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Editorial article, editorial: impacts of global warming on ecology and meteorology and the related physical mechanisms, evaluation and prediction.

• 1 Department of Mathematics, North University of China, Taiyuan, China
• 2 College of Physics Science and Technology, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, China
• 3 Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, United States
• 4 Key Laboratory of Mesoscale Severe Weather/Ministry of Education, School of Atmospheric Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
• 5 Nanjing Normal University Nanjing, Nanjing, China

Editorial on the Research Topic Impacts of global warming on ecology and meteorology and the related physical mechanisms, evaluation and prediction

Global warming refers to changes in climate over a period of time in which the temperatures of the atmosphere and seas on Earth dramatically rise due to the greenhouse effect, and it plays a dominant role in climate change, rising sea levels, increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events, ecological imbalances, and loss of biodiversity [ 1 – 4 ]. Consequently, global warming has an adverse effect on meteorology and ecology, both of which inevitably affect human life and social development. As a result, how we can effectively mitigate global warming has become an urgent problem for the survival and development of mankind. In this sense, analysis of the features of meteorological and ecological change, quantification of the influence of climate warming on ecology and meteorology, and the uncovering of the underlying physical mechanisms contribute to a much deeper comprehension of the impact of global warming.

This Research Topic accepted many manuscripts across multiple research fields, including mathematics, meteorology, and ecology. These research studies mainly focus on construction or using models to quantify influence and predict future trends. For instance, Zhao et al. have, based on the CMIP6 model, evaluated the performance of wind speed in China, providing available guidance for wind prediction in specific regions; Hou et al. developed a model based on a three-dimensional Copula function to quantify the effects of drought on cropland area and assess the risk of drought, which is important for understanding and reducing the negative effects associated with drought; Feng et al. used a nonlinear time series analysis method of phase space reconstruction to quantify the snow depth over the Tibetan Plateau; Chou et al. proposed an economic climate model to quantify the effects of climate change on the economy; Wang et al. utilized Earth system model simulations to assess oceanic CO 2 uptake, surface temperature, and acidity for Zhejiang offshore; and, to investigate the influence of saturated water absorption on vegetation systems, Li et al. established a vegetation-water model with a saturated water absorption effect.

This Research Topic has also received some papers that use a variety of data to analyze the characteristics of meteorological elements. Su et al. used a multi-dataset to analyze trends—seasonal and irregular variations of actual evapotranspiration. Wang et al. analyzed the climate change characteristics of coastal wind energy resources in Zhejiang Province based on ERA-medium-term data. Based on wind speed data and machine learning, Yan et al. studied the daily characteristics of wind speed changes in Beijing and analyzed the spatial and temporal characteristics of wind speed diurnal changes, which is conducive to predicting pollutant emissions.

We also collected some papers on the physical mechanisms of climate change. Guo et al. utilized Chinese meteorological station data and reanalysis data to explore the physical mechanism behind the variation of precipitation cycling rate in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Zhao et al. explored the dominant factors causing the subtropical atmospheric anomaly in the western Pacific.

The situation of global warming is becoming more and more serious, and the impact on ecology and meteorology is intensifying, which means human beings and our development are facing unprecedented threats. The purpose of this research topic is to use a variety of methods to analyze the characteristics of meteorological and ecological changes in the context of global warming, quantify the impact of extreme events on agriculture, meteorology, and oceans, and reveal the physical mechanisms of their changes. We hope that this Research Topic will provide a platform to promote multidisciplinary and integrated research at a deeper level in the fields of meteorology, ecology, epidemiology, and mathematics.

Author contributions

G-QS wrote the manuscript. YW, B-LL, and YG contributed to the manuscript edits. All authors read, contributed to the research design, and approved the final manuscript.

The project is funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant no. 2018YFE0109600), National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant nos. 42075029 and 42275034.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords: global warming, ecology, meteorology, physical mechanisms, prediction

Citation: Sun G-Q, Wu Y, Li B-L and Guo Y (2022) Editorial: Impacts of global warming on ecology and meteorology and the related physical mechanisms, evaluation and prediction. Front. Phys. 10:1041941. doi: 10.3389/fphy.2022.1041941

Received: 11 September 2022; Accepted: 29 September 2022; Published: 10 November 2022.

Edited and reviewed by:

Copyright © 2022 Sun, Wu, Li and Guo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Gui-Quan Sun, [email protected]

This article is part of the Research Topic

Impacts of Global Warming on Ecology and Meteorology and the Related Physical Mechanisms, Evaluation and Prediction

Scoping Review of Climate Change and Health Research in the Philippines: A Complementary Tool in Research Agenda-Setting

Affiliations.

• 1 Alliance for Improving Health Outcomes, Inc., Rm. 406, Veria I Bldg., 62 West Avenue, Barangay West Triangle, Quezon City 1104, Philippines. [email protected].
• 2 Department of Global Health, School of Tropical Medicine and Global Health, Nagasaki University, 1-12-4 Sakamoto, Nagasaki 852-8102, Japan. [email protected].
• 3 Alliance for Improving Health Outcomes, Inc., Rm. 406, Veria I Bldg., 62 West Avenue, Barangay West Triangle, Quezon City 1104, Philippines.
• 4 Department of Global Health, School of Tropical Medicine and Global Health, Nagasaki University, 1-12-4 Sakamoto, Nagasaki 852-8102, Japan.
• 5 Department of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Nagasaki University, 1-12-4 Sakamoto, Nagasaki 852-8523, Japan.
• 6 Institute of Global Health, University of Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 324, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany.
• PMID: 31340512
• PMCID: PMC6679087
• DOI: 10.3390/ijerph16142624

The impacts of climate change on human health have been observed and projected in the Philippines as vector-borne and heat-related diseases have and continue to increase. As a response, the Philippine government has given priority to climate change and health as one of the main research funding topics. To guide in identifying more specific research topics, a scoping review was done to complement the agenda-setting process by mapping out the extent of climate change and health research done in the country. Research articles and grey literature published from 1980 to 2017 were searched from online databases and search engines, and a total of 34 quantitative studies were selected. Fifty-three percent of the health topics studied were about mosquito-borne diseases, particularly dengue fever. Seventy-nine percent of the studies reported evidence of positive associations between climate factors and health outcomes. Recommended broad research themes for funding were health vulnerability, health adaptation, and co-benefits. Other notable recommendations were the development of open data and reproducible modeling schemes. In conclusion, the scoping review was useful in providing a background for research agenda-setting; however, additional analyses or consultations should be complementary for added depth.

Keywords: agenda-setting; climate change; health; scoping review.

Publication types

• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
• Climate Change*
• Philippines

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• Published: 16 February 2011

Increased flood risk linked to global warming

• Quirin Schiermeier  

Nature volume  470 ,  page 316 ( 2011 ) Cite this article

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Likelihood of extreme rainfall may have been doubled by rising greenhouse-gas levels.

Climate change may be hitting home. Rises in global average temperature are remote from most people's experience, but two studies in this week's Nature 1 , 2 conclude that climate warming is already causing extreme weather events that affect the lives of millions. The research directly links rising greenhouse-gas levels with the growing intensity of rain and snow in the Northern Hemisphere, and the increased risk of flooding in the United Kingdom.

Insurers will take note, as will those developing policies for adapting to climate change. "This has immense importance not just as a further justification for emissions reduction, but also for adaptation planning," says Michael Oppenheimer, a climate-policy researcher at Princeton University in New Jersey, who was not involved in the studies.

There is no doubt that humans are altering the climate, but the implications for regional weather are less clear. No computer simulation can conclusively attribute a given snowstorm or flood to global warming. But with a combination of climate models, weather observations and a good dose of probability theory, scientists may be able to determine how climate warming changes the odds. An earlier study 3 , for example, found that global warming has at least doubled the likelihood of extreme events such as the 2003 European heatwave.

More-localized weather extremes have been harder to attribute to climate change until now. "Climate models have improved a lot since ten years ago, when we basically couldn't say anything about rainfall," says Gabriele Hegerl, a climate researcher at the University of Edinburgh, UK. In the first of the latest studies 1 , Hegerl and her colleagues compared data from weather stations in the Northern Hemisphere with precipitation simulations from eight climate models (see page 378 ). "We can now say with some confidence that the increased rainfall intensity in the latter half of the twentieth century cannot be explained by our estimates of internal climate variability," she says.

The second study 2 links climate change to a specific event: damaging floods in 2000 in England and Wales. By running thousands of high-resolution seasonal forecast simulations with or without the effect of greenhouse gases, Myles Allen of the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues found that anthropogenic climate change may have almost doubled the risk of the extremely wet weather that caused the floods (see page 382 ). The rise in extreme precipitation in some Northern Hemisphere areas has been recognized for more than a decade, but this is the first time that the anthropogenic contribution has been nailed down, says Oppenheimer. The findings mean that Northern Hemisphere countries need to prepare for more of these events in the future. "What has been considered a 1-in-100-years event in a stationary climate may actually occur twice as often in the future," says Allen.

But he cautions that climate change may not always raise the risk of weather-related damage. In Britain, for example, snow-melt floods may become less likely as the climate warms. And Allen's study leaves a 10% chance that global warming has not affected — or has even decreased — the country's flood risk.

Similar attribution studies are under way for flood and drought risk in Europe, meltwater availability in the western United States and drought in southern Africa, typical of the research needed to develop effective climate-adaptation policies. "Governments plan to spend some US$100 billion on climate adaptation by 2020, although presently no one has an idea of what is an impact of climate change and what is just bad weather," says Allen.

Establishing the links between climate change and weather could also shape climate treaties, he says. "If rich countries are to financially compensate the losers of climate change, as some poorer countries would expect, you'd like to have an objective scientific basis for it."

The insurance industry has long worried about increased losses resulting from more extreme weather (see 'Fatal floods' ), but conclusively pinning the blame on climate change will take more research, says Robert Muir-Wood, chief research officer with RMS, a company headquartered in Newark, California, that constructs risk models for the insurance industry. "This is a key part of our research agenda and insurance companies do accept the premise" that there could be a link, he says. "If there's evidence that risk is changing, then this is something we need to incorporate in our models."

Min, S.-K. et al. Nature 470 , 378-381 (2011).

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Research Article

Understanding climate change from a global analysis of city analogues

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Crowther Lab, Department of Environmental Systems Science, Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

Roles Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Plant Ecology, Department of Environmental Systems Science, Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

Affiliation Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

• Jean-Francois Bastin, 
• Emily Clark, 
• Thomas Elliott, 
• Simon Hart, 
• Johan van den Hoogen, 
• Iris Hordijk, 
• Haozhi Ma, 
• Sabiha Majumder, 
• Gabriele Manoli, 

• Published: July 10, 2019
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217592
• Reader Comments

16 Oct 2019: Bastin JF, Clark E, Elliott T, Hart S, van den Hoogen J, et al. (2019) Correction: Understanding climate change from a global analysis of city analogues. PLOS ONE 14(10): e0224120. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224120 View correction

Combating climate change requires unified action across all sectors of society. However, this collective action is precluded by the ‘consensus gap’ between scientific knowledge and public opinion. Here, we test the extent to which the iconic cities around the world are likely to shift in response to climate change. By analyzing city pairs for 520 major cities of the world, we test if their climate in 2050 will resemble more closely to their own current climate conditions or to the current conditions of other cities in different bioclimatic regions. Even under an optimistic climate scenario (RCP 4.5), we found that 77% of future cities are very likely to experience a climate that is closer to that of another existing city than to its own current climate. In addition, 22% of cities will experience climate conditions that are not currently experienced by any existing major cities. As a general trend, we found that all the cities tend to shift towards the sub-tropics, with cities from the Northern hemisphere shifting to warmer conditions, on average ~1000 km south (velocity ~20 km.year -1 ), and cities from the tropics shifting to drier conditions. We notably predict that Madrid’s climate in 2050 will resemble Marrakech’s climate today, Stockholm will resemble Budapest, London to Barcelona, Moscow to Sofia, Seattle to San Francisco, Tokyo to Changsha. Our approach illustrates how complex climate data can be packaged to provide tangible information. The global assessment of city analogues can facilitate the understanding of climate change at a global level but also help land managers and city planners to visualize the climate futures of their respective cities, which can facilitate effective decision-making in response to on-going climate change.

Citation: Bastin J-F, Clark E, Elliott T, Hart S, van den Hoogen J, Hordijk I, et al. (2019) Understanding climate change from a global analysis of city analogues. PLoS ONE 14(7): e0217592. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217592

Editor: Juan A. Añel, Universidade de Vigo, SPAIN

Received: February 14, 2019; Accepted: May 8, 2019; Published: July 10, 2019

Copyright: © 2019 Bastin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files.

Funding: Author TWC is supported by grant from DOB Ecology. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The gap between the scientific and public understanding of climate change, referred to as the “Consensus Gap”, is largely attributed to failures in climate change communication[ 1 ]. Often limited to ad-hoc reporting of extreme weather events or intangible, long-term climate impacts (e.g. changes in average temperature by 2100). Despite an exhaustive list of risks associated to climate change [ 2 ] (e.g. heat stress, air and water quality, food supply, distribution of vectors of diseases, social factors), the intangible nature of reporting on climate change fails to adequately convey the urgency of this issue to a public audience on a consistent basis[ 3 ]. It is hard for most people to envision how an additional 2°C of warming might affect daily life. This ineffective communication of climate change facts, compounded by uncertainty about the extent of expected changes, has left the door open for widespread misinterpretation about the existence of this global phenomenon.

History has repeatedly shown us that data and facts alone do not inspire humans to change their beliefs or act [ 3 ]. Increased scientific literacy has no correlation with the acceptance of climate change facts [ 4 ]. A growing body of research demonstrates that visualization—the ability to create a mental image of the problem—is the most effective approach for motivating behavior change [ 5 , 6 ]. Several studies have analyzed ‘geographic shifts’ to better illustrate climate change. For example, Seidel and colleagues (2008) [ 7 , 8 ] showed that climate change has driven a widening of the tropical belt, by ~2 to 4.8 latitudinal degrees in recent decades. Similarly, the changing conditions of cities around the world provides another tangible example of shifting climate regimes. Given that over 50% of the global population exists within cities [ 9 ], these urban environments potentially valuable tool to visualize the impact of climate change at a global scale. As iconic locations, cities are associated with distinct sets of environmental conditions. As such, shifts in the climate conditions of these urban areas could provide a unique opportunity for people to visualize the impacts of climate change, and to establish effective response strategies to address the effects.

Several studies [ 10 – 15 ] and press reports [ 16 , 17 ] have shown that the use of ‘cities geographic shift’ or “city analogues” can help to understand and visualize the effects of climate change. In particular, cities can serve as useful climate analog, enabling people to visualize their own climate future via comparison with other cities that currently experience those climate conditions. However, until now, existing research have been focused on regional- or continent-scale analyses in North America or Europe [ 10 – 15 ], and we lack a unifying global perspective. These regional trends suggest that cities are likely to resemble those at lower latitudes as the climate continues to warm. However, it remains unclear if this trend holds at a global scale, as other climate drivers such as changing precipitation regimes may obscure these latitudinal trends. As such, Southern Hemisphere or tropical cities, which already exist in warm conditions and are likely to experience considerable changes in precipitation and extreme climate variation, may show independent geographic shifts under changing climate conditions. Generating a unified understanding of the shifts in the climate conditions of the world’s cities is critical if we are going to visualize the impacts of climate change in any biogeographic region. Generating this understanding requires a global perspective and the use of a full range of climate variables to represent the entire climate regime of those regions.

In this study, we evaluate the global shifts in the climate conditions of cities by taking current climate data for the world’s 520 major cities (Current Cities), and project what they will most closely resemble in 2050 (Future Cities). Rather than describing the quantitative changes in climate variables [ 18 ], we propose to quantify city climate analogs at a global scale [ 10 – 12 ], i.e. assessing which Current Cities will most closely resemble the climate conditions of Future Cities. To tackle previous limitations, we explore these patterns at a global scale using 19 bioclimatic variables, to include climate variability and seasonality in addition to climate averages.

Specifically, we aim to test three questions: (i) What proportion of the world’s major cities of the future most closely resemble their own current climate conditions vs . the climate conditions of other cities in different geographic regions? (ii) What proportion of cities will experience novel climate conditions that are outside the range experiences by cities today? (iii) If cities do shift their climate conditions, is this spatial shift uniform in direction across the planet?

Materials and methods

Selection of major cities.

We selected these “major” cities of the world from the “LandScan (2016) High Resolution global Population Data Set” created by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory [ 19 ]. By “major” cities, we considered cities that are an administrative capital or that account more than 1,000,000 inhabitants. In total, 520 cities were selected.

The climate database

To characterize the current climate conditions among these major cities of the world, we extracted 19 bioclimatic variables from the latest Worldclim global raster layers (Version 2; period 1970–2000) at 30 arc-seconds resolution [ 20 ]. These variables captured various climatic conditions, including yearly averages, seasonality metrics, and monthly extremes for both precipitation and temperature at every location.

Future data: GCMs, downscaling and future scenarios

For the future projections, the same 19 bioclimatic variables were averaged from the outputs of three general circulation models (GCM) commonly used in ecology [ 21 , 22 ]. Two Community Earth System Models (CESMs) were chosen as they investigate a diverse set of earth-system interactions: the CESM1 BGC (a coupled carbon–climate model accounting for carbon feedback from the land) and the CESM1 CAM5 (a community atmosphere model) [ 21 ]. Additionally, the Earth System component of the Met Office Hadley Centre HadGEM2 model family was used as the third and final model [ 22 ]. To generate the data, we chose Representative Common Pathway 4.5 (RCP 4.5) scenario from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) as the input. It is a stabilization scenario, meaning that it accounts for a stabilization of radiative forcing before 2100, anticipating the development of new technologies and strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions [ 23 ]. By using this optimistic climate change scenario, we represent conservative changes in climate conditions that are likely to occur even if substantial climate change mitigation occurs. For each output, a delta downscaling method developed by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) was applied to reach a resolution of 30 arc-seconds [ 24 ], using current conditions Worldclim 1.4 as a reference. Downscaling approach were necessary to assess climate conditions at the cities’ scale even if it induces a risk of pixel mismatch and consequently, a lower level of confidence for local scale analyses [ 25 , 26 ].

Summarizing the current climate among the major cities through a principal component analysis

The 19 current and future bioclimatic variables were extracted from the coordinates of the 520 major cities (i.e., the city centroids), meaning each city had two sets of bioclimatic metrics: the current climate data for the world’s major cities (Current Cities) and the equivalent 2050 projection (Future Cities) according to the average of the three RCP 4.5 GCMs.

A scaled principal components analysis (PCA) was performed on current bioclimatic data in order to account for correlation between climate variables and to standardize their contributions to the subsequent dissimilarity analysis [ 27 ]. As the first four principal components accounted for more than 85% of the total variation of climate data (40.2%, 26.9%, 10.5% and 7.6%, respectively), the remaining principal components were dropped from later analyses. The main contributing variables to the four components are the temperature seasonality (axis 1), the minimum temperature of the coldest month (axis 1), the maximum temperature of the warmest month (axis 2), the precipitation seasonality (axis 2), the precipitation of the driest (axis 4) and of the wettest (axis 3) month, and the temperature diurnal range (axis 4, Fig 1 ).

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

The seven major climate variables contributing to the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) are superposed on each figure. The figure at the top (a) shows the distribution of current (blue) and future (red) cities on the space defined by the first two principal components. The first two axes explain, respectively, 40.2 and 26.9% of climate variations. The first axis is mainly driven by differences in temperature seasonality and in minimum temperature of the coldest month, while the second axis is mainly driven by differences in precipitation seasonality. The figure at the bottom (b) shows the same current (green) and future (orange) cities on the space defined by the third and fourth principal components. They explain respectively 10.5 and 7.6% of climate variations. The third axis is mainly driven by changes in precipitation of the wet season, while the fourth axis is mainly driven by changes in the mean diurnal temperature range. Boxplots illustrates the distribution of the points along each of the 4 axes. The continuous line in the boxes represents the median of the distribution, the extremities of the boxes the 1 st and the 3 rd quartile and the continuous lines go up to 1.5 times the difference between the 3 st and the 1 rd quartile.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217592.g001

Calculating the extent of the covered climate domain

For further interpretation of the results, a convex hull was computed from the coordinates of the Current Cities within the multivariate space defined by the first four principal components axes [ 28 ]. For reference, a convex hull of a set of N-dimensional points forms the smallest possible hypervolume (in N-dimensions) containing all points defined in that set; in this case, it defines the bounds of climatic combinations that Earth currently experiences in these 520 cities. All Future Cities falling outside the hypervolume of this convex hull represent currently non-existent bioclimatic assemblies in these cities, i.e. cities with no current climate analog [ 29 ].

Pairing cities based on the similarity between current and future climate conditions

Euclidean distances (i.e., dissimilarity indices) were calculated for every combination of Current and Future City based on their coordinates within the multivariate space defined by the first four principal components axes, creating a symmetric dissimilarity matrix with pairwise comparisons for all cities ( S1 Table ). The Euclidean distance was calculated using the vegan package on R (RCran version 3.3.2) [ 30 ]. Each Future City was then paired with its three closest Current Cities based on the dissimilarity values ( S1 Table , S2 Table ). Three cities are kept for each Future city in order to facilitate comparison between Current and Future climate, as all cities are not necessarily known by the reader. To avoid un-realistic shifts or shifts due to pixel mismatch between Current and Future climate conditions, the final analysis was performed keeping shift values between the 5 th and the 95 th percentile, i.e. keeping 477 out of the original 520 cities.

Calculating the absolute latitudinal shift

To illustrate and summarize the shifts between Current and Future Cities, we calculated the importance of absolute latitudinal shift for each city. Shifts in latitude were standardized for both hemisphere, so that a shift south in the northern hemisphere is equal to a shift north in the southern hemisphere, i.e. referred as the absolute latitudinal shift. In other words, the absolute latitudinal shift expresses a geographic shift in relation to the equatorial line (shifting away from or towards the equator).

Analyses and figures were performed using R, maps were built using Q-GIS 3.0.

Analysis of changes between current and future cities from the PCA

The future climate of each city was projected within the four principal components (using the PCA eigenvectors derived from the bioclimatic variables of the current climate) to allow for direct comparison between Current and Future Cities ( Fig 1 ). On the plane defined by the first two components of the PCA ( Fig 1A ), explaining respectively 40.2 and 26.9% of climate variations, we observe changes towards less temperature seasonality, with higher maximal and minimal temperatures during the year, as well as higher precipitation seasonality, with higher precipitation in the wettest month but lower precipitation in the driest one. While no clear trend can be observed along the third axis (10.5% of climate variation), the changes along the fourth axis (7.6% of climate variation) show higher temperature diurnal range ( Fig 1B ), i.e. the daily difference between cities’ maximum and minimum temperatures will increase. In brief, cities of the world become hotter, in particular during the winter and the summer. Wet seasons become wetter and dry season drier.

What proportion of cities will resemble their own current climate vs . other cities by 2050?

We characterized the climate of the world’s 520 major cities using 19 climatic variables that reflect the variability in temperature and precipitation regimes for current and future conditions. Future conditions are estimated using an optimistic Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP4.5), which considers a stabilization of CO 2 emissions by mid-century (see Material and Methods ). This model was chosen to show the extent of the changes we would be facing even considering the implementation of effective mitigation policies. Using a multivariate analysis, we analyzed the climate similarity of all Current and Future cities to one another ( S1 Table ). This simple analysis enables us to estimate which major cities of the world will remain relatively similar, and which will shift to reflect the climate of another city by 2050. Overall, our analysis shows that 77% of the world’s Current Cities will experience a striking change in climate conditions, making them more similar to the conditions of another existing city than they are to their own current climate conditions ( S1 Table , S2 Table ). The climate conditions of remaining 23% of cities remained most closely associated with their current climate conditions.

What proportion of cities will experience novel climate conditions?

Overall 78% of the 520 Future Cities studied present a climate within the hypervolume representing covered combinations of climate conditions. Therefore, 22% of the Future Cities’ climate conditions would disappear from this current climatic domain ( Fig 2A ). As such, 22% of the world’s cities are likely to exist in a climatic regime that does current exist on the planet today. The situation is even more pronounced in the tropics, with 30% of cities experiencing novel climate conditions essentially because the climate will get drier.

a, b, the extent of change in climate conditions. Cities predicted to have climates that no major city has experienced before are colored in red (mostly within the tropics). Cities for which future climate conditions reflect current conditions in other major cities of the world are shown in green. The size of the dots represents the magnitude of change between current and future climate conditions. b , The proportion of cities shifting away from the covered climate domain (concentrated in the tropics). c,d, The extent of latitudinal shifts in relation to the equatorial line. Cities shifting towards the equator are colored with a blue gradient (mostly outside the tropics), while cities shifting away from the equator are colored with a yellow to red gradient (mostly within the tropics). d, A summary of the shift by latitude is illustrated in a barchart, with shifts averaged by bins of 5 degrees. The background of the maps are a combination rasters available in the public domain, i.e. of USGS shaded relief only and hydro cached.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217592.g002

Is this spatial shift uniform in direction across the planet?

The proportion of shifting cities varied consistently across the world. Cities in northern latitudes will experience the most dramatic shifts in extreme temperature conditions ( Fig 2C and Fig 2D ). For example, across Europe, both summers and winters will get warmer, with average increases of 3.5°C and 4.7°C, respectively. These changes would be equivalent to a city shifting ~1,000 km further south towards the subtropics, i.e. a velocity ~20 km.year -1 , under current climate conditions ( Fig 2C and Fig 2D ). Consequently, by 2050, striking changes will be observed across the northern hemisphere: Madrid’s climate in 2050 will be more similar to the current climate in Marrakech than to Madrid’s climate today; London will be more similar to Barcelona, Stockholm to Budapest; Moscow to Sofia; Portland to San Antonio, San Francisco to Lisbon, Tokyo to Changsha, etc( Fig 3 , S2 Table ).

Difference between future and current climate for four cities and an example of their similar current counterpart. Illustration of the results of the analysis for London ( a ; counterpart: Barcelona), Buenos Aires ( b ; counterpart: Sidney), Nairobi ( c ; counterpart:Beirut) and Portland ( d ; counterpart:San Antonio). The red bar represents the difference between the current climate of the city of interest (e.g. London in (a)) and the current climate of the city to which the city of interest (e.g. London in (a)) will have the most similar climate by 2050 (e.g. Barcelona in (a)). The yellow bar the difference between the current and future climate of the city of interest (e.g. current London and London 2050 in (a)). The green bar represents the difference between the future climate of the city of interest (London 2050) and the current climate of the most similar counterpart (e.g. Barcelona in (a)). Images of Barcelona and London were obtained on Pixabay, shared under common creative CC0 license.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217592.g003

Cities in the tropical regions will experience smaller changes in average temperature, relative to the higher latitudes. However, shifts in rainfall regimes will dominate the tropical cities. This is characterized by both increases in extreme precipitation events (+5% rainfall wettest month) and, the severity and intensity of droughts (-14% rainfall driest month). With more severe droughts, tropical cities will move towards the subtropics, i.e. towards drier climates ( Fig 2C and Fig 2D ). However, the fate of major tropical cities remains highly uncertain because many tropical regions will experience unprecedented climate conditions. Specifically, of all 22% of cities that will experience novel climate conditions, most (64%) are located in the tropics. These include Manaus, Libreville, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Rangoon, and Singapore ( Fig 2A and Fig 2B , S2 Table ).

In summary, at a global level, we observe a global geographic shift towards the subtropics, i.e. towards ~20 degrees of latitude ( Fig 2B and Fig 4 ).

Cities below 20 degrees North/South tend to move away from the equator (positive latitudinal shift) while cities beyond 20 degrees North/South tend to move closer to the equator (negative latitudinal shift). Cities are colored according to the aggregated ecoregion of the world [ 36 ] to which they belong, with the tropical in red, the subtropical in orange, the temperate in green and the boreal in blue.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217592.g004

Our analysis reveals consistent global patterns in the climate shifts of future major cities around the world over the next 30 years. Despite our use of a highly optimistic climate change scenario (i.e. RCP 4.5), we show that the climate conditions of over 77% of world’s major cities will change to such a great extent that they will resemble more closely the conditions of another major city. The projected shifts showed consistent biogeographic trends, with all city climates (both southern and northern hemisphere) generally shifting towards the conditions in warmer, low-latitude regions. The extent and consistency of these patterns provides a stark reminder of the global scale of this climate change threat and associated risks for human health. In contrast to previous analyses, our analysis also reveals that 22% of the world’s cities are likely to exist in a climatic regime that does not current exist on the planet today. These trends highlight the extreme vulnerability of tropical and sub-tropical cities, 30% of which will experience shifts into entirely novel climate regimes with no existing analogues across the world’s major cities. This lends support to the idea of novel climates, which are expected to emerge in many tropical and sub-tropical regions [ 29 ]. It should be noted that, by defining the climate envelope using a convex-hull (i.e. by defining a volume from simplices (“triangles”) that form the smallest convex simplicial complex of a set of input points in 4-dimensional space), we applied a conservative method for evaluating future change. Indeed, because it includes the smallest level of extrapolation and generating the smallest possible shapes, this approach has a low-risk of incorrectly identifying novel climate conditions, relative to a concave-hull approach [ 31 ]. However, this approach necessarily comes with the high likelihood of missing some novel climates. The 22% of cities experiencing a novel climate must therefore be seen as a highly conservative estimate.

Our findings also support previous studies conducted in Europe [ 10 , 11 ] and north America [ 13 ], stressing the current trend of north-to-south geographical shift across the northern hemisphere. Yet, using an optimistic climate change scenario, we found that the velocity (i.e. the speed of geographical shift) risks to be higher in the near future than in the second half of the 21th century [ 10 ] passing from 15 km year -1 to 20 km year -1 . Our study also allows the extension of such observations to the global scale, showing that observations for Europe can be generalized for the entire Northern Hemisphere and for a part of the southern hemisphere ( Fig 2B ). At the global scale, our study reveals that geographical shift tend to converge towards the subtropics ( Fig 4 ), going to warmer climate conditions from boreal and temperate regions and to drier conditions from tropical regions. While this lends support to previous observations of a “tropical belt widening” due to the expected warmer conditions [ 7 , 8 ], it also shows that tropical biomes tend to shrink in many areas due to drier conditions. We therefore suggest here to refer to a “sub-tropical widening” compared to the previous “tropical widening” due to climate change.

While our findings are necessarily dependent on the methodology used to identify the climatic shifts, it is widely recognized that the choice of the metric to assess the similarity-dissimilarity of the climate conditions between cities has an extremely minor effect, compared to the choice of the climate model and scenario[ 32 ]. That is, our results are unlikely to be affected whatever method we use to calculate dissimilarity, as the variation between climate projections is far greater. Nonetheless, Mahony and colleagues [ 31 ] highlighted the need to standardize the contribution of each climate variable to the dissimilarity matrix and to account for correlation between them to avoid any bias[ 31 ]. In the present study, we address this using a scaled principal component analysis to summarize the main bioclimatic variations among the 520 major cities. This approach simply follows classic dissimilarity analysis recommendations for ecological studies[ 27 ], applying an Euclidean distance matrix on the main dimensions of the principal component analysis to assess the similarity between cities. This method was preferred to the sigma-dissimilarity developed by Mahony and colleagues[ 31 ] for its simplicity and it broad use in ecological sciences.

Our analysis allows us to visualize a tangible climate future of the world’s major cities. These results enable decision makers from all sectors of society, to envision changes that are likely to occur in their own city, within their own lifetime. Londoners, for example, can start to consider how their 2050 equivalents (e.g. Barcelona today) have taken action to combat their own environmental challenges. In 2008, Barcelona experienced extreme drought conditions, which required the importation of €22m of drinking water. Since then, the municipal government has implemented a series of ‘ smart initiatives ‘ to manage the city’s water resources (including the control of park irrigation and water fountain levels). The Mayor of London has factored drought considerations into his Environment Strategy aims for 2050 [ 33 ], but this study can provide the context to facilitate the development of more targeted climate strategies. In addition, this information can also empower local citizens to evaluate proposed environmental policies. By allowing people to visualize their own climate futures, we hope that this information can facilitate efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Our study is not a novel model revealing updated climate projections or expectations by 2050. Instead, our analysis is intended to illustrate how complex climate data can be effectively summarized into tangible information that can be easily interpreted by anyone. Of course, the climate scenarios that we have used are based on predictions from a few climate models, run under a single (business as usual) climate scenario. We recognize that these models are characterized by huge amounts of uncertainty [ 34 ], and the predicted Future Cities may change as these Earth System Models are refined, in particular in light of urban climate specificities [ 35 ]. However, our results are likely to reflect the qualitative direction of climate changes within cities and so meet our primary goal, which is to communicate predicted climate changes to a non-specialist audience in order to motivate action. When model projections are updated, we would recommend communicating any new results with this goal in mind.

To our knowledge, our study represents the first global analysis of the shifts in climate conditions of the world’s major cities under climate change. Our analysis revealed that over 77% of the world’s cities are likely to experience a shift towards the climate conditions of another major city by 2050, while 22% will shift to climate conditions that are not currently present for any major cities on the planet. Across the globe, the direction of movement is generally trending towards the subtropics, providing unifying patterns that support trends observed in Europe and North America. In addition, this analysis revealed new insights for cities in equatorial regions, many of which are likely to move to entirely new climate conditions that are not currently experienced by any of the other global cities today. These city analogues, and the data we openly share, can help land managers and city planners to visualize the climate futures of their respective cities, facilitating efforts to establish targeted climate response strategies. As well as facilitating our basic understanding of climate change effects, our analysis highlights the value of using cities to visualize the tangible effects of climate change across the globe.

Supporting information

S1 table. dissimilarity between current and future climate of the major cities of the world..

The dissimilarity is expressed as the Euclidean distance matrix performed on the 4 main axes of the PCA analysis that summarizes the climate variation (19 bioclimatic variables) among the major cities of the world.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217592.s001

S2 Table. Summary statistics of the global analysis of city analogues.

The table provides the three cities for which current climate is the most similar to the future climate of each city. It also provides the associated latitudinal shift for the most similar city and the expected changes in climate conditions by 2050 for the mean annual temperature, the annual precipitations, the temperature of the warmest month, the temperature of the coldest month and the precipitation of the wettest month.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217592.s002

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by grants to T.W.C. from DOB Ecology, Plant-for-the-Planet and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. Images of cities were obtained on Pixabay, and openly shared under CC0 common creative license.

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Roz Pidcock

Which of the many thousands of papers on climate change published each year in scientific journals are the most successful? Which ones have done the most to advance scientists’ understanding, alter the course of climate change research, or inspire future generations?

On Wednesday, Carbon Brief will reveal the results of our analysis into which scientific papers on the topic of climate change are the most “cited”. That means, how many times other scientists have mentioned them in their own published research. It’s a pretty good measure of how much impact a paper has had in the science world.

But there are other ways to measure influence. Before we reveal the figures on the most-cited research, Carbon Brief has asked climate experts what they think are the most influential papers.

We asked all the coordinating lead authors, lead authors and review editors on the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report to nominate three papers from any time in history. This is the exact question we posed:

What do you consider to be the three most influential papers in the field of climate change?

As you might expect from a broad mix of physical scientists, economists, social scientists and policy experts, the nominations spanned a range of topics and historical periods, capturing some of the great climate pioneers and the very latest climate economics research.

Here’s a link to our summary of who said what . But one paper clearly takes the top spot.

Winner: Manabe & Wetherald ( 1967 )

With eight nominations, a seminal paper by Syukuro Manabe and Richard. T. Wetherald published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences in 1967 tops the Carbon Brief poll as the IPCC scientists’ top choice for the most influential climate change paper of all time.

Entitled, “Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity”, the work was the first to represent the fundamental elements of the Earth’s climate in a computer model, and to explore what doubling carbon dioxide (CO2) would do to global temperature.

Manabe & Wetherald (1967), Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences

The Manabe & Wetherald paper is considered by many as a pioneering effort in the field of climate modelling, one that effectively opened the door to projecting future climate change. And the value of climate sensitivity is something climate scientists are still grappling with today .

Prof Piers Forster , a physical climate scientist at Leeds University and lead author of the chapter on clouds and aerosols in working group one of the last IPCC report, tells Carbon Brief:

This was really the first physically sound climate model allowing accurate predictions of climate change.

The paper’s findings have stood the test of time amazingly well, Forster says.

Its results are still valid today. Often when I’ve think I’ve done a new bit of work, I found that it had already been included in this paper.

Prof Steve Sherwood , expert in atmospheric climate dynamics at the University of New South Wales and another lead author on the clouds and aerosols chapter, says it’s a tough choice, but Manabe & Wetherald (1967) gets his vote, too. Sherwood tells Carbon Brief:

[The paper was] the first proper computation of global warming and stratospheric cooling from enhanced greenhouse gas concentrations, including atmospheric emission and water-vapour feedback.

Prof Danny Harvey , professor of climate modelling at the University of Toronto and lead author on the buildings chapter in the IPCC’s working group three report on mitigation, emphasises the Manabe & Wetherald paper’s impact on future generations of scientists. He says:

[The paper was] the first to assess the magnitude of the water vapour feedback, and was frequently cited for a good 20 years after it was published.

Tomorrow, Carbon Brief will be publishing an interview with Syukuro Manabe, alongside a special summary by Prof John Mitchell , the Met Office Hadley Centre’s chief scientist from 2002 to 2008 and director of climate science from 2008 to 2010, on why the paper still holds such significance today.

Joint second: Keeling, C.D et al. ( 1976 )

Jumping forward a decade, a classic paper by Charles Keeling and colleagues in 1976 came in joint second place in the Carbon Brief survey.

Published in the journal Tellus under the title, “Atmospheric carbon dioxide variations at Mauna Loa observatory,” the paper documented for the first time the stark rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii.

A photocopy of Keeling et al., (1976) Source: University of California, Santa Cruz

Dr Jorge Carrasco , Antarctic climate change researcher at the University of Magallanes  in Chile and lead author on the cryosphere chapter in the last IPCC report, tells Carbon Brief why the research underpinning the “Keeling Curve’ was so important.

This paper revealed for the first time the observing increased of the atmospheric CO2 as the result of the combustion of carbon, petroleum and natural gas.

Prof David Stern , energy and environmental economist at the Australian National University and lead author on the Drivers, Trends and Mitigation chapter of the IPCC’s working group three report, also chooses the 1976 Keeling paper, though he notes:

This is a really tough question as there are so many dimensions to the climate problem – natural science, social science, policy etc.

With the Mauna Loa measurements continuing today , the so-called “Keeling curve” is the longest continuous record of carbon dioxide concentration in the world. Its historical significance and striking simplicity has made it one of the most iconic visualisations of climate change.

Source: US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Also in joint second place: Held, I.M. & Soden, B.J. ( 2006 )

Fast forwarding a few decades, in joint second place comes a paper by Isaac Held and Brian Soden published in the journal Science in 2006.

The paper, “Robust Responses of the Hydrological Cycle to Global Warming”, identified how rainfall from one place to another would be affected by climate change. Prof Sherwood, who nominated this paper as well as the winning one from Manabe and Wetherald, tells Carbon Brief why it represented an important step forward. He says:

[This paper] advanced what is known as the “wet-get-wetter, dry-get-drier” paradigm for precipitation in global warming. This mantra has been widely misunderstood and misapplied, but was the first and perhaps still the only systematic conclusion about regional precipitation and global warming based on robust physical understanding of the atmosphere.

Held & Soden (2006), Journal of Climate

Honourable mentions

Rather than choosing a single paper, quite a few academics in our survey nominated one or more of the Working Group contributions to the last IPCC report. A couple even suggested the Fifth Assessment Report in its entirety, running to several thousands of pages. The original IPCC report , published in 1990, also got mentioned.

It was clear from the results that scientists tended to pick papers related to their own field. For example, Prof Ottmar Edenhofer , chief economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group Three report on mitigation, selected four papers from the last 20 years on the economics of climate change costs versus risks, recent emissions trends, the technological feasibility of strong emissions reductions and the nature of international climate cooperation.

Taking a historical perspective, a few more of the early pioneers of climate science featured in our results, too. For example, Svante Arrhenius’ famous 1896 paper  on the Greenhouse Effect, entitled “On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground”, received a couple of votes.

Prof Jonathan Wiener , environmental policy expert at Duke University in the US and lead author on the International Cooperation chapter in the IPCC’s working group three report, explains why this paper should be remembered as one of the most influential in climate policy. He says:

[This is the] classic paper showing that rising greenhouse gas concentrations lead to increasing global average surface temperature.

Svante Arrhenius (1896), Philosophical Magazine

A few decades later, a paper by Guy Callendar in 1938  linked the increase in carbon dioxide concentration over the previous 50 years to rising temperatures. Entitled, “The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature,” the paper marked an important step forward in climate change research, says Andrew Solow , director of the Woods Hole Marine Policy centre and lead author on the detection and attribution of climate impacts chapter in the IPCC’s working group two report. He says:

There is earlier work on the greenhouse effect, but not (to my knowledge) on the connection between increasing levels of CO2 and temperature.

Though it may feature in the climate change literature hall of fame, this paper raises a question about how to define a paper’s influence, says Forster. Rather than being celebrated among his contemporaries, Callendar’s work achieved recognition a long time after it was published. Forster says:

I would loved to have chosen Callendar (1938) as the first attribution paper that changed the world. Unfortunately, the 1938 effort of Callendar was only really recognised afterwards as being a founding publication of the field … The same comment applies to earlier Arrhenius and Tyndall efforts. They were only influential in hindsight.

Guy Callendar and his 1938 paper in Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society

Other honourable mentions in the Carbon Brief survey of most influential climate papers go to Norman Phillips, whose 1956 paper described the first general circulation model, William Nordhaus’s 1991 paper on the economics of the greenhouse effect, and a paper by Camile Parmesan and Gary Yohe in 2003 , considered by many to provide the first formal attribution of climate change impacts on animal and plant species.

Finally, James Hansen’s 2012 paper , “Public perception of climate change and the new climate dice”, was important in highlighting the real-world impacts of climate change, says Prof Andy Challinor , expert in climate change impacts at the University of Leeds and lead author on the food security chapter in the working group two report. He says:

[It] helped with demonstrating the strong links between extreme events this century and climate change. Result: more clarity and less hedging.

Marc Levi , a political scientist at Columbia University and lead author on the IPCC’s human security chapter, makes a wider point, telling Carbon Brief:

The importance is in showing that climate change is observable in the present.

Indeed, attribution of extreme weather continues to be at the forefront of climate science, pushing scientists’ understanding of the climate system and modern technology to their limits.

Look out for more on the latest in attribution research as Carbon Brief reports on the Our Common Futures Under Climate Change conference taking place in Paris this week.

Pinning down which climate science papers most changed the world is difficult, and we suspect climate scientists could argue about this all day. But while the question elicits a range of very personal preferences, stories and characters, one paper has clearly stood the test of time and emerged as the popular choice among today’s climate experts – Manabe and Wetherald, 1967.

Main image: Satellite image of Hurricane Katrina.

• What are the most influential climate change papers of all time?

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What evidence exists that Earth is warming and that humans are the main cause?

We know the world is warming because people have been recording daily high and low temperatures at thousands of weather stations worldwide, over land and ocean, for many decades and, in some locations, for more than a century. When different teams of climate scientists in different agencies (e.g., NOAA and NASA) and in other countries (e.g., the U.K.’s Hadley Centre) average these data together, they all find essentially the same result: Earth’s average surface temperature has risen by about 1.8°F (1.0°C) since 1880. 

Yearly temperature compared to the twentieth-century average (red bars mean warmer than average, blue bars mean colder than average) from 1850–2022 and atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts (gray line): 1850-1958 from IAC , 1959-2019 from NOAA ESRL . Original graph by Dr. Howard Diamond (NOAA ARL), and adapted by NOAA Climate.gov.

In addition to our surface station data, we have many different lines of evidence that Earth is warming ( learn more ). Birds are migrating earlier, and their migration patterns are changing.  Lobsters  and  other marine species  are moving north. Plants are blooming earlier in the spring. Mountain glaciers are melting worldwide, and snow cover is declining in the Northern Hemisphere (Learn more  here  and  here ). Greenland’s ice sheet—which holds about 8 percent of Earth’s fresh water—is melting at an accelerating rate ( learn more ). Mean global sea level is rising ( learn more ). Arctic sea ice is declining rapidly in both thickness and extent ( learn more ).

The Greenland Ice Sheet lost mass again in 2020, but not as much as it did 2019. Adapted from the 2020 Arctic Report Card, this graph tracks Greenland mass loss measured by NASA's GRACE satellite missions since 2002. The background photo shows a glacier calving front in western Greenland, captured from an airplane during a NASA Operation IceBridge field campaign. Full story.

We know this warming is largely caused by human activities because the key role that carbon dioxide plays in maintaining Earth’s natural greenhouse effect has been understood since the mid-1800s. Unless it is offset by some equally large cooling influence, more atmospheric carbon dioxide will lead to warmer surface temperatures. Since 1800, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere  has increased  from about 280 parts per million to 410 ppm in 2019. We know from both its rapid increase and its isotopic “fingerprint” that the source of this new carbon dioxide is fossil fuels, and not natural sources like forest fires, volcanoes, or outgassing from the ocean.

Philip James de Loutherbourg's 1801 painting, Coalbrookdale by Night , came to symbolize the start of the Industrial Revolution, when humans began to harness the power of fossil fuels—and to contribute significantly to Earth's atmospheric greenhouse gas composition. Image from Wikipedia .

Finally, no other known climate influences have changed enough to account for the observed warming trend. Taken together, these and other lines of evidence point squarely to human activities as the cause of recent global warming.

USGCRP (2017). Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume 1 [Wuebbles, D.J., D.W. Fahey, K.A. Hibbard, D.J. Dokken, B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, 470 pp, doi:  10.7930/J0J964J6 .

National Fish, Wildlife, and Plants Climate Adaptation Partnership (2012):  National Fish, Wildlife, and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy . Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, Council on Environmental Quality, Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Washington, D.C. DOI: 10.3996/082012-FWSReport-1

IPCC (2019). Summary for Policymakers. In: IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, M. Tignor, E. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Nicolai, A. Okem, J. Petzold, B. Rama, N.M. Weyer (eds.)]. In press.

NASA JPL: "Consensus: 97% of climate scientists agree."  Global Climate Change . A website at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus). (Accessed July 2013.)

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Global warming.

The causes, effects, and complexities of global warming are important to understand so that we can fight for the health of our planet.

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Ash spews from a coal-fueled power plant in New Johnsonville, Tennessee, United States.

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Global warming is the long-term warming of the planet’s overall temperature. Though this warming trend has been going on for a long time, its pace has significantly increased in the last hundred years due to the burning of fossil fuels . As the human population has increased, so has the volume of fossil fuels burned. Fossil fuels include coal, oil, and natural gas, and burning them causes what is known as the “greenhouse effect” in Earth’s atmosphere.

The greenhouse effect is when the sun’s rays penetrate the atmosphere, but when that heat is reflected off the surface cannot escape back into space. Gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels prevent the heat from leaving the atmosphere. These greenhouse gasses are carbon dioxide , chlorofluorocarbons, water vapor , methane , and nitrous oxide . The excess heat in the atmosphere has caused the average global temperature to rise overtime, otherwise known as global warming.

Global warming has presented another issue called climate change. Sometimes these phrases are used interchangeably, however, they are different. Climate change refers to changes in weather patterns and growing seasons around the world. It also refers to sea level rise caused by the expansion of warmer seas and melting ice sheets and glaciers . Global warming causes climate change, which poses a serious threat to life on Earth in the forms of widespread flooding and extreme weather. Scientists continue to study global warming and its impact on Earth.

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MINDANAO: Dealing with climate change is the challenge of the generation

With the announcement of a La Niña coming to the country, thoughts about climate and the changes therein permeate the air, and discussion about its effects on our daily lives are vital conversations we need to have, and engage more deeply.

We have seen how extreme weather wreaks havoc on economies. Experts have already told us repeatedly how we as a country are especially at risk of disasters spawned by a changing climate and the economic havoc it will bring.

The climate challenge looms especially large for those in Mindanao who grow crops. Shifting climate patterns affect the flowering of many crops that bear fruit, affecting harvest times and volumes.

This extends to the poultry and livestock sector, since they are fed with the corn we grow. In turn, incomes of those in the agricultural sector, which is a significant part of Mindanao’s current economy and potential will be affected.

Climate change and the more frequent disasters expected from these, affect the operations of other businesses, including the manufacturing and distribution of products.

In the country, typhoon season means delays in the shipment of products, preventing the people from accessing the goods and services they need, and diminishing income opportunities.

The effects on income and business disruptions are clear for all to see.

Thus, addressing the climate change challenge means that we go beyond our lamentations and gather more solutions. We, yes, we, including me and you, will all need to contribute and document our ideas that can help each other, as our collective experience and the solutions drawn from these are how we address the challenge of a generation.

This challenge prods many of us who own businesses to think of strategies to make our businesses resilient to disruptions. As we enter strategic planning season, understanding and dealing with the effect of climate related disruptions ought to form part of our assessments, as it adds a layer to discussing other disruptions, challenges and opportunities.

Key here is figuring out how we can effectively source our inputs and how we can sell more volume in more markets.

To my mind we can start with mapping backward how we produce our products. Are we compliant with environment, health and safety requirements and best practices? Are we able to find alternative or back up suppliers in case disruptions take place?

The next step would be mapping forward how and where we sell them to a wider set of customers and markets.

Once we figure that, we become more competitive even in difficult circumstances.

Clinical trials

We eagerly anticipate the release of the results of the clinical trials for virgin coconut oil and lagundi as adjunct therapies for COVID-19. The Department of Science and Technology's work in pushing these is truly appreciated and inspiring. I hope many young graduates of science courses can pursue fields in science and technology.

At the national level, the proposed virology institute will attract many of our young minds to research on means to address various viral diseases.

At the regional level I think the DOST regional offices will be working more closely with other agencies to pursue innovation related research that can offer technology options that can assist our MSMEs to make them more competitive.

A strong suggestion perhaps is that the studies can also look into having these and other similar locally available inputs to deal with other viral infections such as dengue fever.

May this effort continue! Let us continue staying safe!

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