In the world of climate science there is an increasing demand for contributions from the social sciences, given that the current processes of climate change deeply affect societies. This article is a response to this call, with specific focus on past and potential contributions from anthropology, as we have known it from the 19th century onwards. It is shown how through the ages, different anthropological interests have shaped distinct perspectives on the entanglement of society and nature. It is argued that the present global concerns about climate change necessitate a refashioning of anthropology, and make it expedient to pay attention to the emergent global imaginaries. WIREs Clim Change 2013. doi: 10.1002/wcc.219

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Conflict of interest: The author has declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

The Kyoto Protocol (KP) has played an important role in putting climate change action firmly on the political agenda and to deliver real reductions in industrialized countries' Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. It also led to widespread action in developing countries through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), although real emission reductions were much smaller than how they appear on paper. Policies to promote low emission technologies have been applied widely. Financial support to developing countries from public and private sources has grown to about US$100 billion/year. In 30–40% of CDM projects, foreign technology was used and the investment in renewable energy in developing countries rose to US$ 70 billion/year in 2011, with some Chinese and Indian manufacturers belonging to the top global suppliers. An extensive administrative machinery of reporting of emissions and other data, review, and enforcement has been built. And awareness of climate change, its impacts, and how to tackle it has grown enormously. However, as results from the past are not a guarantee for the future, the prospects for the KP look bleak. Geopolitical developments led to rejection by emerging economies to adopt the KP model of legally binding emission reductions, which triggered reluctance by major industrialized countries to continue this model. With the persistent rejection of the USA of the KP model, it seems a different approach will be needed. This could for instance be a system based on commitments that are only binding under national law or a system based on coordination of policies and measures across countries, which would ‘wake up’ an unused article of the KP. WIREs Clim Change 2013, 4:151–158. doi: 10.1002/wcc.216

Conflict of interest: The author has declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

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Human rights have not played a significant role in the international law and politics of climate change to date. However, there has been increasing interest among legal scholars and moral and political philosophers in a human rights approach to climate change. This review focuses on the new literature in moral and political philosophy that has begun to explore the connections between human rights and climate change. The attractions of a human rights approach to climate change are explained. The idea of a moral conception of human rights is introduced and distinguished from human rights recognized in international and national law. The key features of moral human rights are identified and an important distinction between negative and positive rights is explained. The three main arguments in the literature connecting human rights and climate change are introduced and critical discussions of them are presented. The first argument (associated with Steve Vanderheiden) claims that there is a human right to a stable climate, which can be derived from a human right to an adequate environment. The second argument (associated with Simon Caney) claims that anthropogenic climate change violates basic human (negative) rights to life, health, and subsistence. The third argument claims that there is a human right to emit greenhouse gases. This argument has two versions. The first version claims that there is a human right to equal per capita emissions. The second version claims that there is a human right to subsistence emissions. WIREs Clim Change 2013, 4:159–170. doi: 10.1002/wcc.218

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Conflict of interest: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

Because of the failure of the world to agree an adequate regime to limit greenhouse gas emissions to a safe level, adaptation to climate change has risen rapidly in UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations since 2007. We closely review the development of policies, institutions, and financing of adaptation in international agreements from 1992 to the present. We conclude that the way the treaty has been built—first as a mitigation regime with adaptation added on only later—has led to some profound problems for marrying the goals of economic development and building climate resilient societies. Particularly there are two problematic areas. First, following mitigation approaches, technical solutions are often the focus in adaptation projects, when social, political, and cultural problems lie at the roots of vulnerability and should be addressed directly. Second, early requirements that external funding would only come if the adaptation effort was clearly ‘additional’ to what would have been done without a changing climate have been extremely pernicious. By attempting to divide a development project from the ‘additional’ costs of adapting to climate change, the global policy has shaped adaptation efforts at the local level. To understand how we ended up with such quirky definitions of what counts as adaptation, we need to review the history of adaptation in the negotiated regimes. Finally, we trace the incomplete negotiations over who will pay for adaptation in developing countries, whether that funding will come as grants or loans, as private investment or public funds, and what say recipient countries will have. WIREs Clim Change 2013, 4:171–189. doi: 10.1002/wcc.212

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India occupies an intriguing dual position in global climate politics—a poor and developing economy with low levels of historical and per capita emissions, and a large and rapidly growing economy with rising emissions. Indian climate politics has substantially been shaped around the first perspective, and increasingly, under international pressure, is being forced to grapple with the second. This review of Indian climate politics examines the initial crystallization of Indian climate positions and its roots in national climate politics, and then examines the modest ways in which climate politics have been revisited in domestic debates since about 2007. Following elucidation of these themes, the article turns to a discussion of new directions for Indian climate policy and their moorings in domestic climate politics. WIREs Clim Change 2013, 4:191–201. doi: 10.1002/wcc.210

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In temperate climates, mortality is higher in the winter than the summer. Most wintertime deaths are attributed to cardiovascular and respiratory disease, with hypothermia from extreme cold accounting for a negligible share of all recorded deaths. International and national assessments of the health risks of climate change often conclude that increased temperatures from climate change will likely reduce winter mortality. This article examines the support for this hypothesis. We find that although there is a physiological basis for increased cardiovascular and respiratory disease mortality during winter months, the limited evidence suggests cardiovascular disease mortality is only weakly associated with temperature. Although respiratory disease mortality shows a stronger seasonal relationship with colder temperatures, cold alone does not explain infection rates. Further, respiratory disease mortality is a relatively small proportion of winter deaths. Therefore, assuming no changes in acclimatization and the degree to which temperature-related deaths are prevented, climate change may alter the balance of deaths between winters and summers, but is unlikely to dramatically reduce overall winter mortality rates. WIREs Clim Change 2013, 4:203–212. doi: 10.1002/wcc.211

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Many studies of future climate change take an ensemble modeling approach in which simulations of future conditions are produced with multiple climate models (or model versions), rather than just one. These ensemble studies are of two main types—perturbed-physics and multimodel—which investigate different sources of uncertainty about future climate change. Increasingly, methods are being applied which assign probabilities to future changes in climate on the basis of the set of projections (the ensemble) produced in a perturbed-physics or multimodel study. This has prompted debate over both the appropriate interpretation of ensembles as well as how best to communicate uncertainty about future climate change to decision makers; such communication is a primary impetus for ensemble studies. The intuition persists that agreement among ensemble members about the extent of future climate change warrants increased confidence in the projected changes, but in practice the significance of this robustness is difficult to gauge. Priority topics for future research include how to design ensemble studies that take better account of structural uncertainty, how to weight ensemble members and how to improve the process by which ensemble studies are synthesized with other information in expert assessments. WIREs Clim Change 2013, 4:213–223. doi: 10.1002/wcc.220

Conflict of interest: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

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