The IPCC’s reductive Common Era temperature history

Esper, Jan; Smerdon, Jason E.; Anchukaitis, Kevin J.; Allen, Kathryn; Cook, Edward R.; D’Arrigo, Rosanne; Guillet, Sébastien; Ljungqvist, Fredrik C.; Reinig, Frederick; Schneider, Lea; Sigl, Michael; Stoffel, Markus; Trnka, Mirek; Wilson, Rob; Büntgen, Ulf (2024). The IPCC’s reductive Common Era temperature history. Communications earth & environment, 5(1) Springer Nature 10.1038/s43247-024-01371-1

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Common Era temperature variability has been a prominent component in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports over the last several decades and was twice featured in their Summary for Policymakers. A single reconstruction of mean Northern Hemisphere temperature variability was first highlighted in the 2001 Summary for Policymakers, despite other estimates that existed at the time. Subsequent reports assessed many large-scale temperature reconstructions, but the entirety of Common Era temperature history in the most recent Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was restricted to a single estimate of mean annual global temperatures. We argue that this focus on a single reconstruction is an insufficient summary of our understanding of temperature variability over the Common Era. We provide a complementary perspective by offering an alternative assessment of the state of our understanding in high-resolution paleoclimatology for the Common Era and call for future reports to present a more accurate and comprehensive assessment of our knowledge about this important period of human and climate history.

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