The first ever NPG Journal Club

On May 9th, the worlds of Geoscience and Google+ will meet as we present our inaugural NPG journal club. The focus of discussion: How has Earth’s climate changed in the past 2,000 years? This big climate question was recently brought to the forefront with the publication of a progress article in Nature Geoscience. In this paper, 78 members of the PAGES 2k Consortium reanalysed more than 400 records of continental temperature.

Trawling through all these records, the authors found that the late 20th century was probably the warmest period in the past 1,400 years. This result certainly made the news. But the paper’s wealth of data and analysis, and the finer details of each continent’s temperature ups and downs over the 2,000 years, are ripe for further discussion.

PAGES reconstruction of past climate by region. Credit: Nature Geoscience

The panel

We’ve therefore invited two authors of the paper, #PAGES executive director Thorsten Kiefer and postdoctoral researcher Nick McKay to discuss their work. They will be joined by Nerilie Abram, who is working on the marine side of the PAGES 2k project and is an author of a paper looking at 1,000 years of ice melt in Antarctica, and Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller and blogger at RealClimate, as well as editors from Nature Geoscience

How to watch 

To get involved, RSVP to the event on Google+.  The video’s URL will be available on the event page and will also be embedded at the bottom of this blog post. So make sure you add these links too your bookmarks.

How to ask a question

The panel is waiting to hear your questions, too! You can post your questions on the event page now, and throughout the live discussion. You can also tweet questions using #NPGjclub hashtag. Or you can post questions at the bottom of this blog post in the lead up to the event, but we won’t be monitoring the blog during the actual discussion.

Finally, don’t forget to read up: you can download the paper free of charge until the end of 9 May.

Join us there!