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Public Lecture Series 2024-2025 - Demystifying climate extremes: how lessons from the past inform the future

Calendar Tuesday, 11 March 2025
Calendar 18:30-19:30

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Climate hope display

A palaeontological view of the modern climate and biodiversity crisis - Daniela Schmidt (University of Bristol)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 6th Assessment Report states that past climate changes have significantly impacted biodiversity and human society, with rapid warming often triggering global biodiversity crises. However, because the fossil record has some biases and covers long time periods, it raises questions about how useful it is for understanding the current climate crisis. In this discussion, Daniela Schmidt will focus on examples of how environmental changes in the past affected life on Earth, show how we can work with challenging fossil records, and explain how combining climate and biological data helps us better understand these impacts.

We are living in an alarming period of global warming. The series will show how past changes in greenhouse gases impacted our planet’s global climate, hydrological cycles, ice cover, and marine and terrestrial ecosystems. It will explore how understanding our geological past can contribute to potential physical and social solutions to mitigate extreme future events.