Our motivation for calling a conference on climatic change was to stimulate interdisciplinary exchange between researchers in various fields concerned with climatic research, which include meteorology, oceanography, limnology, palynology, glaciology, dendrochronology, and climate modeling. The philosophy behind this attempt at cross- fertilization is much the same as that of previous conferences on cli- matic change in the NATO-series ("Climatic variations and variability, facts and theories", Berger, 1981; "Milankovitch and climate", Berger et al., 1984). The past is the key to the range of future possibilities. It is for this reason that we stressed history and case studies in convening the present symposium on abrupt climatic change, without however forget- ting that modeling, conceptual and mathematical, ultimately provides the understanding necessary for prediction. We attempted to strike a bal- ance between these complementary aspects of current climatological re- search, aiming at a symposium situated in scope about halfway between "Climate in Earth history" (Berger and Crowell, 1982) and "Climate pro- cesses and climate sensitivity" (Hansen and Takahashi, 1984). We con- centrated, therefore, on the last 20,000 years, where the time-scales are potentially good enough to document rapid change.

Table of Contents:
I. Introduction.- Abrupt climatic change - an introduction.- Air-sea interaction processes as models for abrupt climatic changes.- How to recognize an abrupt climatic change?.- The rapidity of CO2-induced climatic change: observations, model results and palaeoclimatic implications.- II. The Last Millennium.- The explosive volcanic eruption record in Northern Hemisphere temperature records.- Decadalscale patterns of climatic change over eastern North America inferred from tree rings.- Factors controlling free air and ocean temperature of the last 30 years and extrapolation to the past.- Summer temperature changes from tree rings in the Mediterranean area during the last 800 years.- Evidence of abrupt climatic change during the last 1,500 years recorded in ice cores from the tropical Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru.- III. Abrupt Climatic Change during the Holocene.- The Late-Quaternary climate of the western Amazon Basin.- Late Holocene morphological changes in a Jamaican Land Snail: evidence for changes in rainfall.- Indications for Abrupt Holocene Climatic Change: Late Holocene oxygen isotope stratigraphy of the Great Salt Lake, Utah.- Pollen time series and Holocene climate variability of the midwest United States.- IV. Glacial-Holocene Transition: Land Records.- Fossil beetle assemblages as evidence for sudden and intense climatic changes in the British Isles during the last 45,000 years.- On the duration of the interglacial to glacial transition at the end of the Eemian Interglacial (Deep Sea Stage 5 e): botanical and sedimentological evidence.- The Alleröd/Younger Dryas boundary.- Movement of the desert boundary in the Levant from latest Pleistocene to Early Holocene.- Younger Dryas in North America - modeling, data analysis, and re-evaluation.- The Younger Dryas insouthwestern Europe: an abrupt climatic change as evidenced from pollen records.- Aridification and abrupt climatic events on the Saharan northern and southern margins, 20,000 Y BPto Present.- V. Glacial-Holocene Transition: Ice Core Record.- Ice core evidence of abrupt climatic changes.- Abrupt climatic changes: the Antarctic ice record during the late Pleistocene.- Environmental changes during last deglaciation inferred from chemical analysis of the Dome C ice core.- VI. Glacial-Holocene Transition: Deep-Sea Record.- Bioturbation effects on abrupt climatic changes recorded in deep sea sediments. Correlation between ?18O profiles and accelerator 14C dating.- Glacial-Holocene transition: climate pulsations and sporadic shutdown of NADW production.- Rapid changes in the inflow of Atlantic water into the Norwegian Sea at the end of the last glaciation.- Paleoproductivity of oceanic upwelling and the effect on atmospheric CO2 and climatic change during deglaciation times.- VII. Modeling Climate and Its Record.- Modeling future climate change affecting nuclear waste disposal: An outline.- Detection of abrupt climatic changes in deep-sea sediment cores: the forward problem.- Abrupt terminations of Late Pleistocene ice ages: a simple Milankovitch explanation.- Simulation of paleoclimatic tracers using atmospheric general circulation models.- Climate sensitivity and past climates: evidence from numerical studies.- A climate model intercomparison for the Younger Dryas and its implications for paleoclimatic data collection.