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 future possibilities. It is for this reason that we stressed history and case studies in convening the present symposium on abrupt climatic change, without however forget- ting that modeling, conceptual and mathematical, ultimately provides the understanding necessary for prediction. We attempted to strike a bal- ance between these complementary aspects of current climatological re- search, aiming at a symposium situated in scope about halfway between "Climate in Earth history" (Berger and Crowell, 1982) and "Climate pro- cesses and climate sensitivity" (Hansen and Takahashi, 1984). We con- centrated, therefore, on the last 20,000 years, where the time-scales are potentially good enough to document rapid change.