Past climate changes have the potential to situate current challenges. Studying the last occurrence of climatic change, the Little ice Age (1350-1850), can help us understand risks, baselines and responses. In this talk, we will illustrate some of our attempts to make climate proxies speak to current concerns.

Helene Svarva (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) will introduce her work on dendroclimatology – using trees as climate archives. Sam White (Helsinki University) then suggests some approaches to make these reconstructions of past climate speak to current concerns. He will share the design for an online course on the Little Ice Age. Its six lessons connect sampling and reconstruction to narration and learning from past climate. 

The talk will flag some of the challenges and potentials of ‘doing big interdisciplinarity’ and disseminating research to a wider audience.