Interconnections of Past Greenhouse Climates: Lessons For the Future

Global warming has already reached 1C above pre-industrial levels because of greenhouse gas emissions. Rainfall patterns are shifting. To test divergent climate predictions for the future and to understand natural climate change in the past we need datasets much longer than those possible by direct observation.

We will develop palaeoclimate records from deep sea drill cores that contain both marine and terrigenous sediments (riverine material and wind-blown dust). These will be used to study interactions between tectonics, insolation, ice-sheets and ocean circulation that control regional response to global change.

Potential foci include: regions where climate model reconstructions of the past are poor (e.g. North Africa, see references); regions where predictions of the future are most alarming (e.g. the Mediterranean, California, Southern Africa) and past intervals where global climate changed radically but the response of these hotspots is unknown (e.g. the warm Pliocene, the warm Miocene and the Eocene-Oligocene transition).