Abstract

With some thoughts on the usefulness of climate history

Our two principal sources of climate variability over the past millennium and beyond are proxy-based reconstructions and model simulations. Though the two share broad agreement, model simulations typically possess less centennial-scale variability than reconstructions. I will provide an overview of the discrepancies between temperature and hydroclimate reconstructions, and last millennium simulations of the same two parameters, and discuss how the differences might be reconciled. Lastly, I will give a few examples in the usefulness of climate history to understand both ongoing climate change and past human history.

Dr. Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist is a Swedish historian and palaeoclimatologist from Stockholm University and is at present Visiting Researcher at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge.