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The transnational climate movement mobilized massively around the 2015 Paris Climate Summit (COP21) - despite a growing consensus within the movement that the UN was unable to solve the climate crisis. Extensive ethnographic fieldwork is the basis for exploration of the profound effect this consensus had on the movement around and beyond COP21. Firstly, it facilitated a historic degree of unification within a previously divided movement, around a desire to focus less on influencing official negotiations, although the degree to which negotiations should be ignored, and what actions should focus on instead, created new cleavages. Secondly, organizers experienced that mobilizing around a summit whilst trying to ignore it is problematic, thus limiting strategic options and presenting an ‘efficacy dilemma’. This, finally, limited the movement’s success, and fueled desires for a transnational climate movement beyond COPs. Whether those desires can be realized without the organizational benefits of summit mobilizations remains unanswered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information about climate projections and climate predictions and the European Climate Prediction System. It highlights the phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, which aims to provide a basis for coordinated and consistent global climate simulations, and the underlying basis for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as other issues on global and regional climate changes.

In an Editorial discussing the Special Issue on Climate Change and Health, guest editors Jonathan Patz and Madeleine Thompson summarize key issues in the field and describe the significance of research studies included in the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting successful climate change mitigation policies requires the public to choose how to balance the sometimes competing goals of managing CO2 emissions and achieving economic growth. It follows that collective action on climate change depends on members of the public to be knowledgeable of the causes and economic ramifications of climate change. The existing literature, however, shows that people often struggle to correctly reason about the fundamental accumulation dynamics that drive climate change. Previous research has focused on using analogy to improve people’s reasoning about accumulation, which has been met with some success. However, these existing studies have neglected the role economic factors might play in shaping people’s decisions in relation to climate change. Here, we introduce a novel iterated decision task in which people attempt to achieve a specific economic goal by interacting with a causal dynamic system in which human economic activities, CO2 emissions, and warming are all causally interrelated. We show that when the causal links between these factors are highlighted, people’s ability to achieve the economic goal of the task is enhanced in a way that approaches optimal responding, and avoids dangerous levels of warming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1990s, regionalisation in England held out the promise that regions could forge their own unique policies to address climate change. This paper considers the Yorkshire & Humber region's climate change action plan. The study uses critical discourse to analyse the plan and a series of interviews with those who helped develop the initiative. It shows that in the case of Yorkshire & Humber, the Regional Development Agency was a key player in shaping the policies. This resulted in a focus on un-proven large-scale technological projects to mitigate climate change and create significant economic development for the region. Little came of this. The need to maintain economic growth seriously undermined the drive to reduce carbon emissions. The findings suggest that the proposed new sub-national governance arrangements will face similar problems in which short-term economic drivers outweigh efforts to reduce carbon emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Soil respiration, RS, the flux of microbially and plant-respired carbon dioxide (CO2) from the soil surface to the atmosphere, is the second-largest terrestrial carbon flux. However, the dynamics of RS are not well understood and the global flux remains poorly constrained. Ecosystem warming experiments, modelling analyses and fundamental biokinetics all suggest that RS should change with climate. This has been difficult to confirm observationally because of the high spatial variability of RS, inaccessibility of the soil medium and the inability of remote-sensing instruments to measure RS on large scales. Despite these constraints, it may be possible to discern climate-driven changes in regional or global RS values in the extant four-decade record of RS chamber measurements. Here we construct a database of worldwide RS observations matched with high-resolution historical climate data and find a previously unknown temporal trend in the RS record after accounting for mean annual climate, leaf area, nitrogen deposition and changes in CO2 measurement technique. We find that the air temperature anomaly (the deviation from the 1961–1990 mean) is significantly and positively correlated with changes in RS. We estimate that the global RS in 2008 (that is, the flux integrated over the Earth’s land surface over 2008) was 98 ± 12 Pg C and that it increased by 0.1 Pg C yr-1 between 1989 and 2008, implying a global RS response to air temperature (Q10) of 1.5. An increasing global RS value does not necessarily constitute a positive feedback to the atmosphere, as it could be driven by higher carbon inputs to soil rather than by mobilization of stored older carbon. The available data are, however, consistent with an acceleration of the terrestrial carbon cycle in response to global climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]