Recent attention to paleoclimate research has made apparent to the wider global change community the relevance of paleo perspectives on climate change. Of particular importance, paleoclimate has documented amplitudes and rates of climate change that are not knowable from historical records and has identified drivers of climate change on a range of timescales. Of equal importance, paleoclimate provides targets and points of validation for current-generation climate models used to predict near-term climate change. Recent advances in proxy methods, numerical approaches, and modeling capabilities have opened new avenues of investigation into past climate change. However, key gaps in knowledge and capabilities persist. Among them are uncertainties in proxies and their calibrations; uncertainties in the absolute timing and spatial coherence of past climate events; gaps in data availability for broad intervals of the Phanerozoic; and limitations in modeling capabilities and knowledge of past boundary conditions.
There is motivation by the research community and funders to chart new directions for future research into Earth’s past climate in order to understand how climate operates in climate states different than the present, and especially in warm states that might be analogues to a future state. Discussion topics will include how climate sensitivity and variability, extreme events, and the hydrological cycle and other aspects of the climate system, operated during past climate states, and what forcings and feedbacks caused the transition between states. Potential elements of this vision could include proxy and model development, new methods of treating existing data sets including through assimilation, and a focus on critical regions or transitions in Earth history.
This AGCI workshop will bring together experts in paleoclimate data generation, modeling, and data-model synthesis to present ideas from recent efforts and to develop ideas/recommendations for the way forward.
Recent attention to paleoclimate research has made apparent to the wider global change community the relevance of paleo perspectives on climate change. Of particular importance, paleoclimate has documented amplitudes and rates of climate change that are not knowable from historical records and has identified drivers of climate change on a range of timescales. Of equal importance, paleoclimate provides targets and points of validation for current-generation climate models used to predict near-term climate change. Recent advances in proxy methods, numerical approaches, and modeling capabilities have opened new avenues of investigation into past climate change. However, key gaps in knowledge and capabilities persist. Among them are uncertainties in proxies and their calibrations; uncertainties in the absolute timing and spatial coherence of past climate events; gaps in data availability for broad intervals of the Phanerozoic; and limitations in modeling capabilities and knowledge of past boundary conditions.
There is motivation by the research community and funders to chart new directions for future research into Earth’s past climate in order to understand how climate operates in climate states different than the present, and especially in warm states that might be analogues to a future state. Discussion topics will include how climate sensitivity and variability, extreme events, and the hydrological cycle and other aspects of the climate system, operated during past climate states, and what forcings and feedbacks caused the transition between states. Potential elements of this vision could include proxy and model development, new methods of treating existing data sets including through assimilation, and a focus on critical regions or transitions in Earth history.
This AGCI workshop will bring together experts in paleoclimate data generation, modeling, and data-model synthesis to present ideas from recent efforts and to develop ideas/recommendations for the way forward.
As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels climb higher than they have been in the last two million years, we face the challenge of adapting to and mitigating the effects of climate change. How do we know that humans are responsible for climate change? What effects of climate change can we see already? How can geology help understand what a future warm world might look like? In this talk, Dr. Tierney will take us through the past, present, and future trajectory of Earth’s climate and discuss how paleoclimatologists query the ancient record of climate change to improve our understanding of the future.
Chapters (navigate to in progress bar or lower-right corner of the video):
1. Beginning (00:18)
2. Carbon dioxide measurements and its sources (01:42)
3. Fourier, carbon dioxide, and electromagnetic spectrum (05:58)
4. Greenhouse effect (09:36)
5. Global temperature record (11:42)
6. Receding glaciers, Miami sea level rise, California 1000-year drought, climate extremes (12:32)
7. Paleoclimate as a window to future (14:50)
8. Ice cores and 800,000 years of carbon dioxide and methane (16:30)
9. Sediment cores and proxies for climate (17:30)
10. Foraminifera, a paleo geologist’s friend (19:32)
11. 2.5Ma (million years ago), last time the for an atmosphere with over 400ppm CO2—until today (20:38)
12. Humans are an ice-age species (21:44)
13. Model of Pliocene temperature (23:20)
14. Temperature of past 65Ma, CO2 and greenhouse climate of 56-34 Ma Eocene. Giant snakes and crocodiles in Arctic! (23:41)
15. Palms in Antarctica! (27:30)
16. Eocene ocean temperature/warm poles (28:06)
17. Eocene not a stable climate, PETM (Paleo Eocene Thermal Maximum) 55Ma (29:17)
18. PETM and loss of shell carbonates 100,000-year recovery (30:34)
19. Present warming rate is faster than PETM (33:50)
20. Summary: climate change is real and bad, but there is hope for us (34:52)
21. IPCC projections/Pliocene vs Eocene as our possible future (35:42)
22. Nobel scientist Sherwood Rowland quote (37:58)
23. End (38:40)
Event Co-Chair
