The timing could be better
but our major review paper on past climates has just dropped in @ScienceMagazine. In this review, we argue that past climate climates are key to predicting the future
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6517/eaay3701


Our future climate trajectory is still unknown, but it's going to be toasty: comparable to many of the warm climates of the past 100 million years.
Earth history tells us what the climate system does under higher carbon dioxide. Not only should we study it more, but we should use paleoclimates in model evaluation. For example, to test whether the high ECS in some of the new climate models is legit.

Past climates also tell us things about ice sheets, the water cycle, El Niño...things for which we don't have very certain future predictions. Lots of work to be done on this front!
Past climate is both the context for the future, and the key to understanding the physics of climate change.
This paper was made possible by a workshop sponsored by @aspenglobal and @HSFdn with a truly all-star team of co-authors incl. @cjpoulsen @holy_kau @Triptychphrases @theFosterlab @climategordon @hl_ford @ChemClimatology @derp_code @ClimateSamwell 


And finally, you can download the data from the figures on GitHub and plot your own graphs of temperature and carbon dioxide through Earth history! https://github.com/jesstierney/PastClimates