Welcome to the web summary and assessment of IPCC WGI AR5 Chapter 5: Information from Paleoclimate Archives
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a scientific body created by the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization in 1988 to serve as an authoritative voice on climate science. The IPCC generates Assessment Reports every few years to provide scientists, policymakers, and the general public with comprehensive and objective syntheses of the scientific community's knowledge of global climate change. Working Group I (WGI) is charged with summarizing the science, while WGII and III address impacts and mitigation, respectively. WGI's contribution to Assessment Report 5 (AR5) was released in late 2013, asserting that "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century."
Chapter 5 summarizes information obtained from paleoclimate records--geologic evidence of past climate changes as preserved in climate archives. Paleoclimate records are critical to our understanding of anthropogenic warming in a number of ways, as they provide: (1) a contextual understanding of natural climate variability to which modern warming can be compared; (2) opportunities to validate climate models against the paleo-record; (3) improved understanding of the functioning of certain parts of the climate system and estimates of climate sensitivity; and (4) insights into how ecosystems respond to climate change.
About this project
This website was created as part of a graduate seminar at the University of Colorado - Boulder. For the seminar, students read the IPCC's latest assessment report (AR5) from working group I (WGI) and attended lectures by an author from each chapter. This website is designed to make the content of Chapter 5 more accessible to a broad audience and offer some insights into its importance in communicating the larger body of climate science to policymakers and the general public.
Find out more
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IPCC seminar web project homepage
About this project
This website was created as part of a graduate seminar at the University of Colorado - Boulder. For the seminar, students read the IPCC's latest assessment report (AR5) from Working Group I (WGI) and attended lectures by an author from each chapter. This website is designed to make the content of Chapter 5 more accessible to a broad audience and offer some insights into its importance in communicating the larger body of climate science to policymakers and the general public.
Find out more
This site is designed to summarize and assess the information presented in Chapter 5 in a way that is clear and accessible.
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Chapter material is summarized on a section-by-section basis under the "Summary of Content" tab
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"Policy and Societal Relevance" offers my personal take on how this chapter fits in to the bigger picture of climate science and why it matters.
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A critical evaluation of the chapter--what it does well and what it leaves out--is provided under the "Assessment" tab
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Key terms and concepts are defined in the glossary, the summary of paleoclimate events gives the timing and key characteristics of important climatic periods, and FAQs and other helpful sites are listed under the "Resources" tab.
Note that the summaries and assessments provided within this website are reflective of the understanding and opinion of the author (Sarah Crump), and are by no means official IPCC documents.
Figure 5.2, IPCC AR5 WGI. Atmospheric CO2 in parts per million (ppm) reconstructed for the last 65 million years (Ma) from a variety of proxies. CO2 tends to vary with temperature and thus is important to measure when studying the climate of the past. This chapter focuses particularly on times in Earth's history when CO2, and thus temperature, are as high or higher than present so that the past can be used as an analogue for the future.