Call for Participation: "Towards a History of Paleoclimatology: Changing roles and shifting scales in climate sciences" (original) (raw)
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Paleoanthropology is primarily rooted in the study of fossils and the analysis of sites. Dependence on these resources leads to challenges resulting from the difficulty in gaining access to scarce, precious, and sometimes overprotected materials, and from issues of control over field sites. The development of virtual paleoanthropology can sometimes be a way to partially solve the first problem. However on some occasions, the access to and utilization of numerical data has also become an issue of dispute. In parallel, recent advances in studies focusing on microstructures, isotopic composition, and paleogenetics require direct sampling of the fossils. The trend in paleoanthropology is to integrate approaches from different scientific fields, and this is especially visible in developmental sciences, genetics, and environmental studies. In the meantime, dealing with human evolution remains a sensitive topic, subject to clear ideological and religious biases. The interest of the media and of the public in this science does not always contribute to an objective approach to the questions. Finally, among other issues, the expansion of paleoanthropology studies in developing countries must contend with the decline of a colonial mode of thinking. # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007 816 28 Prospects and pitfalls
2001
Dentro de los debates teoricos que se vienen produciendo desde hace decadas en el seno de la Prehistoria/Arqueologia parece existir un cierto consenso sobre dos ideas fundamentales: que nuestra disciplina es esencialmente una ciencia social y que el estudio del Paleolitico es la parte mas obsoleta, conservadora y cientificista de ella. Para precisar las causas de esta anomalia y tras evaluar de un modo critico las distintas aproximaciones desde las que se han realizado analisis historiograficos en nuestro ambito, se ofrece una reconstruccion racional, ciertamente esquematica, de los principales Programas de Investigacion que han tenido alguna relevancia en el desarrollo del Paleolitico, utilizando para ello una libre adaptacion de la metodologia desarrollada por I. Lakatos. Las conclusiones mas relevantes que se desprenden de dicho analisis son, por un lado, que la parte mas antigua de la Prehistoria se ha investigado desde parametros completamente distintos a los de la Prehistoria ...
Climatic Change, 2009
High-resolution paleoclimatology is the study of climate variability and change on interannual to multi-century time scales. Its primary focus is the past few millennia, a period lacking major shifts in external climate forcing and earth system configuration. Large arrays of proxy climate records derived from natural archives have been used to reconstruct aspects of climate in recent centuries. The main approaches used have been empirical and statistical, albeit informed by prior knowledge both of the physics of the climate, and of the processes imprinting climate information in the natural archives. We propose a new direction, in which emerging tools are used to formalize the combination of process knowledge and proxy climate records to better illuminate past climate variability on these time scales of great relevance to human concerns. 1 A turning point The study of past climates has progressed from the descriptive toward the quantitative over recent decades. As this has proceeded, very considerable gains have been made in understanding the climate system, and, at the same time, greater demands have been placed on the quality and quantity of natural archives of climate information, and on the methods used to translate their contents into climatologically meaningful quantities. Nowhere is this more evident than in the attention given to past climates in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Jansen et al. 2007).
MEETING REPORT | Eighth International Conference on Paleoceanography
Oceanography, 2004
The host country and meeting location are different each time, and the next venue is selected by community vote at the end of each conference. In recognition of the internationally renowned efforts of the French community in both the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) and International Marine Global Changes (IMAGES) coring programs, France was selected at the end of ICP-7 in Sapporo (Japan) to be the organizer of the 2004 ICP-8. ICP-8 took place in Biarritz, France, from September 5 to September 10, 2004, in the conference center of the local landmark casino. The Environnments et Paléoenvironnement Océanique (EPOC) group of University Bordeaux I acted as the local organizing committee. A total of 700 scientists attended from 34 different countries-including 250 students. The overall conference theme was "An Ocean View of Global Change." Scientifi c topics addressed during ICP-8 provided attendees with information about the latest discoveries and the current state of knowledge in paleoceanography. Meeting talks and discussions identifi ed emerging new areas of knowledge and raised questions about unresolved scientifi c problems. The Scientifi c Committee selected fi ve themes covering two time scales: (1) the Mesozoic (from 248 to 65 million years ago [Ma]) and Cenozoic (from 65 Ma to the present) oceans, but with an emphasis on (2) oceanographic questions concerning the more modern oceans of the Holocene (the last 10,000 years) and the most recent glacial. Two main scientifi c fi elds were considered: changes in the chemistry of the ocean (e.g., the carbonate and silica systems of the Pleistocene [1.8 Ma to 10,000 years ago] ocean and biogeochemical cycles) and changes in climate (e.g., high-frequency climate variability and interhemispheric ocean-continentclimate links). The main highlights and outcomes that emerged from the thirty-fi ve invited talks and the fi ve hundred posters are summarized below. To obtain a copy of the detailed agenda, full abstracts, and a list of invited speakers and their reported results and hypotheses, go to the ICP-8 web site: www.icp8.cnrs.fr.