A European view of the future of palaeoclimate research

In May 1996 a conference entitled 'Climate and Ozone at the Dawn of the Third Millenium' was held in Brussels. Paul Crutzen (Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 1995), Bert Bolin (Blue Planet Prize, 1995), Willy Dansgaard and Nick Shackleton (co-recipients of the Crafoord Prize, 1995) led the debate both to celebrate the extraordinary recent achievements of European environmental research as well as planning how to continue this success in the future. The conference covered the whole range of European environmental science (Berger et al., 1996). What we have summarised here is the debate on the future direction of palaeoclimatic research. It was suggested that priorities for palaeoclimatic research should be set in three ways: (1) what data do climate models require from the palaeoclimatologists; (2) as a feedback, what models do the palaeoclimatologists require; and (3) there is still a need for pure or non-directed research as this has in the past provided significant insights into the way the climate systems work? The delegates also agreed that there was a need for palaeoclimatic data on three different time scales and resolutions: (1) data for the last 200-500 years with a resolution of at least a month Iso that climate models can be tested and natural rapid climate changes such as the El Nino-Southern oscillation can be investigated; (2) data for at least the last 2000 years if not the whole of the Holocene at yearly resolution to investigate natural climate variability; and (3) longer term palaeoclimatic studies to increase our general knowledge of climate change. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd