On Thursday 23rd November at the Universiteit van Amsterdam there will be a world premiere of a brand new DVD on Climate Change. The DVD is intended both as a teaching aid in Universities and as information for policymakers and planners.  It features the work of a major European project that has been investigating evidence for past climate variability in Europe, with a view to providing data that can help provide more reliable climate scenarios for the future.

Attending this fascinating world premiere is free. Practical details can be found at the bottom of this webpage.

What makes Climate Change research so complex?

The film is in three main sections.  The first features world-leading climate scientists, who explain the very short-term nature of instrumental (e.g. thermometer, rain-gauge) records; point to the huge increase recently in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, which in the past have tracked global temperatures, and that this would imply major climate warming for the future.  However, in the last two thousand years climate reconstructions reveal considerable natural variability, albeit of lesser scale, such that the climate of Europe has changed from the relative warmth of Medieval times to the ‘Little Ice Age’ of the 15th to the early 19th Centuries, in part caused by changes in solar activity.  Scientists then outline the relative role of the sun in very recent climate change and explain the difficulties of incorporating solar variability in climate models for the future.

The methods and findings of the ACCROTELM team

The second section of the film presents the methods and findings of the ACCROTELM team, who have concentrated on examining the past record of climate across Europe for the last few thousand years from bogs (mires) and from lakes.  The film shows the fieldwork and laboratory methods used to obtain ‘proxy’ records of past climates from bogs.  The data from lakes in west-central Europe and Northern Italy show that the record of lake-level changes over the last 4,500 years can be related closely to past changes in solar activity.  The records of past climate from the bogs over the last 4,500 years are, however, spatially variable across northern Europe.  Nevertheless, in one major climate-change episode in the Bronze Age, farmers in the Northern Netherlands were affected significantly and had to migrate to the coast. 

Important lessons for planners anticipating future climate change

The third section of the film concludes that there is good evidence for past abrupt climate changes within the last 4,500 years, but that it was spatially variable, and was experienced with greater or lesser intensity in different regions in Europe.  The lessons from the past tell us that this evidence for spatial variability in Europe could present problems for planners who wish to anticipate future climate change.  This spatial variability needs to be investigated more fully and its causes understood, so that it can be included in the next generation of climate models. 

The film concludes that there is a need to investigate past climates in more depth and at a range of sites in order to understand the magnitude, rate and causes of natural climate variability, which will undoubtedly underlie any future climate changes that may be forced additionally by greenhouse gas emissions.