Climate: Past, Present & Future

How earthworms can help us understand past climates?

Charlotte PRUD’HOMME, Research group for Terrestrial Palaeoclimates, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Germany December 19, 2018

Earthworms calcite granules from the µm to the mm scale

Name of proxy Earthworm calcite granules (ECG) Type of record Paleotemperature and paleoprecipitation reconstruction; radiocarbon dating Paleoenvironment Continental environments – loess/paleosol sequences Period of time investigated Mostly Last full Glacial cycle – from 112,000-15,000 years Before Present (BP) (or older depending on the preservation of the granules). How does it work? Earth ...[Read More]

God does not play DICE – but Bill Nordhaus does! What can models tell us about the economics of climate change?

Claudia Elisabeth Wieners, Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research, Utrecht And Centre for Complex Systems Studies, Utrecht University December 3, 2018

Climate change has been described as “the biggest market failure in human history”[1]. Although fuel is costly, emitting the by-product CO2 is for free; yet it causes damages to society. In other words, those who benefit, by using the atmosphere as waste dump, do not pay the full costs, i.e. the adverse effects climate change has on societies on a global scale. Can this market failure be cured? Sh ...[Read More]

What can artificial intelligence do for climate science?

Sebastian Scher, PhD student, Department of Meteorology and Bolin Centre for Climate Research, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden September 26, 2018

What is machine learning? Artificial Intelligence, and its subfield of machine learning, is a very trending topic as it plays an increasing role in our daily life. Examples are: translation programs, speech recognition software in mobile phones and automatic completion of search queries. However, what value do these new techniques have for climate science? And how complicated is it to use them? Th ...[Read More]

How glowing sediment can help to decipher the Earth’s past climate !

Svenja Riedesel, Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, United Kingdom September 3, 2018

The glowing sediment

The last 2.5 Million years of the Earth’s history (termed Quaternary) are characterised by climatic cycles oscillating between warm (interglacial) and cold (glacial) periods. To be able to fully understand and interpret past climate variations the development of accurate and precise chronological techniques is crucial. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating is a strong geochronological too ...[Read More]