We present a novel approach to assimilate climate information contained in chronicles and annals from the 15th century to generate climate reconstructions of the Burgundian Low Countries, taking into account uncertainties associated with the descriptions of narrative sources. Our study aims to be a first step towards a more quantitative use of available information contained in historical texts, showing how Bayesian inference can help the climate community with this endeavor.

An investigation of the wet season characteristics including wet day frequencies, wet–dry spells, and season onset, end and length is done for Cape Town, South Africa. The temporal changes since 1841 in these characteristics indicate an increased incidence of shorter wet seasons and long dry spells in the most recent 3 decades compared to previous years. There is evidence of some associations between solar cycles and the Southern Oscillation index cycles with the wet season characteristics.

The Leeuwin Current to the west of Australia steers the heat exchange between the tropical and the subantarctic ocean areas. Its prominent variability during the last glacial effectively shaped the Australian ecosystem and was closely related to the dynamics of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. At ~ 43 ka BP, the rapidly weakening Leeuwin Current, the ecological response in Australia, and human interference likely caused the extinction of the exotic Australian megafauna.

The ratio of titanium to aluminum (Ti/Al) is an established way to reconstruct North African climate in eastern Mediterranean Sea sediments. We demonstrate here how to obtain reliable Ti/Al data using an efficient scanning method that allows rapid acquisition of long climate records at low expense. Using this method, we reconstruct a 3-million-year North African climate record. African environmental variability was paced predominantly by low-latitude insolation from 3–1.2 million years ago.

Natural climate variability plays an important role in the discussion of past and future climate change. Here we study centennial temperature variability and the role of large-scale ocean circulation variability using different climate models, geological reconstructions and temperature observations. Unfortunately, uncertainties in models and geological reconstructions are such that more research is needed before we can describe the characteristics of natural centennial temperature variability.