Accurate reconstructions of sea surface, bottom water, and continental surface temperatures during the Cenozoic era are essential for understanding climate dynamics in the geological past, particularly under warmer-than-present conditions. However, producing robust and precise paleotemperature estimates remains inherently challenging. Temperature proxies are subject to a range of geochemical, biological, environmental, and analytical uncertainties, which lead to discrepancies in both absolute and relative temperature estimates across different methods. These limitations hinder efforts to synthesize globally representative paleotemperature records and to constrain the rates and magnitudes of global temperature changes in response to both abrupt and long-term changes in atmospheric CO₂.

Addressing these challenges requires new approaches, including improved proxy calibrations, and more comprehensive inter-proxy and proxy-model comparisons, to obtain a better understanding of the uncertainties associated with paleotemperature reconstructions. In this session, we welcome contributions that push the boundaries of Cenozoic paleotemperature research, including new multi-proxy and multi-site temperature reconstructions, new advances in proxy ground-truthing, applications, and calibrations, and novel modelling perspectives on paleotemperature changes. By bringing together the diverse community using proxy and modelling techniques, we seek to increase the robustness of Cenozoic ocean and terrestrial temperature reconstructions. Ultimately, this will improve our understanding of Earth’s climate system and its behaviour during warmer-than-present states.