BACKGROUND The establishment rate of invasive alien insect species has been increasing worldwide during the past century. This trend has been widely attributed to increased rates of international trade and associated species introductions, but rarely linked to environmental change. To better understand and manage the bioinvasion process, it is crucial to understand the relationship between glob...

When floods ravage Asian monsoon regions in summer, megadroughts often attack extratropical North America, which feature an intercontinental contrasting precipitation anomaly between Asia and North America. However, the characteristics of the contrasting Asian-North American (CANA) precipitation anomalies and associated mechanisms have not been investigated specifically. In this article, we fir...

Recent public debate and the scientific literature have frequently cited a "pause" or "hiatus" in global warming. Yet, multiple sources of evidence show that climate change continues unabated, raising questions about the status of the "hiatus". To examine whether the notion of a "hiatus" is justified by the available data, we first document that there are multiple definitions of the "hiatus" in...

The growth rate of climate forcing by measured greenhouse gases peaked near 1980 at almost 5 W/m(2) per century. This growth rate has since declined to approximately 3 W/m(2) per century, largely because of cooperative international actions. We argue that trends can be reduced to the level needed for the moderate "alternative" climate scenario ( approximately 2 W/m(2) per century for the next 5...

Very often, when I talk to the public or the media about “global warming”, they ask me if I believe in global warming. This unfortunate question is apparently very popular among scientists as well. And I say ‘unfortunate’ because when we are dealing with a scientific problem ‘believing’ has no place. In science we either ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’. We ‘believe’ only when we cannot possibly prove a t...

In a short period of time, climate 'geoengineering' has been added to the list of technoscientific issues subject to deliberative public engagement. Here, we analyse this rapid trajectory of publicization and explore the particular manner in which the possibility of intentionally altering the Earth's climate system to curb global warming has been incorporated into the field of 'public engagemen...