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...