Significantly wetter or drier future conditions for one to two thirds of the world's population.

Future projections of precipitation are uncertain, hampering effective climate adaptation strategies globally. Our understanding of changes across multiple climate model simulations under a warmer climate is limited by this lack of coherence across models. Here, we address this challenge introducing an approach that detects agreement in drier and wetter conditions by evaluating continuous 120-year time-series with trends, across 146 Global Climate Model (GCM) runs and two elevated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions scenarios.

Increasing precipitation variability on daily-to-multiyear time scales in a warmer world.

The hydrological cycle intensifies under global warming with precipitation increases. How the increased precipitation varies temporally at a given location has vital implications for regional climates and ecosystem services. On the basis of ensemble climate model projections under a high-emission scenario, here, we show that approximately two-thirds of land on Earth will face a "wetter and more variable" hydroclimate on daily to multiyear time scales.

High sensitivity of tropical precipitation to local sea surface temperature.

Precipitation and atmospheric circulation are the coupled processes through which tropical ocean surface temperatures drive global weather and climate. Local sea surface warming tends to increase precipitation, but this local control is difficult to disentangle from remote effects of conditions elsewhere. As an example of such a remote effect, El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events in the equatorial Pacific Ocean alter precipitation across the tropics.

Large differences in regional precipitation change between a first and second 2 K of global warming.

For adaptation and mitigation planning, stakeholders need reliable information about regional precipitation changes under different emissions scenarios and for different time periods. A significant amount of current planning effort assumes that each K of global warming produces roughly the same regional climate change. Here using 25 climate models, we compare precipitation responses with three 2 K intervals of global ensemble mean warming: a fast and a slower route to a first 2 K above pre-industrial levels, and the end-of-century difference between high-emission and mitigation scenarios.

Must an inventor "possess" an invention to patent it?

The requirements for patenting inventions relating to biotechnology have become increasingly strict and complicated in recent years. Despite early patent rulings that there is no need for an inventor to "reduce to practice" an invention, the courts are now ruling that an inventor must "possess" his or her invention before filing for patent. This review discusses what such "possession" may mean and describes decisions in which courts have found that an inventor has met or failed the possession test before filing for patent protection.