Geosciences Memory Online:

Solar Variability and Climate Change

"Fewer scientific problems are so often discussed yet so rarely decided by proofs, as whether climatic relations have changed over time." -- Joachim von Schouw, 1826.

P. Brueghel, The Numbering at Bethlehem (1565)

For Breughel, the climate was wintry
even at Bethlehem. Did Breughel's
fascination with wintry scenes, and
the frozen canals he loved to depict,
result from Solar Variability, the Little
Ice Age, and the Maunder Minimum?


P. Breughel, Hunters in the Snow, (1566)

A novel experiment is currently underway in the geophysical sciences. Thanks to funding from the Sloan Foundation, geoscientists who have worked on a number of pathbreaking developments now have an opportunity to document and write their own history. The AGU, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Institute of Physics have established sites on the World Wide Web to which geoscientists may contribute their recollections and other unpublished material for the histories of Solar Variability and Climate Change; Black Smokers; Greenland Ice Drilling Projects; General Atmospheric Circulation Models; and the GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment.

This site, Solar Variability and Climate Change, is divided into subtopics: Solar Irradiance Measurements, Global Temperature Reconstructions, Isotope Proxies, Solar Reconstruction and Tree Ring and Other Proxies. The moderator has provided a historical overview. Please click on the topic of interest to you and view the documents and discussion there. Join the discussion and submit any materials you think appropriate: recollections, photographs, grant proposals that you feel charted out a promising lead or direction for the field (or perhaps a dead end with a moral!), unpublished early drafts of papers, thoughts or ideas. In order to limit controversy over questions of current scientific interest, the site will focus on developments prior to 1990, and the site moderator will screen submissions. As the title "Geosciences Memory Online" suggests, the site will become an online repository -- a continuing, interactive conversation -- for the history of our knowledge of the influence of Solar Variability on Terrestrial Climate Change.

"The temperature of the winter season, in northern latitudes, has suffered a material change, and become warmer in modern, than it was in ancient times. ... Indeed I know not whether any person, in this age, has ever questioned the fact. " -- Noah Webster, 1843.


Select a Topic

  • Solar Irradiance Measurements
  • Global Temperature Reconstructions
  • Solar Reconstruction
  • Isotope, Tree Ring and Other Proxies

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