Background: Adverse health effects have been predicted from a so-called “global warming”. The present study is the second in a series that tests the global warming question at the county level in an individual state using an ecological design. The state studied this time is Alabama. Methods: Two response variables, cancer death rates and heart disease death rates for the counties were compared ...

While most animals thermotax only to regulate their temperature, female mosquitoes are attracted to human body heat during pursuit of a blood meal. Here we elucidate the basic rules of Aedes aegypti thermotaxis and test the function of candidate thermoreceptors in this important behavior. We show that host-seeking mosquitoes are maximally attracted to thermal stimuli approximating host body tem...

The anomalously warm winter of 2005 follows similarly warm winters of 2003 and 2004. Although surface air temperature in the winter of 2002 was colder than 1961-2000 average, the depth-integrated temperatures at Mooring 2 indicate that the shift to warmer conditions in the Bering Sea began in the spring of 2000. This warming becomes comparable in its scale with major warm episodes in the late 1...

The last glacial period was terminated by an abrupt warming event in the North Atlantic approximately 15,000 years before the present, and warming events of similar age have been reported from low latitudes. Understanding the mechanism of this termination requires that the precise relative timing of abrupt climate warming in the tropics versus the North Atlantic be known. Nitrogen and argon iso...

The U.K. government has committed to an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, with housing accounting for 27% of total current emissions. There are several drivers both to reduce emissions from homes and to reduce fuel poverty, promoting a range of building and behavioural measures in homes. The health benefits of warmer homes in winter have been described, but there has been less consider...

Field experiments, conducted in 29 air-conditioned offices, used survey questionnaires and physical measurements to investigate workers’ subjective thermal responses and comfort perception. A total of 650 individuals participated in the field study. The thermal neutrality and thermal preference of subjects occurred at 25.6°C and 24.1°C respectively. Responses from those subjects suggest a comfo...

Reductions in Arctic sea ice may promote the negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO-). It has been argued that NAO-related variability can be used an as analogue to predict the effects of Arctic sea ice loss on mid-latitude weather. As NAO- events are associated with colder winters over Northern Europe, a negatively shifted NAO has been proposed as a dynamical pathway for Arctic ...

This paper explores the potential of using subjective well-being (SWB) data to value environmental attributes. A theoretical framework compares this method, also known as the lifesatisfaction approach, with the standard hedonic pricing approach, identifying their similarities and differences. As a corollary, we show how SWB data can be used to test for the equilibrium condition implicit in the ...

[1] Coastal upwelling helps set the physical context for marine ecosystems, and upwelling zones are among the most productive regions of the global ocean. Unlike earlier models, two state-of-the-art climate models exhibit little change during the next century in the magnitude and seasonality of coastal upwelling, but climate models are still probably not sufficiently developed (for example, the...

Quantifying changes in interspecific plant growth and physiology under climate warming will facilitate explanation of the shifts in community structure in subtropical forest. We evaluated the effects of 3 years climate warming (ca. 1°C, 2012-2015) on plant growth and physiological parameters of six subtropical tree species by translocating seedlings and soil from a higher to a lower elevation s...