the independent scientists behind the 2009 report concluded that “global data on glaciers do not support claims made by the IPCC that most glaciers are retreating or melting.” Data for this analysis came from all over the world, including places like Africa, Antarctica, the Arctic, Europe, North America, and South America. On the issue of solar influence over climate cycles, the NIPCC paper reviewed recent and older literature which concluded that solar activity is the true driver of planetary climate. According to the literature, “cosmic ray variability was the major driver of changes in earth’s surface air temperature over the past millennium… this forcing was primarily driven by variations in solar activity, modulated by the more slowly changing geomagnetic field strength of the planet, which sometimes strengthened the solar forcing and sometimes worked against it.” The report indicates that the powerful influence of solar cosmic rays leave little room for  only a small impact of anthropogenic CO2 emissions in the last two centuries.

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The rapidly growing transdisciplinary enthusiasm about developing new kinds of Anthropocene stories is based on the shared assumption that the Anthropocene predicament is best made sense of by narrative means. Against this assumption, this article argues that the challenge we are facing today does not merely lie in telling either scientific, socio-political, or entangled Anthropocene narratives to come to terms with our current condition. Instead, the challenge lies in coming to grips with how the stories we can tell in the Anthropocene relate to the radical novelty of the Anthropocene condition about which no stories can be told. What we need to find are meaningful ways to reconcile an inherited commitment to narrativization and the collapse of storytelling as a vehicle of understanding the Anthropocene as our current predicament.

In this video, the speaker is reading out his paper on "THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY: ECOTAGING FOR DISTANT ECOTOPIA" by countering, through ecosophical cum eco-ethical means, the short-sighted "technical quick-fixes" offered by green-capitalism in subsuming a portion of the global environmental movement by asserting market fundamentalism without heeding the environmental variables. The speaker emphasizes the eco-ethos of Permaculture and highlights the sustainability ideal of "eco-swaraj", following the Deep Ecologists' Ecotopia and the Gandhian "Gram Swaraj", as well as Rabindranath Tagore's eco-philosophical underpinnings. In doing so, the speaker highlights the role of Urban Agriculture in obliterating the parasitic status of the modern city in the post-industrial era.

Conifer dominated plantations in central and northern Europe are associated with relatively low ecological values, and in some cases, may be vulnerable to disturbances caused by anthropogenic climate change. This has prompted the consideration of alternative tree species compositions for use in production forestry in this region. Here we evaluate the likely biodiversity costs and benefits of supplanting Norway spruce (Picea abies) monocultures with polycultures of spruce and birch (Betula spp.) in southern Sweden. This polyculture alternative has previously been evaluated in terms of economic, recreational, and silvicultural benefits. By also assessing the ecological implications we fill a gap in our understanding of the range of socio-ecological benefits that can be achieved from a single polyculture alternative. We project likely broad scale changes to species richness and abundance within production stands for five taxonomic groups including ground vegetation, tree-living bryophytes, lichens, saproxylic beetles, and birds. Our research leads us to three key findings. First, the replacement of spruce monocultures with spruce-birch polycultures in the managed forest landscapes of southern Sweden can be expected to result in an increase in biological diversity for most but not all taxa assessed, but it is unlikely to improve conditions for many red-listed forest species. Second, modification of other aspects of forest management (i.e. rotation length, dead wood and green tree retention, thinning regimes) is likely to contribute to further biodiversity gains using spruce-birch polycultures than spruce monocultures. Third, the paucity of empirical research which directly compares the biodiversity of different types of managed production stands, limits the extent to which policy relevant conclusions can be extracted from the scientific literature. We discuss the wider implications of our findings, which indicate that some climate change adaptation strategies, such as risk-spreading, can be readily integrated with the economic, environmental and social goals of multi-use forestry.

Natural disturbances play a key role in ecosystem dynamics and are important factors for sustainable forest ecosystem management. Quantitative models are frequently employed to tackle the complexities associated with disturbance processes. Here we review the wide variety of approaches to modelling natural disturbances in forest ecosystems, addressing the full spectrum of disturbance modelling from single events to integrated disturbance regimes. We applied a general, process-based framework founded in disturbance ecology to analyze modelling approaches for drought, wind, forest fires, insect pests and ungulate browsing. Modelling approaches were reviewed by disturbance agent and mechanism, and a set of general disturbance modelling concepts was deduced. We found that although the number of disturbance modelling approaches emerging over the last 15 years has increased strongly, statistical concepts for descriptive modelling are still largely prevalent over mechanistic concepts for explanatory and predictive applications. Yet, considering the increasing importance of disturbances for forest dynamics and ecosystem stewardship under anthropogenic climate change, the latter concepts are crucial tool for understanding and coping with change in forest ecosystems. Current challenges for disturbance modelling in forest ecosystems are thus (i) to overcome remaining limits in process understanding, (ii) to further a mechanistic foundation in disturbance modelling, (iii) to integrate multiple disturbance processes in dynamic ecosystem models for decision support in forest management, and (iv) to bring together scaling capabilities across several levels of organization with a representation of system complexity that captures the emergent behaviour of disturbance regimes.

Natural disturbances play a key role in ecosystem dynamics and are important factors for sustainable forest ecosystem management. Quantitative models are frequently employed to tackle the complexities associated with disturbance processes. Here we review the wide variety of approaches to modelling natural disturbances in forest ecosystems, addressing the full spectrum of disturbance modelling from single events to integrated disturbance regimes. We applied a general, process-based framework founded in disturbance ecology to analyze modelling approaches for drought, wind, forest fires, insect pests and ungulate browsing. Modelling approaches were reviewed by disturbance agent and mechanism, and a set of general disturbance modelling concepts was deduced. We found that although the number of disturbance modelling approaches emerging over the last 15 years has increased strongly, statistical concepts for descriptive modelling are still largely prevalent over mechanistic concepts for ex...

The new book by Dipesh Chakrabarty, the climate of history in a planetary age,  focuses our attention admirably on the tensions and intersections between the global and the planetary. After reviewing its strengths, this paper discusses how a consideration of "evental time" and the politics of swarming might further enforce and enact its themes.

Significant changes in physical and biological systems are occurring on all continents and in most oceans, with a concentration of available data in Europe and North America. Most of these changes are in the direction expected with warming temperature. Here we show that these changes in natural systems since at least 1970 are occurring in regions of observed temperature increases, and that these temperature increases at continental scales cannot be explained by natural climate variations alone. Given the conclusions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely to be due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations, and furthermore that it is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent except Antarctica, we conclude that anthropogenic climate change is having a significant impact on physical and biological systems globally and in some continents.

Pollen-based climate reconstructions were performed on two high-resolution pollen marines cores from the Alboran and Aegean Seas in order to unravel the climatic variability in the coastal settings of the Mediterranean region between 15 000 and 4000 years BP (the Lateglacial, and early to mid-Holocene). The quantitative climate reconstructions for the Alboran and Aegean Sea records focus mainly on the reconstruction of the seasonality changes (temperatures and precipitation), a crucial parameter in the Mediterranean region. This study is based on a multi-method approach comprising 3 methods: the Modern Analogues Technique (MAT), the recent Non-Metric Multidimensional Scaling/Generalized Additive Model method (NMDS/GAM) and Partial Least Squares regression (PLS). The climate signal inferred from this comparative approach confirms that cold and dry conditions prevailed in the Mediterranean region during the Oldest and Younger Dryas periods, while temperate conditions prevailed during the Bølling/Allerød and the Holocene. Our records suggest a West/East gradient of decreasing precipitation across the Mediterranean region during the cooler Late-glacial and early Holocene periods, similar to present-day conditions. Winter precipitation was highest during warm intervals and lowest during cooling phases. Several short-lived cool intervals (i.e. Older Dryas, another oscillation after this one (GI-1c2), Gerzensee/Preboreal Correspondence to: I. Dormoy (isabelle.dormoy@univ-fcomte.fr) Oscillations, 8.2 ka event, Bond events) connected to the North Atlantic climate system are documented in the Alboran and Aegean Sea records indicating that the climate oscillations associated with the successive steps of the deglaciation in the North Atlantic area occurred in both the western and eastern Mediterranean regions. This observation confirms the presence of strong climatic linkages between the North Atlantic and Mediterranean regions.

Historical climatology is commonly defined as the study of past climates based on ‘documentary evidence’ before the establishment of modern networks of meteorological measurement, which excludes the last two centuries of recent global warming. This article reviews historical climatology with regard to the Anthropocene. In the Anthropocene the dynamics of climate change are essentially anthropogenic. The term ‘sociosphere’ will be advocated as a terminological improvement over existing attempts to define the place of human activities in Earth System Analysis. Theoretical and empirical advances in the study of social ecodynamics are called for. Historical climatology has a capacity to contribute making such advances, but a redefinition is inevitable for this potential to be realized: (1) historical climatology needs to expand temporally into the 19th and 20th centuries; and (2) it has yet to adjust to an important conceptual transition in climatology: from a descriptive (meteorological) concept of climate to climate dynamics.

Energy systems can be vulnerable to climate change. This paper summarizes the contribution of their authors to a few strategic studies, research workshops, development forum and international conferences related to Climate and Energy. It presents a review of the impacts that climate change may have throughout the energy chain and identifies current knowledge gaps and areas for future research development. One of the greatest challenges is how to assess impacts which may occur as a consequence of the projected increase in the intensity of extreme weather events: the majority of current methodologies rely on past experience but this may not be a sufficiently good guide for planning and operational activities in the coming decades. Also, climate impact assessments on energy planning and operation need to take into account a greater number of scenarios, as well as investigate impacts on particular energy segments. Therefore, we identify energy segments for which little climate impact research has been conducted. Finally, because climate impact assessment for energy systems is a relatively new research field, it is expected that methodological developments will increase in the near future with a consequent broadening of the knowledge base on the subject.

This researched paper takes up the question of human obligation in the anthropogenic environment. This text owes a tremendous debt to a great variety of researchers, ideas, in this aim to establish a networked ethic system, a nested ethic apparatus. The approach is meant to be an ethic of care, that is quite realist. Herein we consider a fragment of the escalating pressures materializing in the anthropocentric environment. We comb through a portion of partnered global security instruments, those responses and relevant ethic and evolutionary systems. This paper mines in a variety of ideas, discussing biopolitics and post-colonial ethics in the antagonistic capital environment. We turn to arguments vindicating feminist ethics of care, dignity and vulnerability for expanding upon realist international ethics, paying close attention to post-liberal Eastern leanings.
In conclusion this paper joins in mind to substantial proposals in policy and research. Closing on implications for stakeholders, research, education and policy priorities.

This essay considers the consequences of anthropogenic sounds on the ecosystem with a focus on the human’s relationship with nature. Regardless that it is universally acknowledged that human beings are capable of experiencing the environment through all their senses, the sonic aspect has been studied mainly from a ‘noise pollution’ perspective with little to no focus on the social and psychological perspectives. This essay aims to discuss how important soundscape studies became during the past few decades not only as a field of study that addresses the Biophony and Geophony, but as one that gives equal importance to the repercussions of human-made sounds on humans themselves.

Despite their importance for evaluating anthropogenic climatic change, quantitative temperature reconstructions of the Holocene remain scarce from northern high-latitude regions. We conducted highresolution midge analysis on the sediments of the past 6000 years from a lake in south-central Alaska.

The future of the European energy system will strongly depend on a future world energy context that will be dominated by two key challenges. The first challenge corresponds to the necessity of meeting the energy needs of a growing population in Asia, South America and Africa, while some key energy resources – oil and natural gas – enter in a process of increasing scarcity. The second challenge results from the need to rapidly adjust the structure of the world energy system in order to meet the tightening constraints induced by the will to limit anthropogenic climate change. Both issues are clearly strategic for Europe as on the one hand the Union will have to master a growing import dependency from the international markets and neighbouring regions, and as on the other hand it intends to take the lead on the international scene for climate change mitigation policies.Analyses of world long term energy scenario show that the growing scarcity on hydrocarbon supply will not solve the cl...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -comprised of top climate scientists from around the globe -has reached consensus that human activities have contributed signiWcantly to global climate change. However, over time, the United States has refused to join concerted international eVorts -such as the Kyoto Protocol -to curb human activities contributing to climate change. US newspaper and television media constitute key inXuences among a set of complex dynamics shaping information dissemination in this politicized environment. Mass-media coverage of climate change is not simply a random amalgam of newspaper articles and television segments; rather, it is a social relationship between scientists, policy actors and the public that is mediated by such news packages. This paper demonstrates that consistent adherence to interacting journalistic norms has contributed to impediments in the coverage of anthropogenic climate change science. Through analysis of US newspaper and television coverage of human contributions to climate change from 1988 through 2004, this paper Wnds that adherence to Wrst-order journalistic norms -personalization, dramatization, and novelty -signiWcantly inXuence the employment of second-order norms -authority-order and balance -and that this has led to informationally deWcient massmedia coverage of this crucial issue. By critically scrutinizing US print and television media as a 'public arena,' we improve understanding of how journalistic activities have shaped interactions at the interface with climate science, policy and the public.

Research on the climate variability during the recent decades has been immensely stimulated by the increasing manifestation of anthropogenic climate change. Such research can provide support in evaluating future climate scenarios and as such may be instrumental in extending the lead-time for adaptation. The Mediterranean region is particularly sensitive to short-term climate change due to its intermediate position between the

This study presents a detailed investigation of public scepticism about anthropogenic climate change in Britain using the trend, attribution, and impact scepticism framework of . The study found that climate scepticism is currently not widespread in Britain. Although uncertainty and scepticism about the potential impacts of climate change were fairly common, both trend and attribution scepticism were far less prevalent. It further showed that the different types of scepticism are strongly interrelated. Although this may suggest that the general public does not clearly distinguish between the different aspects of the climate debate, there is a clear gradation in prevalence along the Rahmstorf typology.

This study investigates the impact of anthropogenic climate change on the Indian summer monsoon, and the ENSO-monsoon teleconnection, using the transient climate change simulations of the MRI coupled model (MRI-CGCM2.2). In the present simulations atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations and aerosols are varied to represent observed changes during 1850-2000, and from 2001-2100, at the rate prescribed by the SRES-A2 and B2 scenarios to study the response of the monsoon climate during 2071-2100. All India annual temperature shows warming by 2.35 C (1.64 C), while all-India monsoon rainfall (JJAS) indicates an increase by 9% (6%) in SRES-A2 (B2) scenario relative to the present climate . Increase in the monsoon precipitation is evident over parts of south India, parts of the Bay of Bengal and northwest India. The simulations feature stronger warming over South Asia relative to the Indian Ocean, leading to enhanced land-sea temperature contrast. Enhanced moisture in a warmer scenario, coupled with enhanced monsoon circulation, leads to enhanced moisture transport over the Indian region from both the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea leading to increased monsoon precipitation. Decomposition of the moisture transport into divergent and non-divergent components shows that the enhanced monsoon rainfall is mainly due to intensification in the non-divergent component of the moisture transport. While strong and continued increase in monsoon rainfall suggests a change towards wetter mean state, warming of summer (JJA) Niñ o-3 SSTs suggests a change towards warmer El Niñ o like mean state in the east Pacific. The variability in the Niñ o-3 SST shows an increasing trend, as well as fluctuations about the trend. The correlation between the Indian monsoon rainfall and Niñ o-3 SST decrease particularly after 2050. This weakening of ENSO-monsoon relationship is also seen in the form of change in the impact of ENSO events on the intra-seasonal monsoon rainfall over India.

— This study was undertaken to assess the impacts of climate change on agricultural productivity and farmers' adaptation strategies in southwest Nigeria. The study sourced primary data from a total of 411 households who are mainly farmers and it also used different Transdisciplinary (TD) methods and approaches including Social Analysis System (SAS 2), multi-stage sampling techniques, structured questionnaires, focused group discussion and key informant/in-depth interview. The secondary data was obtained from credible publications and institutions including the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet). The primary data obtained was triangulated with the secondary data to arrive at the findings of this study which covered a period of 31 years from 1985 to 2015. The findings from this study showed that crop yield had drastically decreased due to erratic rainfall, increase in sunshine hours, increase in temperature and pest infestation. This calls for urgent actions to be taken by all relevant stakeholders in the agriculture sector be it the farmers themselves, government, private sector, non-governmental organizations and other non-state actors to adequately address the adverse impacts of climate change.

Despite hazard mitigation efforts and scientific and technological advances, extreme weather events continue to cause substantial losses. The impacts of extreme weather result from complex interactions among physical and human systems across spatial and temporal scales. This article synthesizes current interdisciplinary knowledge about extreme weather, including temperature extremes (heat and cold waves), precipitation extremes (including floods and droughts), and storms and severe weather (including tropical cyclones). We discuss hydrometeorological aspects of extreme weather; projections of changes in extremes with anthropogenic climate change; and how social vulnerability, coping, and adaptation shape the societal impacts of extreme weather. We find four critical gaps where work is needed to improve outcomes of extreme weather: (a) reducing vulnerability; (b) enhancing adaptive capacity, including decision-making flexibility; (c) improving the usability of scientific information in decision making, and (d ) understanding and addressing local causes of harm through participatory, community-based efforts formulated within the larger policy context. 1

The future of the European energy system will strongly depend on a future world energy context that will be dominated by two key challenges. The first challenge corresponds to the necessity of meeting the energy needs of a growing population in Asia, South America and Africa, while some key energy resources – oil and natural gas – enter in a process of increasing scarcity. The second challenge results from the need to rapidly adjust the structure of the world energy system in order to meet the tightening constraints induced by the will to limit anthropogenic climate change. Both issues are clearly strategic for Europe as on the one hand the Union will have to master a growing import dependency from the international markets and neighbouring regions, and as on the other hand it intends to take the lead on the international scene for climate change mitigation policies. Analyses of world long term energy scenario show that the growing scarcity on hydrocarbon supply will not solve the c...

Climate science and nuclear weapons testing have a long and surprisingly intimate relationship. The global networks that monitored the Fukushima radiation plume and forecasted its movement are the direct descendants of systems and computer models developed to trace fallout from weapons tests. Tracing radioactive carbon as it cycles through the atmosphere, the oceans, and the biosphere has been crucial to understanding anthropogenic climate change. The earliest global climate models relied on numerical methods very similar to those developed by nuclear weapons designers for solving the fluid dynamics equations needed to analyze shock waves produced in nuclear explosions. The climatic consequences of nuclear war also represent a major historical intersection between climate science and nuclear affairs. Without the work done by nuclear weapons designers and testers, scientists would know much less than they now do about the atmosphere. In particular, this research has contributed enormously to knowledge about both carbon dioxide, which raises EarthÕs temperature, and aerosols, which lower it. Without climate models, scientists and political leaders would not have understood the full extent of nuclear weaponsÕ power to annihilate not only human beings, but other species as well. In the post-Cold War era, US national laboratories built to create the most fearsome arsenal in history are now using their powerful supercomputers, their expertise in modeling, and their skills in managing very large data sets to address the threat of catastrophic climate change.

1] Tropical cyclones form only under specific environmental conditions. Anthropogenic climate change might alter the geographical areas where tropical cyclones can develop. Using an ensemble of regional climate models, we find an increase in the extremes of cyclone intensity over the Mediterranean Sea under a climate change scenario. At least for the most sensitive model, the increase in intensity is clearly associated with the formation of tropical cyclones. Previous studies did not find evidence of changes in the projected areas of formation of tropical cyclones (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007;. Those studies were based either on relatively low-resolution global climate models or on one particular regional climate model. The use of a multi-model ensemble of relatively high-resolution regional climate models has allowed us to detect for the first time a risk of tropical cyclone development over the Mediterranean Sea under future climate change conditions.

The studies on anthropogenic climate change performed in the last decade over Europe show consistent projections of increases in temperature and different patterns of precipitation with widespread increases in northern Europe and decreases over parts of southern and eastern Europe. In many countries and in recent years there is a tendency towards cereal grain yield stagnation and increased yield variability. Some of these trends may have been influenced by the recent climatic changes over Europe.