As different as night and day

摘要

An under-appreciated aspect of climate change is the fact that Earth is warming at a higher rate at night than during the day: over the past 50 years, daily minimum temperatures have increased about 40% faster than daily maximum temperatures'. This asymmetric warming may have important biological consequences, particularly for fundamental ecosystem metabolic processes that are strongly sensitive to temperature variations, such as photosynthesis and respiration. On page 88 of this issue, Peng et al.