Unlike peer nations’ residents, Americans are less accepting of, and concerned by, (especially anthropogenic) climate change. Reinforced Theistic Manifest Destiny theory (RTMD; e.g., Ranney, 2012) explains many such “U.S.exceptionalist” phenomena by combining geopolitical history with six belief constructs: afterlife, deity, nationalism, creation, evolution, and global warming. We assess predic...

Mountain waters, glaciers, hazards, and biodiversity are vulnerable to the impacts of global warming. Warming is projected to amplify over mountains by global climate models, yet meteorological records do not show a uniform acceleration of warming with elevation. Here we explore warming-elevation relationships using records from 2660 meteorological stations and determine that the vertical gradi...

The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change commits signatories to preventing 'dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system', leaving unspecified the level of global warming that is dangerous. In the late 1990s, a limit of 2°C global warming above preindustrial temperature was proposed as a 'guard rail' below which most of the dangerous climate impacts could be avoided. T...

Midlatitude weather and climate are dominated by the jet streams and associated eastward moving storm systems. Occasionally, however, these are blocked by persistent anticyclonic regimes known as blocking. Climate models generally predict a small decline in blocking frequency under anthropogenic climate change. However, confidence in these predictions is undermined by, among other things, a lac...

Ecological changes in the phenology and distribution of plants and animals are occurring in all well-studied marine, freshwater, and terrestrial groups. These observed changes are heavily biased in the directions predicted from global warming and have been linked to local or regional climate change through correlations between climate and biological variation, field and laboratory experiments, ...

Northern Hemisphere permafrost affected land ar­ eas contain abont twice as mnch carbon as the global at­ mosphere. This vast carbon pool is vnlnerable to acceler­ ated losses throngh mobilization and decomposition nnder projected global warming. Satellite data records sparming the past 3 decades indicate widespread redactions ( ~ 0.81.3 days decade “ ̂ ) in the mean aimnal snow cover extent and...

The prospect that increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will have measurable effects on the earth’s climate over the next few decades has attracted a vast research effort. Climatologists have faced two main challenges. The first has been to distinguish the signal of human-induced climate change from the noise of interannual and decadal natural variability. The second has b...

The response of terrestrial ecosystems to climate warming has important implications to potential feedbacks to climate. The interactions between topography, climate, and disturbance could alter recruitment patterns to reduce or offset current predicted positive feedbacks to warming at high latitudes. In northern Alaska the Brooks Range poses a complex environmental and ecological barrier to spe...

Our paper documents that land-use change impacts regional and global climate through the surface-energy budget, as well as through the carbon cycle. The surface-energy budget effects may be more important than the carbon-cycle effects. However, land-use impacts on climate cannot be adequately quantified with the usual metric of 'global warming potential'. A new metric is needed to quantify the ...