General discussion: climatic analysis

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Abstract
In opening the proceedings of this meeting Mr J. S. Sawyer of the U.K. Meteorological Office uttered the view that it is really premature as yet to ask a meteorologist to interpret the events of the last glaciation. Nevertheless, that is just what I have been asked to do and, though one must tread warily, I believe it must be attempted. Indeed, it has been attempted in a number of scientific papers in recent years and these two days’ proceedings have surely helped us to see a number of things more clearly. I have no time to do justice to all the points that appear interesting. A meteorologist looks first for the large-scale patterns, which are probably the least difficult to discern and which provide the framework into which all else must fit. Most meteorologists, oceanographers and perhaps all who are neither geologists nor palaeobotanists, will also probably echo Professor W. A. Watts’s reservations about the many names adopted for the various cold and warm stages. One must acknowledge the need which has called the multiplicity of naming systems into being, but the outsider can only accept them reluctantly as marking a provisional stage until the dating is firm and the correspondence of the events known by different names in different parts of the world has been established. This huge, and growing, vocabulary is formidable to those outside the debates about the field evidence and tends to deter other scientists who might contribute to interpreting the processes of climatic change in the Quaternary. From this point of view, and to such audiences, dates and numbered stages, or one single series of names, are much to be preferred.

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