Climate of the Past

Learning lessons from the past to inform the future

Dr Charles Williams August 21, 2020

1.5 m air temperature climatology differences, Pliocene simulation from the UK’s physical climate model, relative to the preindustrial era.

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]

Weather hidden within dusty parchments and weighty tomes—historical climatology and its contribution to our understanding of the past climate

Chantal Camenisch, Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research and Institute of History, Section of Economic, Social and Environmental History, University of Bern, Switzerland. April 7, 2020

What is historical climatology? Historical climatology is an interdisciplinary research field between paleoclimatology and the historical sciences, that explores the archives of societies to examine the climate of the past. Archives of society mean all man-made remains of the past in contrast to archives of nature. The latter represent physical remains of natural processes such as tree rings and s ...[Read More]

Are the risks of zoonotic diseases rising in the Anthropocene due to climate change?

Ichiko Sugiyama, Ph.D. Candidate in the Faculty of Chemistry in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel March 16, 2020

The recent coronavirus outbreak (i.e., nCovID-19; Fig. 1) has caused global panic, along with widespread travel bans, home quarantines and country-wide lockdowns. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared nCoVID-19 as a pandemic as of March 11th, 2020 (WHO, 2020). To tackle this global health crisis, scientists are attempting to synthesize a vaccine, while countries are trying to mitigate the n ...[Read More]

Dead Sea – lively stories of the past

Dr. Andrea Miebach, postdoc at the Institute of Geosciences, University of Bonn, Germany February 25, 2020

Dead Sea (photo: Andrea Miebach).

The Dead Sea is dead. Nothing can live there except for specialized microbes. The water with a salinity multiple times higher than seawater prevents a colonization by higher life forms. However, it does not prevent the input of organic material that can tell us stories about the past. A unique sediment record The Dead Sea, located at the lowest elevation on Earth – currently about 430 m below sea ...[Read More]