PAGES - Past Global Changes

IPCC Task Group, Data Support

Details: Published: Wednesday, 13 June 2018 15:38

The IPCC Task Group on Data Support for Climate Change Assessments (TG-Data) - formerly Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impact and Climate Analysis (TGICA) - are currently accepting nominations for experts to serve as TG-Data Co-Chairs as well as members of the Task Group.

More information about TG-Data and the roles and responsibilities of its members can be found in the Terms of Reference (.pdf).

To nominate yourself, please complete the nomination form (.xlsx) and send it, together with a CV, to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. at Future Earth no later than Monday 6 August 2018. Future Earth will then forward all accepted nominations to the IPCC Bureau, who will make the final selection.

Past Land Use and Land Cover

Details: Published: Thursday, 07 June 2018 17:42

Past Global Changes Magazine vol. 26 (1)

The latest issue of Past Global Changes Magazine, titled "Past Land Use and Land Cover", is now available to read and download.

Guest edited by Marie-José Gaillard, Nicki Whitehouse, Marco Madella and Kathleen Morrison, this issue emphasizes the need for appropriate reconstructions of past land-use and land-cover change to study the effect of past anthropogenic land-cover change on climate (the land-use forcing) using Earth System Models. It also highlights how land-use and land-cover change over past millennia can be reconstructed at local to regional and continental scales using the results of archaeological studies combined with model-based quantification of past plant cover from fossil pollen data.

This publication is a product of PAGES' LandCover6k working group.

Regional paleoclimate modeling

Details: Published: Thursday, 07 June 2018 12:51

The PAGES 2k Network project PALEOLINK recently published their first paper on perspectives of regional paleoclimate modeling.

Authors Patrick Ludwig et al. present a review of the added value of the regional climate modeling approach within the scope of paleoclimate research and discuss the current major challenges and perspectives. Two time periods serve as an example: the Holocene, including the Last Millennium, and the Last Glacial Maximum.

They believe regional climate models provide a clear benefit to answer fundamental paleoclimate research questions and may be key to advance a meaningful joint interpretation of climate model and proxy data.

Access the paper, published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, here. Find out more about the project and sign up to the mailing list here.

Common Era in the Holocene

Details: Published: Tuesday, 29 May 2018 16:32

A new paper which uses a synthesis of 93 published records reveals that moisture availability increased over large portions of North America over the past 2000 years, the Common Era (CE).

Published yesterday in Climate of the Past, "Placing the Common Era in a Holocene context: millennial to centennial patterns and trends in the hydroclimate of North America over the past 2000 years" by Bryan Shuman et al. shows in many records that the second millennium CE tended to be wetter than the first millennium CE.

The long-term changes formed the background for annual to multi-decade variations, such as "mega-droughts", and also provide a context for amplified rates of hydrologic change today.

This paper is a contribution to the PAGES 2k Network special issue "Climate of the past 2000 years: regional and trans-regional syntheses".

Access the paper here and the special issue here.

PAGES-supported wshop in Eos

Details: Published: Monday, 28 May 2018 10:40

In November 2017, scientists from 20 countries attended a PAGES-supported workshop in Marrakesh, Morocco, to discuss the mechanisms of climate changes in Africa and how the global hydrological cycle, oceanic and atmospheric circulation, and marine and terrestrial ecosystems respond.

The workshop report "Assessing and Understanding Climate Change in Africa", by Ilham Bouimetarhan, Matthieu Carré, and Rachid Cheddadi, was recently published in Eos.

Access it here.

2k data assists new paper

Details: Published: Wednesday, 16 May 2018 10:43

PAGES 2k Network data has been used in a new paper on model simulations and proxy-based reconstructions, published yesterday in Nature's Scientific Reports.

The authors, led by Raphael Neukom, assess potential sources of discrepancies between data and models by comparing 1000-year hemispheric temperature reconstructions based on real-world paleoclimate proxies with climate-model-based pseudoproxies.

Access the paper, titled "Possible causes of data model discrepancy in the temperature history of the last Millennium" here.

Learn more about the work of PAGES 2k Network here.