• Energy Research

Climate change is with us. As professionals who place value on evidence-based practice, climate change is something we cannot ignore. The current pandemic of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has demonstrated how global crises can arise suddenly and have a significant impact on public health. Global warming, a chronic process punctuated by acute episodes of extreme weather events, is an insidious global health crisis needing at least as much attention. Many neurological diseases are complex chronic conditions influenced at many levels by changes in the environment. This review aimed to collate and evaluate reports from clinical and basic science about the relationship between climate change and epilepsy. The keywords climate change, seasonal variation, temperature, humidity, thermoregulation, biorhythm, gene, circadian rhythm, heat, and weather were used to search the published evidence. A number of climatic variables are associated with increased seizure frequency in people with epilepsy. Climate change-induced increase in seizure precipitants such as fevers, stress, and sleep deprivation (e.g. as a result of more frequent extreme weather events) or vector-borne infections may trigger or exacerbate seizures, lead to deterioration of seizure control, and affect neurological, cerebrovascular, or cardiovascular comorbidities and risk of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. Risks are likely to be modified by many factors, ranging from individual genetic variation and temperature-dependent channel function, to housing quality and global supply chains. According to the results of the limited number of experimental studies with animal models of seizures or epilepsy, different seizure types appear to have distinct susceptibility to seasonal influences. Increased body temperature, whether in the context of fever or not, has a critical role in seizure threshold and seizure-related brain damage. Links between climate change and epilepsy are likely to be multifactorial, complex, and often indirect, which makes predictions difficult. We need more data on possible climate-driven altered risks for seizures, epilepsy, and epileptogenesis, to identify underlying mechanisms at systems, cellular, and molecular levels for better understanding of the impact of climate change on epilepsy. Further focussed data would help us to develop evidence for mitigation methods to do more to protect people with epilepsy from the effects of climate change.

AbstractUnderstanding climate change impacts on Tropical Storm (TS) activity is crucial for effective adaptation planning and risk assessment, particularly in densely populated low‐lying delta rivers basins like the Ganges and Mekong. The change to TS characteristics with warming is uncertain due to limitations in global climate model resolution and process‐representation and storm tracking algorithms (trackers). Here, we used 13 HighResMIP models and two trackers to estimate the uncertainty in projections of TS characteristics. We found different trackers producing qualitatively similar but quantitatively different results. Our results show a decline (median ∼52%) in the frequency of TS but increase in the strongest TS and Available Cyclone Energy (ACE) of TS over both basins. The higher‐resolution models extract TS with much higher intensity and ACE values compared to the lower‐resolution models. These results have implications for adaptation planning and risk assessment for TS and suggest the need for further high‐resolution modeling studies.

The Keersop catchment (43km(2)) in the south of The Netherlands has been contaminated by the emissions of four zinc ore smelters. The objective of this study was to assess the effects of future projected climate change on the hydrology and the leaching of heavy metals (i.e. Cd and Zn) in the catchment. The numerical, quasi-2D, unsaturated zone Soil Water Atmosphere Plant model was used with 100-year simulated daily time series of precipitation and potential evapotranspiration. The time series are representative of stationary climates for the periods 1961-1990 ("baseline") and 2071-2100 ("future"). The time series of future climate were obtained by downscaling the results of eight regional climate model (RCM) experiments, driven by the SRES A2 emissions scenario, using change factors for a series of climate statistics and applying them to stochastic weather generator models. The time series are characterized by increased precipitation in winter, less precipitation in summer, and higher air temperatures (between 2°C and 5°C) throughout the year. Future climate scenarios project higher evapotranspiration rates, more irrigation, less drainage, lower discharge rates and lower groundwater levels, due to increased evapotranspiration and a slowing down of the groundwater system. As a result, lower concentrations of Cd and Zn in surface water are projected. The reduced leaching of heavy metals, due to drying of the catchment, showed a positive impact on a limited aspect of surface water quality.

AbstractRobust infrastructure networks are vital to ensure community resilience; their failure leads to severe societal disruption and they have important postdisaster functions. However, as these ...

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 379 (2195) ISSN:1364-503X ISSN:1471-2962

It is widely recognized that future rainfall extremes will intensify. This expectation is tied to the Clausius-Clapeyron (CC) relation, stating that the maximum water vapour content in the atmosphere increases by 6–7% per degree warming. Scaling rates for the dependency of hourly precipitation extremes on near-surface (dew point) temperature derived from day-to-day variability have been found to exceed this relation (super-CC). However, both the applicability of this approach in a long-term climate change context, and the physical realism of super-CC rates have been questioned. Here, we analyse three different climate change experiments with a convection-permitting model over Western Europe: simple uniform-warming, 11-year pseudo-global warming and 11-year global climate model driven. The uniform-warming experiment results in consistent increases to the intensity of hourly rainfall extremes of approximately 11% per degree for moderate to high extremes. The other two, more realistic, experiments show smaller increases—usually at or below the CC rate—for moderate extremes, mostly resulting from significant decreases to rainfall occurrence. However, changes to the most extreme events are broadly consistent with 1.5–2 times the CC rate (10–14% per degree), as predicted from the present-day scaling rate for the highest percentiles. This result has important implications for climate adaptation.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Intensification of short-duration rainfall extremes and implications for flash flood risks’.