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Lessons about a future warmer world using data from the past

Jun 26, 2018
Measurements on living and fossil corals may lead to conclusions about past temperatures and sea level fluctuations. Photo: Eric Matson / Australian Institute for Marine Science
Measurements on living and fossil corals may lead to conclusions about past temperatures and sea level fluctuations. Photo: Eric Matson / Australian Institute for Marine Science

Selected intervals in the past that were as warm or warmer than today can help us understand what the Earth may be like under future global warming. A latest assessment of past warm periods, published in Nature Geoscience by an international team of 59 scientists from 17 nations, shows that in response to the warming ecosystems and climate zones will spatially shift and on millennial time scales ice sheets will substantially shrink. Among the international team of authors are four scientists from the MARUM – Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen: Pepijn Bakker, Thomas Felis, Michal Kucera and Alessio Rovere, who provided expertise on numerical models and reconstructions of past warm climates, sea level and marine ecosystem response.

Original publication: Palaeoclimate constraints on the impact of 2 °C anthropogenic warming and beyond. Nature Geoscience 2018, DOI: 10.1038/s41561-018-0146-0

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