European Geosciences Union
Division on Climate: Past, Present & Future
President: Irka Hajdas
(cl@egu.eu)
Deputy President: Kerstin Treydte
(treydte@wsl.ch)
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 2022 Hans Oeschger Medal is awarded to Doug Smith for pioneering research in mechanisms of short-term climate variations, and developing methodologies for initialising a climate model with observations to predict climate from one year to decades.
The 2022 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Marlene Kretschmer for outstanding development and the application of statistical methods to the study of causality in climate dynamics.
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
Do you gravitate to science because of the subject’s ability to explain complicated behaviour in nature through experimentation? When we see things or get our hands dirty by conducting experiments, it helps us comprehend scientific theories which are harder to explain. Introducing a complicated scientific theory is often carried out initially by presenting a simplified version. For example, students learn about Newtonian laws of motion prior to special relativity, ball and stick models of the molecule before quantum mechanics, and …
European Geoscience Union (EGU) is an organisation made of different disciplines in geosciences, and each disciplines have their own Division. Within each Division, there are many different volunteered positions. Each year at the EGU General Assembly (a conference), Division members come together to nominate members for those positions. There are variety of positions from President and Deputy President, a Programme Group Chair, Science Officers, as well as Representatives for the Early Career Scientists and an Outreach Team. Information on the …
“Every ship that navigates the high seas, with these charts and blank abstract logs on board, may henceforth be regarded as a floating observatory, a temple of science.” Matthew Fontaine Maury This is a joint post, published together with the climate sciences division blog and the ocean sciences division blog. The ocean has always been important for humanity, with trade and war being just two examples of critical motivations for marine travel throughout the course of history. We might also …
Paleoecological use of land snail shells is no longer a new field of science. They are studied by malacologists and palaeontologists who specialise in the study of molluscs. During the last glaciation, loess, a light yellow, fine-grained sediment, was deposited over large areas, mainly in the periglacial regions of Eurasia and North America. In addition to its many advantages, it has also provided excellent preservation of land snail shells, which can be studied in spatiotemporal resolution. The extraction of snail …
The August issue of The Loupe explores how existing energy resources inform climate change mitigation. Scientists from the Environmental Defense Fund find that while hydrogen is certainly part of the solution to get to net zero, this fuel of the future may not be as clean as we think. Researcher in energy transition under climate change Jarmo Kikstra discusses the delicate intersections between social and natural sciences, and on World Biofuels Day we look at commercially available biofuels around the world and some new ones under development.
Also in this issue: the EGU Biodiversity Task Force’s seven recommendations to the EU Nature Restoration Law which will now be amended and either passed or rejected by the European Parliament and The Council of the European Union. Finally, apply by 12 September to the EGU Policy Pairing scheme to spend a week in Brussels with a Member of the European Parliament (MEP).