Reply Climate variability and crop yields in Europe

Abstract

Hulme et al. reply — Porter and Semenov point out the importance of changes in climate variability on different timescales when assessing the significance of climate-change impacts. They are correct to assert that changes in inter-daily, inter-annual and multi-decadal climate variability are important, but our study1 was intended to draw attention to natural multi-decadal climate variability and to indicate how it might obscure the identification of significant effects of anthropogenic climate change. It was therefore primarily a study of signal-to-noise ratios in impacts indicators, something that has not previously been attempted using low-frequency climate variability. The effects on crop yields of changes in inter-annual and inter-daily climate variability have been considered previously2,3,4.