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Climatic and geographic factors characterizing local conditions, as well as the ecological state of the external environment, have a direct effect on human health, morbidity, and life expectancy. The paper considers the basic concepts of medical ecology, a pathogenetic role of environmental atmospheric pollution in the development of environmentally induced and environmentally dependent diseases associated with exposure to meteorological factors. In addition to the major hygienic risk factors affecting the public health (a level of air, water, and soil pollution), the levels of acoustic and electromagnetic background, the type of human nutrition, architectural and planning conditions of human life are of significant importance. Global climate warming causes numerous environmental changes, primarily an increase in surface air temperature, which in turn entails global changes in weather conditions that lead to various weather anomalies. Human health is directly dependent on environmental conditions and a degree of adaptation to them. The paper highlights the issues of diagnosing environmentally induced diseases and measures to counteract their spread. Based on the system diagnosis using physiological indicators of human health and the integration of the adaptation and nosological approaches, a hardware-software complex has been developed and introduced into medical practice. Corrective technologies of regenerative medicine that are used for ecologically dependent pathologies are described. Their application in the process of the complex sanatorium and resort treatment is most effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AI chatbots such as ChatGPT help people produce texts. According to media reporting, these texts are also used for educational purposes. Thus, AI influences people's knowledge and perception of current issues. This paper examines the narrative of ChatGPT's stories on climate change. Our explorative analysis reveals that ChatGPT's stories on climate change show a relatively uniform structure and similar content. Generally, the narrative is in line with scientific knowledge on climate change; the stories convey no significant misinformation. However, specific topics in current debates on global warming are conspicuously missing. According to the ChatGPT narrative, humans as a species are responsible for climate change and specific economic activities or actors associated with carbon emissions play no role. Analogously, the social structuration of vulnerability to climate impacts and issues of climate justice are hardly addressed. ChatGPT's narrative consists of de-politicized stories that are highly optimistic about technological progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biodiversity reserves are a crucial in-situ method to conserve biodiversity hotspots as they are sensitive to climate change. The Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve (NDBR) in the western Himalayas is enriched with diverse endemic flora and fauna and endorses the second-highest mountain peak in the world. However, in the recent decade, this region has potentially warmed at an alarming rate. With 36 temperature and precipitation indices from high-resolution 40-year data from ERA5 reanalysis and CHIRPS, this paper assesses the state of warming and extreme climatic events. Apart from the indices, Landsat (NASA/USGS, USA) and QuickSCAT (ISRO, India) were utilized to assess the region's response to climate change. An increase of 0.73ºC in the last decade for minimum, 0.26°C for maximum temperatures was observed, with the highest anomaly of 1.7°C in 2016. The reserve's vegetation pattern has changed with the vegetative region's dispersal towards the north and higher elevations. In the year 2000, the area without any vegetation covered 79% of the total area, which declined to a mere 23.8% in the year 2020, equivalent to a 70% decline in the area. Similarly, the area with very dense region covered only 0.02% of the total area in the year 2000, and in the year 2020, it increased to 109%. Snow cover seems to be worst affected in the region with dense snow cover declining maximum by 2020. From coverage of 12.3% of the total area of the reserves, it was reduced to a mere 0.02%, showing a decline of nearly 100% in the region. Our findings show that although protected areas are meant to be resilient to external anthropogenic intrusions, they are highly susceptible to the intrinsic forces of induced climate change. We suggest that reserve managers enable robust measures to identify the distribution of vulnerable species and introduce new methods to preserve the pristine hotspot region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In northern regions, the long-term serviceability of infrastructure founded on frozen ground is adversely affected by climate warming. Rates of change in temperature, which are not identical spatially and temporally, can remarkably dictate the magnitude and evolution of permafrost degradation. Investigating such impacts requires a non-isothermal rate-dependent geomechanical constitutive model for ice-contained geomaterials. In this paper, a critical-state thermo-elasto-viscoplastic (TEVP) constitutive model is developed for modeling time- and temperature-dependent behavior of frozen soils using the concepts of thermo-elasticity and thermo-viscoplasticity. Solid phase stress (defined as the excess of total stress over fluid pressure), in addition to the cryogenic suction, are considered as the two independent stress state variables to establish the model. The proposed model is able to satisfactorily capture the rate-dependent behavior of frozen soils observed in the experimental tests reported in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract—The paper presents the results of a study of spatiotemporal variability of the characteristics of the wind field in the free atmosphere of the Northern Hemisphere in the SEVIRI radiometer field of view of European geostationary meteorological satellites of the second generation Meteosat 8–Meteosat 11 in the time interval 2007–2021. It is noted that the maximum wind speeds, as well as the maximum average monthly and seasonal anomalies of the wind speed modulus, are observed over the Atlantic. A feature of the temporal variability of the area-averaged wind speed modulus is revealed, which consists in a change in the sign of the trend at the turn of 2015–2017 from positive to negative. At the same time, positive linear trends in the time intervals from 2007 to the points of a change in the sign of the trend over the Atlantic, the entire region under consideration and Eurasia, including the European territory of the Russian Federation, are significantly different from zero with a probability of more than 95% and the negative trend is significant only over the Atlantic. A high correlation was noted in the area of seasonal wind speed variations with the area of Arctic sea ice and temperature characteristics of the troposphere at levels of 500 and 200 hPa. Based on the analysis of the relationship between wind speed variability and the main climatic characteristics and large-scale atmospheric processes, a scheme is proposed for the effect of the accelerating reduction in the area of Arctic sea ice associated with global warming on wind speed in the free atmosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The warming in the first half of the 20th century in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) (early 20th century warming (ETCW)) was comparable in magnitude to the current warming, but occurred at a time when the growth rate of the greenhouse gas (GG) concentration in the atmosphere was 4–5 times slower than in recent decades. The mechanisms of the early warming are still a subject of discussion. The ETCW was most pronounced in the high latitudes of the NH, and the recent reconstructions consistently indicate a significant negative anomaly of the Arctic sea ice area during early warming period linked with enhanced Atlantic water inflow to the Arctic and amplified warming in high latitudes of the NH. Assessing the contributions of internal variability and external natural and anthropogenic factors to this climatic anomaly is key for understanding historical and modern climate dynamics. This paper considers mechanisms of ETCW associated with various internal variability and external anthropogenic and natural factors. An analysis of the findings on the topic of long-term studies of climate variations in the NH during the period of instrumental observations does not allow one to attribute the ETCW to one particular mechanism of internal climate variability or external forcing of the climate. Most likely, this event was caused by a combined effect of long-term climatic fluctuations in the North Atlantic and the North Pacific with a noticeable contribution of external radiative forcing associated with a decrease in volcanic activity, changes in solar activity, and an increase in GG concentration in the atmosphere due to anthropogenic emissions. Furthermore, this climate variation in high latitudes of the NH has been enhanced by a number of positive feedbacks. An overview of existing research is given, as are the main mechanisms of internal and external climate variability in the NH in the early 20th century. Despite the fact that the internal variability of the climate system is apparently the main mechanism that explains the ETCW, the quantitative assessment of the contribution of each factor remains uncertain, since it significantly depends on the initial conditions in the models and the lack of instrumental data in the early 20th century, especially in polar latitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arctic is rapidly warming posing a significant threat to underlying permafrost. Permafrost degradation has already resulted in extensive damage to the Arctic's built infrastructure, putting communities and industries at risk. Projected climate warming will further reduce the capacity of permafrost to support infrastructure, thereby requiring a rethinking of construction and development of permafrost regions in the future. This paper focuses on three Arctic regions with a substantial presence of population and infrastructure on permafrost: USA (Alaska), Canada, and Russia. The three regions' permafrost construction practices are examined in order to identify best practices and major gaps. We identify a lack of standardized, codified construction guidelines; an absence of permafrost-geotechnical monitoring in communities; barriers to integrating climate scenarios into future planning; limited data sharing; and low numbers of permafrost professionals as major constraints limiting the region's resilience in the face of climate change. Refining building practices and standards, implementing operational permafrost monitoring systems, developing downscaled climate projections, and integrating local knowledge will minimize the impacts of permafrost degradation under rapidly warming climatic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is a critical issue of our time, and its causes, pathways, and forecasts remain a topic of broader discussion. In this paper, we present a novel data driven pathway analysis framework to identify the key processes behind mean global temperature and sea level rise, and to forecast the magnitude of their increase from the present to 2100. Based on historical data and dynamic statistical modeling alone, we have established the causal pathways that connect increasing greenhouse gas emissions to increasing global mean temperature and sea level, with its intermediate links encompassing humidity, sea ice coverage, and glacier mass, but not for sunspot numbers. Our results indicate that if no action is taken to curb anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the global average temperature would rise to an estimated 3.28 °C (2.46–4.10 °C) above its pre-industrial level while the global sea level would be an estimated 573 mm (474–671 mm) above its 2021 mean by 2100. However, if countries adhere to the greenhouse gas emission regulations outlined in the 2021 United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP26), the rise in global temperature would lessen to an average increase of 1.88 °C (1.43–2.33 °C) above its pre-industrial level, albeit still higher than the targeted 1.5 °C, while the sea level increase would reduce to 449 mm (389–509 mm) above its 2021 mean by 2100. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines meteorological and vegetation-monitoring data collected in the Northern Caspian semidesert over a 70-year period. It is established that the average air temperature of the hydrological year has gradually increased over the monitoring period by 2.73°C (0.039°C/years). Prior to 2000, this increase in temperature was caused by warming of the cold season; after 2000, by warming of the warm season. The precipitation amount in the spring–summer period increased, mainly in 1978–1995, due to rainfalls in April–June. The humidity factor dynamics makes it possible to distinguish three periods. The first period (1951–1977) features insignificant fluctuations around the average humidity factor value (0.30). The second period (1978–1994) is characterized by abundant wetting. By contrast, the third period (1995–2020) is distinguished by severe aridity. These climatic changes have significantly transformed mechanisms responsible for the formation of snow cover, surface runoff of spring melt water, and groundwater level. Despite such fluctuations in natural conditions, the annual vegetation productivity on virgin lands remains in dynamic equilibrium changing over time in a wave-like manner; no invasions of alien species occur. By 2000, the ongoing warming of the winter months made the sustainable development of forest crops impossible. The absence of snow accumulation and surface inflow of spring melt waters deprived planted forest stands of additional wetting sources. Recurrent summer atmospheric droughts intensified their withering. The production of agricultural crops was discontinued since the mid-1990s due to annual harvest failures and the aridity of growing seasons. The climate warming observed in the last two decades contributes to the restoration of the original appearance of plain semidesert Northern Caspian landscapes (without agricultural fields and planted forest stands). Out of necessity, local communities are returning to the extensive cattle breeding traditionally practiced there since ancient times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paleontological studies of the distant past and historical chronicles of the last millennia indicate that warming and cooling of the climate on our planet, replacing each other, have taken place in a continuous series. An important role in this process has been and is played by cosmic factors: variations in solar activity and parameters of the Earth's orbital motion in the gravitational field of the Sun and the planets of the Solar System. It is suggested that the currently observed climate change is associated with a decrease in the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit and the inclination of the axis of its rotation relative to the plane of the ecliptic, which has been going on for almost 30 thousand years. Both processes lead to changes in the boundaries of climatic zones. In the foreseeable future, these processes will proceed in the same direction. Therefore, the current trend towards climate change will continue. Despite the importance of addressing the problem of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions as soon as possible, this paper expresses doubts about the possibility of fending off climate warming in this way. It is proposed to focus on the development of mathematical climate models taking into account space factors and on finding the best ways to adapt industry, transport systems, and the environment to the conditions of expected climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional climate projections indicate that European summer precipitation may change considerably in the future. Southern Europe can expect substantial drying while Northern Europe could actually become wetter. Model spread and internal variability in these projections are large, however, and unravelling the processes that underlie the changes is essential to get more confidence in these projections. Large-scale circulation change is one of the contributors to model spread. In this paper we quantify the role of future large-scale circulation changes to summer precipitation change, using a 16-member single-model ensemble obtained with the regional climate model RACMO2, forced by the global climate model EC-Earth2.3 and the RCP8.5 emission scenario. Using the method of circulation analogues three contributions to the future precipitation change are distinguished. The first is the precipitation change occurring without circulation change (referred to as the thermodynamic term). This contribution is characterised by a marked drying-to-wetting gradient as one moves north from the Mediterranean. The second contribution measures the effects of changes in the mean circulation. It has a very different spatial pattern and is closely related to the development of a region of high pressure (attaining its maximum west of Ireland) and the associated anti-cyclonic circulation response. For a large area east of Ireland including parts of western Europe, it is the major contributor to the overall drying signal, locally explaining more than 90% of the ensemble-mean change. In regions where the patterns overlap, the signal-to-noise ratio of the total change is either enhanced or reduced depending on their relative signs. Although the second term is expected to be particularly model dependent, the high-pressure region west of Ireland also appears in CMIP5 and CMIP6 ensemble-mean projections. The third contribution records the effects of changes in the circulation variability. This term has the smallest net contribution, but a relatively large uncertainty. The analogues are very good in partitioning the ensemble-mean precipitation change, but describe only up to 40% of the ensemble-spread. This demonstrates that other precipitation-drivers (SST, spring soil moisture etc.) will generally strongly influence trends in single climate realisations. This also re-emphasises the need for large ensembles or using alternative methods like the Pseudo Global Warming approach where signal to noise ratios are higher. Nevertheless, identifying the change mechanisms helps to understand the future uncertainties and differences between models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many regions around the world are facing climate changes, with substantial increase in air temperature over the past decades, which is mainly related to continental and global warming forced by the higher greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The objectives of this study were to use the Köppen climate classification to detect local climate change based on a historical series of 100 years and to assess if such change is related to those that are occurring in other spatial scales as a likely consequence of increasing GHG. This paper brings a content full of innovative results. The study area presented an average annual air temperature increase by 0.9 °C between 1917 and 2016, rising from 21.4 °C for the first climatological normal (1917–1946) to 22.3 °C for the last one (1987–2016). Furthermore, in the summer months, the temperature rose from 24.5 to 25.3 °C, and in the winter months, such increase was from 17.1 (1917–1946) to 18.3 °C (1987–2016). Our findings showed the subtropical conditions (Cfa in Köppen's classification) in the study area persisted from the beginning of the analysis (1917–1946) until the climatological normal of 1979–2008, with a clear tendency of tropicalization after that with a change in the climate type of Piracicaba from subtropical to tropical, which can now be classified as tropical with dry winter (Aw climate type). The local average air temperature showed concordances with the long-term air temperature anomalies from regional, continental, and global scales, indicating that all of them may be linked with increasing GHG emissions, since well-defined long-term linear relationships (r2 = 0.99) were observed between continental and global average air temperature anomalies and atmospheric CO2 concentration observed at the NOAA Lab in Mauna Loa in the last 59 years. While the local and regional forcing effects remain to be fully unraveled, our study provided a valid and strong scientific sound evidence that climate change occurred in Piracicaba, southeastern Brazil, in the last 100 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early studies, northern vegetation response to global warming recognised both increases in biomass/cover and shrinking of species' distributional ranges. Subsequent field measurements focussed on vegetation cover and biomass increases ("greening"), and more recently decreases ("browning"). However, satellite observations show that more than 50% of arctic vegetation has not changed significantly despite rapid warming. While absence of change in remote sensing data does not necessarily mean no ecological change on the ground, the significant proportion of the Arctic that appears to be stable in the face of considerable climate change points to a greater need to understand Arctic ecosystem stability. In this paper, we performed an extensive review of the available literature to seek balances or imbalances between research focussing on "greening", "browning" and "stability/no change". We find that greening studies dominate the literature though two relatively small areas of the Arctic are disproportionately represented for this main change process. Critically, there are too few studies anywhere investigating stability. We highlight the need to understand the mechanisms driving Arctic ecosystem stability, and the potential longer-term consequences of remaining stable in a rapidly changing climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of wind generated waves due to the prevailing climate change induced by global warming is vital for benefit to the coastal community. In the present paper, the hindcasting of decadal variation namely (i) 1979–1992, (ii) 1993–2006, and (iii) 2007–2019 of wind-wave climate over seasonal and annual scale through 41 years starting from 1979 is carried out using ERA5 reanalysis wind-forcing with a daily temporal and 0.5° × 0.5° spatial resolution. The numerical simulations are executed over the computational domains (i) Global—Indian Ocean and (ii) Regional—south Gujarat to north Goa for evaluating the variability analysis of annual and seasonal mean significant wave heights. The evaluation framework is validated over three in-situ measurement locations with good correlation as compared to the simulated results. The results indicate that at this site the wind and wave activity is noted to increase during transition from 1979–1992 to 1993–2006, then a declination of mean significant wave height is noted during the span 2007–2019. Further, along with the spatial variation estimation, 27 locations along 15 m bathymetric contour at 25 km interval are selected for trend line study. All the 27 locations exhibits a similar kind of trend by variation of decreasing trend from 1979–2019 with variations 0.07–0.22 cm/year. This study highlights the significance in simulating the prevailing wind-wave changes at a regional level considering the impact of the climatology and seasonality changes for effective coastal management, environmental impact assessments and sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative estimation of long-term trends in the variability of the largest Atlantic upwellings (Canary and Benguela) has been carried out in this paper. Satellite data on the sea surface temperature and three surface wind datasets prepared by different scientific groups have been used. The difference in the calculated absolute vertical velocities due to alongshore wind drift and horizontal wind-field nonuniformity reach tens of percent. All time series demonstrate the common tendency for the intensification of the upwellings from the 1980s to the early 1990s. This confirms published materials concerning the intensification of Canary and Benguela upwellings under global warming. However, since the late 1990s, the intensification of the upwellings has nearly ceased. This proves the highly important role of the natural interdecadal climate variations in the variability of intensity of generation of upwellings during the period of regular satellite measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an assessment of Article 4.1 of the Paris Agreement on climate; the main goal of which is to provide guidance on how “to achieve the long-term temperature goal set out in Article 2”. Paraphrasing, Article 4.1 says that, to achieve this end, we should decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions so that net anthropogenic GHG emissions fall to zero in the second half of this century. To aggregate net GHG emissions, 100-year global warming potentials (GWP-100) are commonly used to convert non-CO2 emissions to equivalent CO2 emissions. The GWP-scaling method is tested using methane as an example. The temperature projections using GWP-100 scaling are shown to be seriously in error. This throws doubt on the use of GWP-100 scaling to estimate net GHG emissions. An alternative method to determine the net-zero point for GHG emissions based on radiative forcing is derived, where the net-zero point is identified with the maximum of GHG forcing. This shows that, to meet the Article 2 warming goal, the net-zero point for GHG emissions needs to be reached as early as 2036, much sooner than in the Article 4.1 window. Other scientific problems in Article 4.1 that further undermine its purpose to guide efforts to achieve the Article 2 temperature targets are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The treatment of uncertainty in climate-change science is dominated by the far-reaching influence of the 'frequentist' tradition in statistics, which interprets uncertainty in terms of sampling statistics and emphasizes p-values and statistical significance. This is the normative standard in the journals where most climate-change science is published. Yet a sampling distribution is not always meaningful (there is only one planet Earth). Moreover, scientific statements about climate change are hypotheses, and the frequentist tradition has no way of expressing the uncertainty of a hypothesis. As a result, in climate-change science, there is generally a disconnect between physical reasoning and statistical practice. This paper explores how the frequentist statistical methods used in climate-change science can be embedded within the more general framework of probability theory, which is based on very simple logical principles. In this way, the physical reasoning represented in scientific hypotheses, which underpins climate-change science, can be brought into statistical practice in a transparent and logically rigorous way. The principles are illustrated through three examples of controversial scientific topics: the alleged global warming hiatus, Arctic-midlatitude linkages, and extreme event attribution. These examples show how the principles can be applied, in order to develop better scientific practice. "La théorie des probabilités n'est que le bon sens reduit au calcul." (Pierre-Simon Laplace, Essai Philosophiques sur les Probabilités, 1819). "It is sometimes considered a paradox that the answer depends not only on the observations but on the question; it should be a platitude." (Harold Jeffreys, Theory of Probability, 1st edition, 1939). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 50 years, temperatures on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) have risen roughly twice as fast as the global average, making it the most unpredictable region of environmental change due to global warming. In this paper, an Environmental Area Index model was developed using data from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project to assess the ecological risk faced by QTP ecosystems under the influence of climate factors. The results show that ecological risk gradually decreases from northwest to the southeast, and there are different trends in ecological risk for each class in areas with different elevation gradients. As elevation increased, the proportion of potential risk areas gradually decreased, and the proportion of high- and higher-risk areas gradually increased. We predict that in the period 2021–2100, the overall ecological risk change trend on the QTP will not be obvious, but there will be a more obvious change on the vertical gradient. In general, under the existing global climate change scenario, the ecological risk faced by the QTP show a decreasing trend under the influence of climate factors, and the decrease in ecological risks is much higher at higher elevations than at lower elevations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air temperature is the main climatic variable for climate change and global warming assessment. In different regions, different climatic features and forcing factors affect air temperature behaviour and development differently. In this paper, time series of monthly and annual absolute minimum, mean and absolute maximum air temperatures measured in the period Jan. 1949–Dec. 2018 at two meteorological stations, Zagreb Grič and Lastovo, were analysed. The stations are situated in distinct climatological areas in geographically and climatologically completely opposite parts of Croatia. The climate of Zagreb Grič station is mild continental. Station Lastovo is located on the small isolated Adriatic Sea island, which has a hot Mediterranean climate. The distance by air between the two analysed meteorological stations is 340 km. In time series of the absolute annual minimum air temperatures measured at both analysed stations, an increasing trend is not statistically significant, while in the time series of mean annual and absolute annual maximum air temperatures, the trends are statistically significant at the level p<0.01. The statistically significant trend of air temperature increase at both stations appeared in the warm season of the year generally from May to August. The day-to-day (DTD) method established a decrease in night-time to night-time air temperature variability, and an increase in the day-time to day-time temperature variability at Lastovo. In Zagreb Grič, the situation is the opposite but the process is very slow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An Erratum to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1028334X23070188 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]