The weather in Eurasia, Australia, and North and South America is largely controlled by the strength and position of extratropical storm tracks. Future climate change will likely affect these storm tracks and the associated transport of energy, momentum, and water vapour. Many recent studies have analyzed how storm tracks will change under climate change, and how these changes are related to at...

Two different approaches are described for constraining climate predictions based on observations of past climate change. The first uses large ensembles of simulations from computationally efficient models and the second uses small ensembles from state-of-the-art coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation models. Each approach is described and the advantages of each are discussed. When compar...

Projections of future climate change made using state-of-the-art climate models suggest that changes over the coming century will be much larger than experienced over the past 100 years. The case for taking action to mitigate these human-induced (or ‘anthropogenic’) changes rests on the credibility of these models. There is a vast scientific literature on the development and testing of these mo...

Atmospheric variations on multi-decadal time scales, or climate regimes, can cause significant alterations throughout the physical environment, often with remarkable consequences for animal populations and ecosystems. Here we report that the climate regimes in the Baltic Sea area, which are based on the North Atlantic Oscillation and two more regional oceanographic variables, account for the ob...

The study of climate change is a very important field of science, since life is directly affected by these changes. Many proxies, i.e. data previously preserved within speleothems, sediments, tree rings, corals, etc., have been observed and many theoretical models have been developed in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of past and future climate. Investigating the past climate change...

Understanding how climate change will affect the planet is a key issue worldwide. Questions concerning the pace and impacts of climate change are thus central to many ecological and biogeochemical studies, and addressing the consequences of climate change is now high on the list of priorities for funding agencies. Here, we review the interactions between climate change and plankton communities,...

The potential impacts of climate-induced changes in air pollution levels and its impacts on population health were investigated. The IPCC scenario (SRES A2) was used to analyse the effects of climate on future PM10 concentrations over Portugal and their impact on short-term population exposure and mortality. The air quality modelling system has been applied with high spatial resolution looking ...

Is the Sun the controller of climate changes, only the instigator of changes that are mostly forced by the system feedbacks, or simply a convenient scapegoat for climate variations lacking any other obvious cause? This question is addressed for suggested solar forcing mechanisms operating on time scales from billions of years to decades. Each mechanism fails to generate the expected climate res...