Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia

Ahmed, Moinuddin; Anchukaitis, Kevin J.; Asrat, Asfawossen; Borgaonkar, Hemant P.; Braida, Martina; Buckley, Brendan M.; Büntgen, Ulf; Chase, Brian M.; Christie, Duncan A.; Cook, Edward R.; Curran, Mark A. J.; Diaz, Henry F.; Esper, Jan; Fan, Ze-Xin; Gaire, Narayan P.; Ge, Quansheng; Gergis, Joëlle; González-Rouco, J Fidel; Goosse, Hugues; Grab, Stefan W.; ... (2013). Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia. Nature geoscience, 6(5), pp. 339-346. Nature Publishing Group 10.1038/ngeo1797

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Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between ad 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period ad 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

08 Faculty of Science > Institute of Geography > Physical Geography > Unit Paleolimnology
10 Strategic Research Centers > Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR)
08 Faculty of Science > Department of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences (DCBP)
08 Faculty of Science > Institute of Geography
08 Faculty of Science > PAGES Past Global Changes

UniBE Contributor:

Büntgen, Ulf, Esper, Jan, Grosjean, Martin, Kiefer, Thorsten, Luterbacher, Jürg, Neukom, Raphael Andreas, von Gunten, Lucien, Wanner, Heinz

Subjects:

900 History > 910 Geography & travel
500 Science > 550 Earth sciences & geology
500 Science > 570 Life sciences; biology
500 Science > 540 Chemistry

ISSN:

1752-0894

Publisher:

Nature Publishing Group

Language:

English

Submitter:

Monika Wälti-Stampfli

Date Deposited:

17 Jan 2014 10:37

Last Modified:

02 Mar 2023 23:23

Publisher DOI:

10.1038/ngeo1797

Additional Information:

Corrigendum to article on BORIS http://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/74044

Uncontrolled Keywords:

Palaeoclimate and palaeoceanography, Climate science

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.39656

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/39656

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