The Centre for Past Climate Change at the University of Reading focuses on documenting and understanding climate and environmental changes, and how these changes have impacted on and been impacted by humans. |
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The two-way interaction between climate and humans is most apparent since the development of agriculture in the early Holocene. The Holocene (i.e. the last 11,700 years) is also the time period when palaeodata are abundant and chronologies most secure.
A secondary focus on the late Quaternary (and particularly the last glacial period i.e. the last 110,000 years, and the previous interglacial period, the period between ca 130,000 and 110,000 years ago), provides an opportunity to understand the impact of climate and environmental changes on human populations and in particular how these may have influenced migrations of human populations out of Africa. Climate and environmental changes during the Late Quaternary have been large, and this also makes this period of intense interest for modeling studies to examine ice-sheet and sea-level behavior as well as regional climate fluctuations. |
NewsMajor paper in Nature Climate Change
[12/8/2015] Prof. Sandy Harrison is the lead author on a new paper on 'Implications of evaluation of CMIP5 palaeosimulations for climate projections. See more here. |
Methods and Strategies
The Centre for Past Climate Change has a major focus on generating new observations, including the development of new reconstruction techniques. Data-generation is paralleled by data synthesis to document environmental and climate changes at regional and global scales. These data syntheses will be used in conjunction with carefully-designed experiments, using both offline models of specific components of the climate system (e.g. fire-enabled dynamic global vegetation models, hydrological models) and fully-coupled climate or earth-system models, to understand the mechanisms of past climate changes. |