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Day 1: State of the Planet • Theme: Transforming our way of living

How has the planet responded to large climate change pressures in the past?

Eric Wolff, British Antarctic Survey, UK; Hubertus Fischer, University of Bern, Switzerland; Denis Didier Rousseau, ENS CERES-ERTI and LMD, France

Session content:
Over recent and future decades, Earth is experiencing climate forcing of a scale and rate that is very unusual compared to natural variations of the past. Nonetheless, there are times in the past when the planet has had to respond to changes of a similar scale, but slower; or of a similar pace, but only regionally. In this session, we will first lay out the evidence for large climate changes of the past, concentrating especially on (a) the major reorganisations as ice ages came and went and (b) the very rapid changes (Dansgaard-Oeschger events), centred on the North Atlantic, that occurred during the last glacial period. We will then call on experts to present evidence about how both ecosystems and human populations dealt with these real past changes. Finally we will convene a panel of experts from the physical and social science arenas to discuss how our present societies would be expected to react to such well-documented changes. An open poster session will invite presentations about the real nature, cause and rate of past changes; about the documented reaction of the biosphere (including humans) to them; and about the options that a human society of today's complexity would have faced if it had been confronted with such changes. One motivation is that it may be easier to focus discussion by confronting the society of today with the documented past, rather than with uncertain future projections. Note that this session is proposed on behalf of the IGBP-PAGES steering committee.