Speaker: Michael Mann (Penn State University)
Abstract: I will review recent work aimed at establishing the nature of, and understanding the factors governing, large-scale climate variability in past centuries. Among the approaches I will discuss are the (1) statistical reconstruction of past climate changes from climate proxy records, the (2) forward modeling of the processes recorded by proxy records, (3) climate model simulations of the response to estimated changes in radiative forcing, and (4) experiments in which proxy data are assimilated directly into climate models.