This talk will be in two parts.

I’ll start off with a summary of how paleoclimate data and modelling are incorporated into the most recent IPCC report. This has three main aspects – (a) the contextualisation of recent and future climate change through changes expressed in the geological record, (b) the assessment of climate sensitivity (and how this feeds into future projections and carbon budgets), and© model evaluation using paleo proxies. I’ll also briefly touch on how this ultimately feeds into the COP negotiations.

Secondly, I’ll present some recent work we’ve been carrying out in Bristol, including work I’ve been doing over the past two weeks here in Oxford. This is a set of climate model simulations covering the entire Phanerozoic. I’ll focus on the ocean circulation in these simulations, and how this impacts global mean temperatures and temperature gradients, and how these model simulations can be combined with proxy records to reconstruct global mean temperature through time.

For an interactive taster of this work, see www.climatearchive.org