CL
Climate: Past, Present & Future

Climate of the Future

How humans are influencing climate change and its significance in defining a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene

April 26, 2021
How humans are influencing climate change and its significance in defining a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) is the body tasked to propose a formal definition for the Anthropocene as a geological time unit. Join us at the EGU2021 General Assembly on Wednesday 28th April at 14:15-15:00 CEST for a series of presentations on the Anthropocene in session SSP2.6.   The Anthropocene concept Geologists cope with the enormity of 4.5 billion years of Earth history by divid ...[Read More]

Generation #polarprediction

April 14, 2021
Generation #polarprediction

More than 11 years ago, I joined the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium as a teaching assistant. The 2007-2009 International Polar Year (IPY), a worldwide collaborative effort aiming at better understanding our polar regions, had just finished, and the scientific community was concerned about the sudden drop in the summer Arctic sea ice extent that had occurred two years befor ...[Read More]

New metric to interpret linear trends from short time series: Trend to variability ratio (TVR)

March 17, 2021
New metric to interpret linear trends from short time series: Trend to variability ratio (TVR)

  Availability of good quality data is essential to deduce meaningful information in all disciplines of science and technology. This statement is especially relevant in climate research, which is under constant scrutiny from sceptics. In order to better understand the Earth system response to the ongoing anthropogenic global warming, we require global observations of climate indicators at ver ...[Read More]

EGU’s Atmospheric Sciences and Climate: Past, Present & Future Divisions welcome the US back into the Paris Climate Agreement

March 3, 2021

As of 19 February 2021, the US officially re-joined the Paris Climate Agreement, a landmark international accord to limit global warming by 2°C (and ideally to 1.5°C) compared to pre-industrial levels. The Paris Climate Agreement aims to bring the world together to avoid catastrophic warming that will impact us all and to build resilience to the consequences of climate change that we are already s ...[Read More]

Highlighting climate sessions at vEGU21: Gather Online

January 6, 2021

With the abstract deadline at 13th January, we would like to highlight some of the fantastic sessions that are offered in the climate division in 2021. Due to the large amount of offered sessions, we focus in this overview on EDI sessions. EDI stands for equality, diversity, and inclusion and the EDI logo highlights sessions that include conveners from multiple countries and institutes, different ...[Read More]

Deep Purple on Ice – Research on the Greenland Ice Sheet During the Pandemic

December 11, 2020
Deep Purple on Ice – Research on the Greenland Ice Sheet During the Pandemic

Insights into the EU project Deep Purple, fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic and doing research in a camp on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Written by Ph.D. students Rey Mourot (GFZ Potsdam), Laura Halbach (Aarhus University) and Eva Doting (Aarhus University). On maps, Greenland is shown as a massive white island. This vast ice and snow cover plays a vital role in reflecting incoming solar radiatio ...[Read More]

A new European effort to better understand extreme weather

November 11, 2020
A new European effort to better understand extreme weather

Extreme weather events routinely have detrimental socio-economic impacts around the globe. In fact, weather-related events make up over 90% of natural disasters worldwide [1]. In the new millennium, the frequency of many extreme weather events such as droughts and high temperatures, has systematically exceeded the levels seen in the 1980s and 1990s [1], and anthropogenic climate change may further ...[Read More]

InterArctic project: understanding the interaction between artic environments and societies

September 21, 2020
InterArctic project: understanding the interaction between artic environments and societies

The InterArctic project (Fig. 1) focuses on vulnerability, resilience and adaptation of northern societies facing global change. The current rapid warming of Arctic and Subarctic climates has already produced many changes in the social, economic and cultural behaviour of the populations inhabiting these regions and more changes are expected to come. In this context, looking at the past provides th ...[Read More]

Climate models and Bach’s unfinished fugue

September 10, 2020
Climate models and Bach’s unfinished fugue

Johann Sebastian Bach’s last work – Contrapunctus XIV – is an unfinished musical composition. For many years, scholars considered that this piece was left unfinished because of Bach’s deteriorating health in his final years and eventual death. However, researchers recently found evidence that Bach might have left this piece intentionally unfinished, as he thought that there was still room for impr ...[Read More]

Learning lessons from the past to inform the future

August 21, 2020
Learning lessons from the past to inform the future

  A fairly recent blog post here reiterated the compelling comparison between the current COVID-19 crisis and the ongoing climate emergency, focusing on extreme events such as hurricanes, heatwaves and severe rainfall-related flooding, all of which are likely to get worse as the climate warms (Langendijk & Osman 2020).  This comparison has been made by us Climate Scientists since the COVI ...[Read More]