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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A

The following papers are all published and make up a Phil Trans A Special Issue entitled 'Warm climates of the past - a lesson for the future?'.
Official Special Issue Webpage

The editors of the Special Issue are Dan Lunt, Harry Elderfield, Rich Pancost, and Any Ridgwell.

The papers emerged from a Royal Society Discussion Meeting in 2011 of the same name.

Three of the papers are available in their final typset from as Open Access files:

Lunt, D.J., Elderfield, H., Pancost, R., Ridgwell, A., Foster, G.L., Haywood, A., Kiehl, J., Sagoo, N., Shields, C., Stone, E.J., Valdes, P., Warm climates of the past - a lesson for the future?, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A., 2013, 371, 20130146; doi:10.1098/rsta.2013.0146 [pdf - Open Access].

Haywood, A.M., Dolan, A.M., Pickering, S.J., Dowsett, H.J., McClymont, E.L., Prescott, C.L., Salzmann, U., Hill, D.J., Lunt, D.J., Pope, J.O., Valdes, P.J., On the identification of a Pliocene time slice for data-model comparison, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A., 2013, 371, 20120515; doi:10.1098/rsta.2012.0515 [pdf - Open Access].

Hansen, J., Sato, M., Russell, G., Kharecha, P., Climate sensitivity, sea level and atmospheric carbon dioxide, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A., 2013, 371, 20120294; doi:10.1098/rsta.2012.0294 [pdf - Open Access].

All the papers are available below in their submitted form as individual pdfs.
Or, you can access all the papers in a zip archive [here].

This Special Issue asks to what extent information gleaned from the study of past climates can aid our understanding of future climate change. Climate change is currently an issue at the forefront of environmental science, and also has important sociological and political implications. Most future predictions are carried out by complex numerical models, yet these models cannot be rigorously tested for scenarios outside of the modern, without making use of past climate data. Furthermore, past climate data can inform our understanding of how the Earth system operates, and provide important contextual information related to environmental change. The papers in this Special Issue tackle the problem from a variety of angles, from reconstructing past histories of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, to improving model predictions of ancient climates, to making quantitative predictions of long-term future change.

Warm climates of the past - a lesson for the future?

Lunt, D.J., Elderfield, H., Pancost, R., Ridgwell, A., Foster, G.L., Haywood, A., Kiehl, J., Sagoo, N., Shields, C., Stone, E.J., Valdes, P., Warm climates of the past - a lesson for the future?, in press, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. [pdf]

Zhang, Y.G., Pagani, M., Liu, Z., Bohaty, M., and DeConto, R., A 40-million-year history of atmospheric CO2, in press, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. [pdf]

Badger, M.P.S., Schmidt, D.A., Mackenson, A., and Pancost, R.D., High resolution alkenone palaeobarometry indicates relatively stable pCO2 during the Pliocene (3.3 to 2.8 Ma), in press, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. [pdf]

John, E.H., Pearson, P.N., Coxall, H.K., Birch, H., Wade, B.S., Foster, G.L., Warm ocean processes and carbon cycling in the Eocene, in press, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. [pdf]

Haywood, A.M., Dolan, A.M., Pickering, S.J., Dowsett, H.J., McClymont, E.L., Prescott, C.L., Salzmann, U., Hill, D.J., Lunt, D.J., Pope, J.O., Valdes, P.J., On the identification of a Pliocene time slice for data-model comparison, in press, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. [pdf]

Dowsett, H.J., Robinson, M.M., Stoll, D.K., Foley, K.M., Johnson, A.L.A., Williams, M., and Riesselman, C.R., The PRISM (Pliocene Palaeoclimate) Reconstruction: Time for a Paradigm Shift, in press, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. [pdf]

Otto-Bliesner, B.L., Rosenbloom, N., Stone, E., McKay, N.P., Lunt, D., Brady, E.C., Overpeck, J.T., How warm was the Last Interglacial? New model-data comparisons, in press, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. [pdf]

Kiehl, J.T. and Shields, C.A., Sensitivity of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum Climate to Cloud Properties, in press, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. [pdf]

Sagoo, N., Valdes, P., Flecker, R., Gregoire, L., The Early Eocene equable climate problem: Can perturbations of climate model parameters identify possible solutions?, in press, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. [pdf]

Zeebe, R.E. and Zachos, J.C., Long-term legacy of massive carbon input to the Earth system: Anthropocene vs. Eocene, in press, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. [pdf]

Hansen, J., Sato, M., Russell, G.Kharecha, P., Climate Sensitivity, Sea Level, and Atmospheric CO2, in press, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. [pdf]

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