final_program_abstracts[1]

11 IMSC Session Program
Reconstructing palaeoclimates from biological proxies: Some
biological and chronological sources of uncertainty
Tuesday - Parallel Session 3
Brian Huntley
Durham University, UK
The various biological proxies used as the basis for palaeoclimatic reconstructions
respond principally to different climatic variables. Biologists’ knowledge of which
variables are of primary importance to a given proxy is often limited or even lacking.
Furthermore, even when known, these primary variables often are not those directly
recorded by meteorologists. Further complexity arises from the observations that
climatic, and sometimes also other environmental, variables often have interacting
effects upon orgamisms, and that the primary climatic variable generally differs in
different parts of the geographical / climatic range of the taxon providing the proxy.
Reconstructing the ‘wrong’ variable(s), or reconstructing individual variables in
isolation, represents a large, but often overlooked, source of uncertainty in the
reconstructed values obtained.
One approach to reducing such uncertainties is to attempt to make concurrent
palaeoclimatic reconstructions from different proxies sampled in different localities,
requiring that the spatial and temporal relationships between the reconstructed values
are consistent with physical understanding of the climate system. The use of different
methods to estimate the chronology for these different records, along with the
limitations of each of these methods, however, generates an additional source of
uncertainty when attempting to develop this approach.
Abstracts 123