European Geosciences Union
Division on Climate: Past, Present & Future
President: Irka Hajdas
(cl@egu.eu)
Deputy President: Didier Roche
(didier.roche@lsce.ipsl.fr)
The Division on Climate: Past, Present & Future is one of the larger divisions of the European Geosciences Union. It pools from many disciplines and consequently has many co-organized and co-listed sessions with other divisions at the general assembly. The division is very interdisciplinary and covers climate variations on all time scales. CL includes the study of any kind of climate archive from rocks to ocean cores, speleothems, ice cores, chronicles, to instrumental records to name a few. Besides observations, climate modeling on all time scales from the deep past to the future are areas covered by the division. Any aspect of the climate system falls into the realm of the division e.g. atmosphere, ocean, biosphere, cryosphere, and geology. Themes focus on the climate on Earth but may also expand other planets or the sun.
Climate system is one of the most complex physical systems on this planet. To understand what changes in our climate system can trigger an event, we require excellent understanding of various sub-systems of Earth, an outstanding modelling framework that combines these sub-systems, and enormous computational power. Today we have several coupled Earth system models that can simulate the climate of our planet. This would not have been possible without the pioneering efforts of Prof. Syukuro Manabe and Prof. Klaus Hasselmann, who have driven the climate research and demonstrated that the greenhouse gas emissions is responsible for climate change. For their ground-breaking research that has helped us model and understand one of the most complex systems on this planet, both of them have been awarded 1/4th of the 2021 noble prize for Physics.
This is for the first time that climate scientists have been awarded the most prestigious award in sciences. As climate scientists, we are proud and thrilled to receive this news. The award is timely and it demonstrates the importance of climate research for society. We hope that this award will ignite and enhance public debate on climate change, which should push our leaders to take strong steps in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions, protecting the vulnerable, and ensuring a safer planet for everyone. More news can be found here: EGU press release (7.10.2021) and in a blog post of NP division
The 2021 Milutin Milankovic Medal is awarded to Ayako Abe-Ouchi for fundamental contributions to our understanding of climate-ice sheet interactions on orbital timescales and how they shape the planetary response to Milankovic cycles.
The 2021 Hans Oeschger Medal is awarded to Sonia I. Seneviratne for her groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of land-climate dynamics, their relevance to weather and climate extremes, and their implications for anthropogenic climate change.
The 2021 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Franziska A. Lechleitner for her contributions to the understanding of the past climate and environment as recorded in speleothems.
The 2021 Virtual Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (vOSPP) Award is awarded to Cameron de Wet North American rainfall patterns during past warm states: A proxy network-model comparison for the Last Interglacial and the mid-Holocene
The 2021 Virtual Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (vOSPP) Award is awarded to Joanne Elkadi Constraining past bedrock surface temperatures at the Gorner glacier, Switzerland, using feldspar thermoluminescence for surface paleothermometry
The 2020 Hans Oeschger Medal is awarded to Kim M. Cobb for pioneering acquisition and interpretation of high-resolution observations from corals and cave deposits in Earth’s equatorial regions and their implications for climate change.
The 2020 Milutin Milankovic Medal is awarded to Valérie Masson-Delmotte for outstanding contributions to research on long-term climate change, namely palaeotemperature records from ice cores, and for her leadership in international efforts to translate science to society.
The 2020 Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Early Career Scientists is awarded to François Massonnet for his significant contribution to polar climate prediction, projection and reanalyses, including original integration of model and data evidence.
Understanding how our environment is changing under a warmer climate will be one of the new challenges our children will face. Meanwhile, teachers are challenged to seek new pedagogical strategies for teaching climate change in the youngest, especially in rural communities, which are one of the most vulnerable to climate change impacts, as they lack resilience towards surviving extreme events. Although in recent years have seen significant advances in teaching climate science to high school students of Colombian cities, students …
Previous blog posts have highlighted the importance of loess as an indicator of climate and environmental changes in the past. These posts showed the relevance of loess deposits as archives of Pleistocene climates and environments, the importance of using novel approaches in mapping these and other Quaternary-related sediments, the aspects of dating loess deposits, as well as the peculiarities of desert loess. Here, we present you the findings published in Frontiers in Earth Science1. In this study, we used bulk …
Extreme precipitation events, i.e., heavy rain episodes of short duration, can lead to severe or even catastrophic social and economic impacts, as seen recently in different flooding and landslide incidents throughout the world. One of the drivers behind these events is the occurrence of atmospheric rivers (ARs), a mechanism that transports great amounts of water vapour across the globe, and significantly controls the volume of precipitable water (rain or snow) once it reaches land. ARs are shallow (1–2.5 km in …
What is this project all about? This project investigates the social responses of the society to environmental stress in the context of climate variability for the last millennium in Cyprus. Human societies had a variable response to changes in climate either due to differences in socioeconomic systems, land use, and health systems. Many health issues in societies are sensitive to both social and urban/rural (built) environment as well as climatic and physical environmental parameter, making epidemiology (study of diseases) and …
In the November issue of The Loupe we reflect on the recent COP26 meeting and the new Glasgow Climate Pact and discover what it’s like to be a member of the EGU Policy Working group with Noel Baker! Learn more about EGU’s new Policy Priority Area for 2022-24 Biodiversity and how you can get involved.
You can also watch the free recording of our special webinar about How to build an LGBT+ network in geoscience, available now on our YouTube channel.
Don’t forget to submit your abstract for EGU22, to be held 3 – 8 April 2022! Find out more here as well as information about the registration fees and submit your abstract by 12 January 2022 at 13.00 CET.
In addition this issue also shares the latest Journal Watch and GeoRoundup of November EGU journal highlights.