Convenors: Michael Schulz (MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences and Faculty of Geosciences, Univ. Bremen), Martin Claussen (Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, KlimaCampus, University Hamburg)
Session language: English

In the past few years, climate science has made impressive progress in quantifying possible future climate changes arising from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and land cover change. However, it is still a major challenge to estimate the range of uncertainty of the climate sensitivity to natural and anthropogenic perturbation. The Earth sciences play a vanguard role in this quest, since geoscientific data are the only method to document and quantify past climate change beyond the range of instrumental observations. Paleoclimate data revealed unambiguously that the Earth’s climate is not steady. Natural variations occur on timescales of a few years to thousands of years. More specifically, Earth’s climate system is capable of exhibiting abrupt changes with large amplitudes over the time span of a few decades or less. The goal of this session is to review some of the most recent scientific highlights in the field of paleoclimate research and to explain their implications for future climate change. A specific aim is to evaluate the skill of climate models for projecting future climate based on their capability of hindcasting past climate variations.