In the talk I shall review our current understanding of climate change and discuss how emerging discoveries about ice cores, marine sediments, radiative forcing from orbital variations, aerosols and volcanoes have been fitted together over the last few decades. We now have a fairly coherent overview of these effects, but how did things look as they were discovered?
I shall show that scientists then, as now, were well aware of the dangers of prediction from short datasets and incomplete understanding. Lastly, I shall consider whether the events of that time have any lessons for the predictions of global warming that are made today.
Further reading is available from http://www.nbs.ac.uk/public/icd/wmc/sci.env.cooling/