layer over the South Pole in the late 1970s went undetected for years. The satellite instrumentation did not fail; rather, the computer programs written to analyze the vast volumes of satellite data were instructed to reject measurements that diverged sharply from expected normal conditions. Amazingly, the rejected values were called to no one’s attention. Noticing outliers in ground-based reco...

Water temperature is a primary driver of stream ecosystems and commonly forms the basis of stream classifications. Robust models of stream temperature are critical as the climate changes, but estimating daily stream temperature poses several important challenges. We developed a statistical model that accounts for many challenges that can make stream temperature estimation difficult. Our model i...

It has been suggested that climate change impacts on the electric sector will account for the majority of global economic damages by the end of the current century and beyond [Rose S, et al. (2014) Understanding the Social Cost of Carbon: A Technical Assessment]. The empirical literature has shown significant increases in climate-driven impacts on overall consumption, yet has not focused on the...

Thomas M. Smith et al . ("how accurate are climate simulations?", Perspectives, 19 April, p. 483) suggest that today's climate models simulate the climate history of Earth over the past 150 years "within the observed uncertainty of the observations." In comparing model results with trends in sea surface temperature in several ocean basins, they estimate the uncertainty in model output arising f...

Increased amount of green house gases (GHG) in the atmosphere will cause climate change that adversely impact crop production especially arid and semi-arid regions developing countries. Development implementation field level adaptations measures to cope up with are necessary farmers whose livelihood depends on crop-based income. Crop simulation models incorporate soil-crop-climate processes pla...

On 31 March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on the impacts of climate change on humans and ecosystems (see go.nature.com/ad5v1b). These are real risks that need to be accounted for in planning for adaptation and mitigation. Pricing the risks with integrated models of physics and economics lets their costs be compared to those of limiting climate ...

Great Lakes water levels have fluctuated over thousands of years. High water levels were a problem in the 1980s, but a recent sudden drop in Lakes Michigan and Huron has caused particular concern, in part because lower water levels are consistent with many global climate change scenarios. We examined water level data (1860-2006) representing Lakes Michigan and Huron to evaluate changes in both ...

Concern over rapid global changes and the potential for interactions among multiple threats are prompting scientists to combine multiple modelling approaches to understand impacts on biodiversity. A relatively recent development is the combination of species distribution models, land-use change predictions, and dynamic population models to predict the relative and combined impacts of climate ch...