European Geosciences Union
Division on Climate: Past, Present & Future
President: Didier Roche (cl@egu.eu)
Deputy President: Marc Luetscher
(marc.luetscher@isska.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.
The 2019 Hans Oeschger Medal is awarded to Edward J. Brook for producing greenhouse-gas records from polar ice cores in unprecedented resolution that permitted the precise north-south synchronisation of climate signals and the identification of past variations in great detail.
The 2019 Milutin Milankovic Medal is awarded to Jacques Laskar for fundamental contributions to the investigation of orbital climate forcing, and for the development of long-term, reliable astronomical solutions important for the whole palaeoclimate community.
The 2018 Milutin Milankovic Medal is awarded to David A. Hodell for fundamental contributions to reconstructing and understanding past climate cycles and the causes of the mid-Pleistocene transition.
The 2018 Hans Oeschger Medal is awarded to Hubertus Fischer for his innovative development and use of analytical techniques to measure chemical compounds and gas concentrations and their isotopic compositions in polar ice cores.
The 2018 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientists Award is awarded to Christo Buizert for his innovative contributions on the bi-polar phasing of climate change from polar ice-core data using an exceptional combination of experimental and theoretical approaches.
The 2018 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Annarosa Quarello Homogenization of GNSS-derived IWV time series
The 2018 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Davide Panosetti Convergence behavior of convection-resolving simulations of summertime deep convection over land
The 2018 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to D. Jimena Roncancio Benitez Evaluation of climate variability and temperature extremes in Colombia: Opportunities for the outlining of climate change and human health adaptive strategies.
The 2018 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Erwin Rottler Alpine temperature changes: features and feedbacks
The 2018 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Nele-Charlotte Neddermann Seasonal predictability of European summer climate re-assessed
Name of proxy Earthworm calcite granules (ECG) Type of record Paleotemperature and paleoprecipitation reconstruction; radiocarbon dating Paleoenvironment Continental environments – loess/paleosol sequences Period of time investigated Mostly Last full Glacial cycle – from 112,000-15,000 years Before Present (BP) (or older depending on the preservation of the granules). How does it work? Earthworms are commonly found living in soil and feeding on organic matter at the soil surface. In carbonate soil, some of them secrete small granules (0.1 to 2 mm) …
Climate change has been described as “the biggest market failure in human history”1. Although fuel is costly, emitting the by-product CO2 is for free; yet it causes damages to society. In other words, those who benefit, by using the atmosphere as waste dump, do not pay the full costs, i.e. the adverse effects climate change has on societies on a global scale. Can this market failure be cured? Should humankind sacrifice some of its present welfare to prevent future climate …
What is machine learning? Artificial Intelligence, and its subfield of machine learning, is a very trending topic as it plays an increasing role in our daily life. Examples are: translation programs, speech recognition software in mobile phones and automatic completion of search queries. However, what value do these new techniques have for climate science? And how complicated is it to use them? The idea behind machine learning is simple: a computer is not explicitly programmed to perform a particular task, …
The last 2.5 Million years of the Earth’s history (termed Quaternary) are characterised by climatic cycles oscillating between warm (interglacial) and cold (glacial) periods. To be able to fully understand and interpret past climate variations the development of accurate and precise chronological techniques is crucial. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating is a strong geochronological tool that can be used to date across a wide time range, from the modern days to a few hundred thousand years ago. It has been …
The meeting programme for the EGU General Assembly 2019 (7–12 April, Vienna) was published this month. With more than 1000 scientific sessions, debates, short courses and side events, and close to 17,000 abstracts, it promises to be a varied and exciting meeting. If you have not yet registered, please do so by the end of today to get reduced registration rates.
This month the EGU has also issued a response to potential changes to the European Research Council, one of the world’s leading and most respected funders of frontier research, designed and governed by scientists. "Without this close relationship with the research community, the ERC’s ability to support the very best frontier science will be compromised," the statement reads.
The EGU has also announced a new award for Earth, planetary and space science journalism this month. The Angela Croome Award is the newest edition to the EGU awards and medals portfolio, joining the newly renamed Julia and Johannes Weertman Medal, the recently launched Katia and Maurice Krafft Award for geoscience outreach and engagement, and many other prestigious honours.
Last but not the least, we are sad to report that Lily Pereg, Deputy President and Programme Group Chair of the EGU Soil System Sciences (SSS) Division and Executive Editor of the SOIL journal, passed away in January. Read the obituary on the EGU website.