Abrupt climate change is a recurring feature of the Earth’s history and the current anthropogenic interference has set the climate system on a potential abrupt change trajectory. As with past climate change, future climate changes are not predicted to affect all areas of the planet in the same way, or at the same rate, yet mechanisms for spatiotemporal differences are complex and difficult to predict from low-resolution global models.
Increasingly detailed high temporal resolution proxy reconstructions of past abrupt climate transitions and oscillations (such as the Late Glacial-Holocene transition, Heinrich Stadials or the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles) have been produced for widely distributed ice core, marine and terrestrial records. When precisely integrated (i.e. via cosmogenic isotopes, palaeomagnetic excursions, tephra) these now allow for an integrated assessment of the anatomy, the spatially variable consequences and the mechanisms of abrupt climate transitions.
With a focus on the period from the last interglacial to the pre-Industrial, this session will assess methodologies (numerical and/or proxy based) and findings from studies of the spatiotemporal anatomy of the climate system on decadal to millennial timescales. We invite contributions that evidence regional climate thresholds and gradients, explore their consequences for human societies and identify mechanisms from the integration of local to global proxy records as well as modelling approaches. Finally, we explore how findings from such precisely integrated records in space and time can serve to quantify vulnerabilities and regional thresholds relevant for the anthropogenic climate change trajectory.