Climate: Past, Present & Future

Dear “climate sceptic”, do you have a fire insurance? – Climate policy under uncertainty

Claudia Elisabeth Wieners, Institute of Economics, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa December 12, 2019

Smoke clears after an experimental wildfire in Australian eucalyptus forest. Credit: Stefan Doerr (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

One often hears that ambitious climate policy might be premature while climate change is still “uncertain”. This sounds like a fair argument: The amount of global warming per doubling CO2 is not well constrained, and the amount of economic damage per degree of warming even less. But is this uncertainty a sound excuse to wait and see? Uncertainty, risk aversion, and insurance If you knew the ...[Read More]

Palaeoclimate Data Syntheses: Opportunities and Challenges

Laia Comas-Bru (School of Archaeology, Geography & Environmental Sciences at Reading University, UK) and Nikita Kaushal (Asian School of the Environment, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore). November 21, 2019

The Cango Cave (South Africa). Photo taken by Laia Comas-Bru.

Reconstructing past climate states from geological records is crucial for understanding the causal mechanisms that originated them. These can occur at time-scales which are much longer than the periods for which humans have been measuring climate variables such as temperature in meteorological stations. Such climate reconstructions provide a long-term context to the magnitude of the current anthro ...[Read More]

Habits in numerical model construction

Lucie Babel, Department of Physical Geography, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University October 2, 2019

Interviews were conducted with modellers about the construction of their model.

Numerical models are omnipresent in climate research. Constructed to understand the past, to forecast future climate and to gain new knowledge on natural processes and interactions, they enable the simulation of experiments at otherwise unreachable time and spatial scales. These instruments have long been considered to be fed – let even determined – by either theories or observations alone. ...[Read More]

Magnetic minerals: storytellers of environmental and climatic conditions

Stephanie Scheidt, Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, University of Cologne, Germany July 9, 2019

Curves representing the magnetic signals of minerals

Name of proxy Environmental Magnetism (also known as enviromagnetics) Type of record Environment and climate proxy Paleoenvironment Sedimentary environments (for the most part) Period of time investigated Present times to millions of years (depending on the preservation conditions) How does it work? Magnetism is a physical property that results from the behaviour of elementary particles in any sub ...[Read More]