Question: Can you studying the climate 3 million years ago give us an indication to what Global Warming will be like in a few years time?

James Pope answered on 26 Jun 2012:

Hi babbyhoff,

I hope so! That’s the aim of my research, to see if by studying the warmer climate of 3 million years ago in the Pliocene I can develop our understanding of what will happen due to global warming as we have no way of testing it other than using climate models looking at past climates to check our climate models work ok, which allows us to assume their predictions for future climate are as accurate as we can make them!