The planet is warming due to human-made greenhouse gas emissions, which have increased drastically since the industrial revolution. To grasp potential pathways for future climate, we need to understand what the impacts of elevated greenhouse gas emissions are on the global heat budget and how the climate system functions in conditions warmer than today. Geological archives and model simulations of past climate states are the key to better understanding climate dynamics in different, warmer-than-today climate conditions.
In this session, we welcome contributions ranging from proxy data to model results aimed at reconstructing and understanding Earth’s climate state and its dynamics over the past 100 million years. We welcome submissions across a wide range of time scales, including those investigating long-term change, Milankovitch cyclicity and/or short-lived events, from the Cretaceous to the Present. Submissions working on chronological or stratigraphic fundamentals underpinning this interval are also encouraged. We invite contributions seeking to better assess Earth system sensitivity in past climate states by reconstructing atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global or regional temperatures. As analogues of biodiversity in a warmer world can only be found in the past, we encourage submissions on marine and terrestrial ecosystem dynamics and disruptions in warmer worlds.
The session intends to bring together the diverse community studying the nature of the warm climate states found in the Cretaceous and Cenozoic. We consciously welcome a broad range of approaches to facilitate synergies to learn from past warm climate conditions to navigate into the future warmer world.