The long-term perspective of climate change

A long-term perspective of natural climate variability across time-scales and regions is essential for understanding present and future global warming, and global warming’s impacts on nature and human society. Such a perspective is too often lacking in the contemporary policy debate. Professors Ulf Büntgen, Mike Hulme, Christine Lane, Hans W. Linderholm, Clive Oppenheimer, Baskar Vira, and chair, Paul J. Krusic, discuss and describe how we investigate the past, what we have learned from having a long-term perspective on climate change, and the challenges faced in applying this knowledge to the policy making process.