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 …[Read More]
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, …[Read More]
The anticipation is rising, the offices smell of gingerbread and cookies, papers get written to be done just in time for Santa and his elves. Everyone is happily stressed these days working on the perfect Christmas presents, but then… aah, what to present at next year’s EGU? Which session to attend? This is a friendly …[Read More]
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 …[Read More]
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 …[Read More]
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 …[Read More]
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 …[Read More]
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? Earthworms are commonly found …[Read More]
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 …[Read More]
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 …[Read More]
