Identifying island safe havens to prevent the extinction of the World's largest lizard from global warming.

The Komodo dragon () is an endangered, island-endemic species with a naturally restricted distribution. Despite this, no previous studies have attempted to predict the effects of climate change on this iconic species. We used extensive Komodo dragon monitoring data, climate, and sea-level change projections to build spatially explicit demographic models for the Komodo dragon.

StableClim, continuous projections of climate stability from 21000 BP to 2100 CE at multiple spatial scales.

Paleoclimatic data are used in eco-evolutionary models to improve knowledge of biogeographical processes that drive patterns of biodiversity through time, opening windows into past climate-biodiversity dynamics. Applying these models to harmonised simulations of past and future climatic change can strengthen forecasts of biodiversity change. StableClim provides continuous estimates of climate stability from 21,000 years ago to 2100 C.

Cradles of diversity are unlikely relics of regional climate stability.

The stability of regional climates on millennial timescales is theorised to be a primary determinant of nearby diversification [1-5]. Using simulated patterns of past temperature change at monthly timescales [6], we show that the locations of climatically stable regions are likely to have varied considerably across and within millennia during glacial-interglacial cycles of the Late Quaternary. This result has important implications for the role of regional climate stability in theories of speciation, because long-term climate refugia are typically presumed to be 'cradles' of diversity (areas of high speciation) only if they remain stable across Milankovitch climate oscillations [1-5], which operate on multi-millennial time scales [7].

Why decadal to century timescale palaeoclimate data are needed to explain present-day patterns of biological diversity and change.

The current distribution of species, environmental conditions and their interactions represent only one snapshot of a planet that is continuously changing, in part due to human influences. To distinguish human impacts from natural factors, the magnitude and pace of climate shifts, since the Last Glacial Maximum, are often used to determine whether patterns of diversity today are artefacts of past climate change. In the absence of high-temporal resolution palaeoclimate reconstructions, this is generally done by assuming that past climate change occurred at a linear pace between widely spaced (usually, ≥1,000 years) climate snapshots.

Human and natural influences on the changing thermal structure of the atmosphere.

Since the late 1970s, satellite-based instruments have monitored global changes in atmospheric temperature. These measurements reveal multidecadal tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling, punctuated by short-term volcanic signals of reverse sign. Similar long- and short-term temperature signals occur in model simulations driven by human-caused changes in atmospheric composition and natural variations in volcanic aerosols.

Identifying human influences on atmospheric temperature.

We perform a multimodel detection and attribution study with climate model simulation output and satellite-based measurements of tropospheric and stratospheric temperature change. We use simulation output from 20 climate models participating in phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. This multimodel archive provides estimates of the signal pattern in response to combined anthropogenic and natural external forcing (the fingerprint) and the noise of internally generated variability.

Advanced technology paths to global climate stability: energy for a greenhouse planet.

Stabilizing the carbon dioxide-induced component of climate change is an energy problem. Establishment of a course toward such stabilization will require the development within the coming decades of primary energy sources that do not emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, in addition to efforts to reduce end-use energy demand. Mid-century primary power requirements that are free of carbon dioxide emissions could be several times what we now derive from fossil fuels (approximately 10(13) watts), even with improvements in energy efficiency.