Climate of the Past 20th Anniversary: Past Abrupt Climate Changes and Tipping Points

To mark its 20th anniversary, Climate of the Past, an interactive journal of the European Geosciences Union, is launching a special webinar series celebrating two decades of leading paleoclimate science.

Each webinar will emphasize the journal’s scientific diversity and impact, featuring two invited talks of 30 minutes from leading researchers across different areas of paleoclimate science. Talks will be followed by a live 30 minutes Q&A session, allowing for discussion and engagement with the broader community.

Although the Earth system has so far responded relatively smoothly to the drastic increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases, there is rising concern that further rising temperatures may trigger nonlinear and abrupt responses in several components of the Earth system.

The thresholds characterizing a transition from one stable system state to another are called ‘Tipping Points’ and are often associated with bifurcations in underlying dynamical systems, but they can also be triggered by noise or rate-induced effects.

New methods are being developed to understand and to interpret abrupt changes found in paleoclimate proxy records. Evidence indicates that several components of the Earth system have indeed transitioned abruptly between different stable states in the past.

This webinar will explore past abrupt climate changes and tipping points help assess potential future abrupt changes and their potential impacts on ecosystems and human societies. To address this topic, we have selected two guest talks:

Sebastian Bathiany (Technical University of Munich) - Paleo records, models, and dynamical systems theory: trinity of climate science, or triangle of sadness?

Christo Bruizert (Oregon State University) - An updated framework for global oceanic coupling of glacial abrupt climate change: an ocean heat valve.

The webinar will be recorded and uploaded to the EGU Youtube channel:https://www.youtube.com/@egu

Conveners:

Martin Claussen & Denis-Didier Rousseau

Speakers:

Sebastian Bathiany (Technical University of Munich) - Sebastian is a meteorologist and climate scientist by training. Their research interests include “tipping points” and the interaction between the atmosphere and the Earth‘s surface (in particular, vegetation and sea ice). Sebastian uses approaches informed by dynamical systems theory, time series analysis and complex Earth system models. He also have a special passion for creative forms of science communication.

Christo Bruizert (Oregon State University) - Christo's work aims to reconstruct and understand past climate change and atmospheric composition, using deep ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. He has combined ice core measurements, numerical modeling and fieldwork to achieve these goals. Christo's ongoing work is to reconstruct the timing, magnitude and spatial pattern of climate change over the Greenland ice sheet using nitrogen isotopes and to understand how this relates to the rate of ice retreat during the last deglaciation.

Register for this online event here.

If you have any questions about ‘Climate of the Past 20th Anniversary: Past Abrupt Climate Changes and Tipping Points’, please contact us via webinars@egu.eu.