Prior to 2.5 billion years ago, ozone was present in our atmosphere only in trace amounts. To understand how climate has changed in response to ozone build-up, we have run 3-D climate simulations with different amounts of ozone. We find that Earth's surface is about 3 to 4 °C degrees cooler with low ozone. This is caused by cooling of the upper atmosphere, where ozone is a warming agent. Its removal causes the upper atmosphere to become drier, weakening the greenhouse warming by water vapor.

After the Marinoan snowball Earth, the climate warmed rapidly due to enhanced greenhouse conditions, and the freshwater inflow of melting glaciers caused a strong stratification of the ocean. Our climate simulations reveal a potentially only moderate global temperature increase and a break-up of the stratification within just a few thousand years. The findings give insights into the environmental conditions relevant for the geological and biological evolution during that time.

Deep ocean temperatures are widely used as a proxy for global mean surface temperature in the past, but the underlying assumptions have not been tested. We use two unique sets of 109 climate model simulations for the last 545 million years to show that the relationship is valid for approximately the last 100 million years but breaks down for older time periods when the continents (and hence ocean circulation) are in very different positions.

The large-scale features of middle Pliocene climate from the 16 models of PlioMIP Phase 2 are presented. The PlioMIP2 ensemble average was ~ 3.2 °C warmer and experienced ~ 7 % more precipitation than the pre-industrial era, although there are large regional variations. PlioMIP2 broadly agrees with a new proxy dataset of Pliocene sea surface temperatures. Combining PlioMIP2 and proxy data suggests that a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ would increase globally averaged temperature by 2.6–4.8 °C.

Understanding of the role of ocean circulation on climate is contingent on the ability to reconstruct its modes and evolution. Here, we show that earth system model simulations of the Late Cretaceous predict major changes in ocean circulation as a result of paleogeographic and gateway evolution. Comparisons of model results with available data compilations demonstrate reasonable agreement but highlight that various plausible theories of ocean circulation change coexist during this period.