Surging Seas

Estimates sea level rise and risk of floods from storm surges in fifty-five low-lying coastal areas in the contiguous United States; land, populations, and housing at risk; and humanitarian and economic implications. Links to interactive map

Climate resilience of the top ten wheat producers in the Mediterranean and the Middle East

Wheat is the main staple crop and an important commodity in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. These are among the few areas in the world where the climate is suitable for growing durum wheat but also are among the most rapidly warming ones, according to the available scenarios of climate projections. How much food security and market stability in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, both depending on wheat production and its interannual variability, are going to be compromised by global warming is an overarching question. To contribute in addressing it, we use a recently established indicator to quantify crop production climate resilience. We present a methodological framework allowing to compute the annual production resilience indicator from nonstationary time series. We apply this approach on the wheat production of the 10 most important producers in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Our findings shows that if no adaptation will take place, wheat production reliability in the Mediterranean and the Middle East will be threatened by climate change already at 1.5 °C global warming. Average climaterelated wheat production losses will exceed the worst past event even if the 2 °C mitigation target is met. These results call for urgent action on adaptation to climate change and support further efforts for mitigation, fully consistently with the Paris Agreement recommendations.Fil: Zampieri, Matteo. Joint Research Centre; ItaliaFil: Toreti, Andrea. Joint Research Centre; ItaliaFil: Ceglar, Andrej. Joint Research Centre; ItaliaFil: Naumann, Gustavo. Joint Research Centre; Italia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Turco, Marco. Universidad de Murcia; EspañaFil: Tebaldi, Claudia. Joint Global Change Research Institute; Itali

Probabilistic 21st and 22nd Century Sea-Level Projections at a Global Network of Tide-Gauge Sites

Sea-level rise due to both climate change and non-climatic factors threatens coastal settlements, infrastructure, and ecosystems. Projections of mean global sea-level (GSL) rise provide insufficient information to plan adaptive responses; local decisions require local projections that accommodate different risk tolerances and time frames and that can be linked to storm surge projections. Here we present a global set of local sea-level (LSL) projections to inform decisions on timescales ranging from the coming decades through the 22nd century. We provide complete probability distributions, informed by a combination of expert community assessment, expert elicitation, and process modeling. Between the years 2000 and 2100, we project a very likely (90% probability) GSL rise of 0.51.2m under representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5, 0.40.9m under RCP 4.5, and 0.30.8m under RCP 2.6. Site-to-site differences in LSL projections are due to varying non-climatic background uplift or subsidence, oceanographic effects, and spatially variable responses of the geoid and the lithosphere to shrinking land ice. The Antarctic ice sheet (AIS) constitutes a growing share of variance in GSL and LSL projections. In the global average and at many locations, it is the dominant source of variance in late 21st century projections, though at some sites oceanographic processes contribute the largest share throughout the century. LSL rise dramatically reshapes flood risk, greatly increasing the expected number of 1-in-10 and 1-in-100 year events

The Detection and Attribution Model Intercomparison Project DAMIP v1.0) contribution to CMIP6

Detection and attribution (D&A) simulations were important components of CMIP5 and underpinned the climate change detection and attribution assessments of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The primary goals of the Detection and Attribution Model Intercomparison Project (DAMIP) are to facilitate improved estimation of the contributions of anthropogenic and natural forcing changes to observed global warming as well as to observed global and regional changes in other climate variables; to contribute to the estimation of how historical emissions have altered and are altering contemporary climate risk; and to facilitate improved observationally constrained projections of future climate change. D&A studies typically require unforced control simulations and historical simulations including all major anthropogenic and natural forcings. Such simulations will be carried out as part of the DECK and the CMIP6 historical simulation. In addition D&A studies require simulations covering the historical period driven by individual forcings or subsets of forcings only: such simulations are proposed here. Key novel features of the experimental design presented here include firstly new historical simulations with aerosols-only, stratospheric-ozone-only, CO2-only, solar-only, and volcanic-only forcing, facilitating an improved estimation of the climate response to individual forcing, secondly future single forcing experiments, allowing observationally constrained projections of future climate change, and thirdly an experimental design which allows models with and without coupled atmospheric chemistry to be compared on an equal footing

Combined Inhibition of CDK4/6 and PI3K/AKT/mTOR Pathways Induces a Synergistic Anti-Tumor Effect in Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma Cells.

Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is a progressive malignancy associated to the exposure of asbestos fibers. The most frequently inactivated tumor suppressor gene in MPM is CDKN2A/ARF, encoding for the cell cycle inhibitors p16INK4a and p14ARF, deleted in about 70% of MPM cases. Considering the high frequency of alterations of this gene, we tested in MPM cells the efficacy of palbociclib (PD-0332991), a highly selective inhibitor of cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6. The analyses were performed on a panel of MPM cell lines and on two primary culture cells from pleural effusion of patients with MPM. All the MPM cell lines, as well as the primary cultures, were sensitive to palbociclib with a significant blockade in G0/G1 phase of the cell cycle and with the acquisition of a senescent phenotype. Palbociclib reduced the phosphorylation levels of CDK6 and Rb, the expression of myc with a concomitant increased phosphorylation of AKT. Based on these results, we tested the efficacy of the combination of palbociclib with the PI3K inhibitors NVP-BEZ235 or NVP-BYL719. After palbociclib treatment, the sequential association with PI3K inhibitors synergistically hampered cell proliferation and strongly increased the percentage of senescent cells. In addition, AKT activation was repressed while p53 and p21 were up-regulated. Interestingly, two cycles of sequential drug administration produced irreversible growth arrest and senescent phenotype that were maintained even after drug withdrawal. These findings suggest that the sequential association of palbociclib with PI3K inhibitors may represent a valuable therapeutic option for the treatment of MPM

Toward a Quantitative Estimate of Future Heat Wave Mortality under Global Climate Change

Background: Climate change is anticipated to affect human health by changing the distribution of known risk factors. Heat waves have had debilitating effects on human mortality, and global climate models predict an increase in the frequency and severity of heat waves. The extent to which climate change will harm human health through changes in the distribution of heat waves and the sources of uncertainty in estimating these effects have not been studied extensively. Objectives: We estimated the future excess mortality attributable to heat waves under global climate change for a major U.S. city. Methods: We used a database comprising daily data from 1987 through 2005 on mortality from all nonaccidental causes, ambient levels of particulate matter and ozone, temperature, and dew point temperature for the city of Chicago, Illinois. We estimated the associations between heat waves and mortality in Chicago using Poisson regression models. Results: Under three different climate change scenarios for 2081–2100 and in the absence of adaptation, the city of Chicago could experience between 166 and 2,217 excess deaths per year attributable to heat waves, based on estimates from seven global climate models. We noted considerable variability in the projections of annual heat wave mortality; the largest source of variation was the choice of climate model. Conclusions: The impact of future heat waves on human health will likely be profound, and significant gains can be expected by lowering future carbon dioxide emissions

Anthropogenic influence on the drivers of the Western Cape drought 2015-2017

In the period 2015-2017, the Western Cape region has suffered from three consecutive years of below average rainfall - leading to a prolonged drought and acute water shortages, most prominently in the city of Cape Town. After testing that the precipitation deficit is the primary driver behind the reduced surface water availability, we undertake a multi-method attribution analysis for the meteorological drought, defined in terms of a deficit in the 3 years running mean precipitation averaged over the Western Cape area. The exact estimate of the return time of the event is sensitive to the number of stations whose data is incorporated in the analysis but the rarity of the event is unquestionable, with a return time of more than a hundred years. Synthesising the results from five different large model ensembles as well as observed data gives a significant increase by a factor of three (95% confidence interval 1.5-6) of such a drought to occur because of anthropogenic climate change. All the model results further suggest that this trend will continue with future global warming. These results are in line with physical understanding of the effect of climate change at these latitudes and highlights that measures to improve Cape Town's resilience to future droughts are an adaptation priority