HOLIVAR2006 Open Science Meeting
Natural Climate Variability and Global Warming
What is HOLIVAR? HOLIVAR is a European Science Foundation (ESF) funded project which seeks to bring together European scientists interested in climate variability during the Holocene period (the last 11,500 years). The scientists are palaeoclimatologists, climate historians and climate modellers. The over-arching research questions concern how and why climate has varied naturally on different time-scales (annual to centennial) over this period and how an understanding of past variability can improve the predictability of climate models.
Global warming is one of the most urgent issues for human society in the 21st century. However, not everyone accepts that the observed warming of the last few decades is caused by increased concentrations of greenhouse gases associated with human activity. Sceptics maintain that the natural variability of the climate system could equally be responsible.
Meeting Themes
The HOLIVAR2006 Open Science Meeting consisted of 12 keynote talks, a panel discussion and 4 poster sessions organised into the following four themes:
Theme 1 Millennial Time Scales (Chair: Bernd Zolitschka)
Theme 2 Decadal to Centennial Time Scales (Chair: Jonathan Holmes)
Theme 3 Climate Variability in the Last 2000 Years (Chair: Heinz Wanner)
Theme 4 Rapid Hydrological Change (Chair: Ingemar Renberg)
Poster submissions were invited in the above themes with special emphasis on.
o New work on climate reconstruction (proxy, documentary and instrumental records)
o New work on climate forcing
o Climate model development and inter-comparison
o Climate-model comparison
o Climate-environment-human society interactions