A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years
Exceptional Now
The climate has been warming since the industrial revolution, but how warm is climate now compared with the rest of the Holocene? Marcott et al. (p. 1198) constructed a record of global mean surface temperature for more than the last 11,000 years, using a variety of land- and marine-based proxy data from all around the world. The pattern of temperatures shows a rise as the world emerged from the last deglaciation, warm conditions until the middle of the Holocene, and a cooling trend over the next 5000 years that culminated around 200 years ago in the Little Ice Age. Temperatures have risen steadily since then, leaving us now with a global temperature higher than those during 90% of the entire Holocene.
Abstract
Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (<5000 years ago), culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene during the Little Ice Age, about 200 years ago. This cooling is largely associated with ~2°C change in the North Atlantic. Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
Already a Subscriber?Sign In
Supplementary Material
Summary
Supplementary Text
Figs. S1 to S26
References
Resources
References and Notes
1
E. Jansen et al., in Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, S. Solomon et al., Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2007), pp. 433–497.
2
Mann M. E., et al., Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 105, 13252 (2008).
3
Moberg A., Sonechkin D. M., Holmgren K., Datsenko N. M., Karlén W., Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data. Nature 433, 613 (2005).
4
Wanner H., et al., Mid- to late Holocene climate change: An overview.. Quat. Sci. Rev. 27, 1791 (2008).
5
The majority of the data sets can be found at NOAA National Climate Data Center (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/paleo.html) and the PANGAEA data repository (www.pangaea.de/). Sources for all data sets are available online (6).
6
Materials, methods, and supporting data are available as supplementary materials on Science Online.
7
Esper J., Cook E. R., Schweingruber F. H., Low-frequency signals in long tree-ring chronologies for reconstructing past temperature variability. Science 295, 2250 (2002).
8
Ammann C. M., Wahl E. R., The importance of the geophysical context in statistical evaluations of climate reconstruction procedures. Clim. Change 85, 71 (2007).
9
J. Esper, D. C. Frank, R. J. S. Wilson, Low-frequency ambition and high-frequency ratifications. EOS 85, 113, 120 (2004).
10
J. Esper et al., Orbital forcing of tree-ring data. Nat. Clim. Change 10.1038/nclimate1589 (2012).
11
Schneider T., Analysis of incomplete climate data: Estimation of mean values and covariance matrices and imputation of missing values. J. Clim. 14, 853 (2001).
12
Wahl E. R., Ammann C. M., Robustness of the Mann, Bradley, Hughes reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures: Examination of criticisms based on the nature and processing of proxy climate evidence. Clim. Change 85, 33 (2007).
13
Wahl E. R., Ritson D. M., Ammann C. M., Comment on "Reconstructing past climate from noisy data". Science 312, 529, author reply 529 (2006).
14
Dykoski C. A., et al., A high-resoultion, absolute-date Holocene and deglacial Asian monsoon record from Dongge Cave, China. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 233, 71 (2005).
15
Wang Y., et al., The Holocene Asian monsoon: Links to solar changes and North Atlantic climate. Science 308, 854 (2005).
16
Haug G. H., Hughen K. A., Sigman D. M., Peterson L. C., Röhl U., Southward migration of the intertropical convergence zone through the Holocene. Science 293, 1304 (2001).
17
Partin J. W., Cobb K. M., Adkins J. F., Clark B., Fernandez D. P., Millennial-scale trends in west Pacific warm pool hydrology since the Last Glacial Maximum. Nature 449, 452 (2007).
18
Griffiths M. L., et al., Increasing Australian-Indonesian monsoon rainfall linked to early Holocene sea-level rise. Nat. Geosci. 2, 636 (2009).
19
Holmgren K., et al., Persistent millenial-scale climatic variability over the past 25,000 years in Southern Africa. Quat. Sci. Rev. 22, 2311 (2003).
20
Cruz F. W., et al., Insolation-driven changes in atmospheric circulation over the past 116,000 years in subtropical Brazil. Nature 434, 63 (2005).
21
Renssen H., et al., Simulating the Holocene climate evolution at northern high latitudes using a couple atmosphere-sea ice-ocean-vegetation model. Clim. Dyn. 24, 23 (2005).
22
Ganopolski A., Kubatzki C., Claussen M., Brovkin V., Petoukhov V., The influence of vegetation-atmosphere-ocean interaction on climate during the mid-holocene. Science 280, 1916 (1998).
23
Leduc G., Schneider R., Kim J.-H., Lohmann G., Holocene and Eemian sea surface temperature trends as revealed by alkenone and Mg/Ca paleothermometry. Quat. Sci. Rev. 29, 989 (2010).
24
Tzedakis P. C., Channell J. E. T., Hodell D. A., Kleiven H. F., Skinner L. C., Determining the natural length of the current interglacial. Nat. Geosci. 10.1038/ngeo1358 (2012).
25
Mantsis D. F., Clement A. C., Broccoli A. J., Erb M. P., Climate feedbacks in response to changes in obliquity. J. Clim. 24, 2830 (2011).
26
Kaufman D. S., et al., Holocene thermal maximum in the western Arctic (0-180 W). Quat. Sci. Rev. 23, 529 (2004).
27
Ljungqvist F. C., The spatio-temporal pattern of the mid-Holocene thermal maximum. Geografia 116, 91 (2011).
28
V. Ramaswamy et al., Eds., Radiative Forcing Of Climate Change. Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 2001).
29
Hoogakker B. A. A., et al., Dynamics of North Atlantic Deep Water masses during the Holocene. Paleoceanography 26, PA4214 (2011).
30
Broecker W. S., Paleocean circulation during the last deglaciation: A bipolar seesaw? Paleoceanography 13, 119 (1998).
31
Steinhilber F., et al., 9,400 years of cosmic radiation and solar activity from ice cores and tree rings. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 109, 5967 (2012).
32
Castellano E., et al., Holocene volcanic history as recorded in the sulfate stratigraphy of the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica Dome C (EDC96) ice core. J. Geophys. Res. 110, D06114 (2005).
33
Zielinski G. A., Mayewski P. A., Meeker L. D., Whitlow S., Twickler M. S., A 110000-yr Record of explosive volcanism from the GISP2 (Greenland) ice core. Quat. Res. 45, 109 (1996).
34
Brohan P., Kennedy J. J., Harris I., Tett S. F. B., Jones P. D., Uncertainty estimates in regional and global observed temperature changes: A new dataset from 1850. J. Geophys. Res. 111, D12106 (2006).
35
G. A. Meehl et al., in Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, S. Solomon et al., Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2007), pp. 747–845.
36
Huang S., Merging information from different resources for new insights into climate change in the past and future. Geophys. Res. Lett. 31, L13205 (2004).
37
Berger A., Loutre M.-F., Insolation values for the climate of the last 10 million years. Quat. Sci. Rev. 10, 297 (1991).
38
McManus J. F., Francois R., Gherardi J.-M., Keigwin L. D., Brown-Leger S., Collapse and rapid resumption of Atlantic meridional circulation linked to deglacial climate changes. Nature 428, 834 (2004).
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Science
Volume 339 • Issue 6124 • 8 March 2013
Pages: 1198 - 1201
History
Received: 27 July 2012
Accepted: 4 January 2013
Copyright
Copyright © 2013, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
RE: 'Exceptional Now'
The 'Exceptional now' paragraph suggests that current temperatures are warmer than 90% of the Holocene. This is at odds with the abstract and paper itself that suggests current temperatures are warmer than 75% of the Holocene.
RE: Present temp date of "wheelchair" graph created by Jeremy D. Shakun
The excellently done "wheelchair" graph shows a blue line. http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/climate-change/
1. What is the last date of the Present temperature data shown at the right hand side of the graph in blue? "Present" is used by different authors as different dates. For example, for Greenland ice cores, BP starts at 1950 and their graphs end at -95 BP. I am trying to distinguish between actual temp data used and the temp projections shown in orange.
2. Am I correct that the difference in temp minimum in the wheelchair graph 20,000 years ago and the frequently seen Greenland ice core graph is due to the actual temp difference between Greenland and your much more global temperature sources?
RE: Comment on Marcott et al 2013
This comment was originally posted on the old version of the Science website in March 2013.
Brief comment on "A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years"
Paul Matthews, School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham, UK
16 March 2013
This paper includes several graphs that show slow temperature variation over the last 10000 years followed by a rapid rise over the 20th century. This aspect of the paper has unsurprisingly been seized upon enthusiastically by climate activists and journalists. However it is clear that this result is spurious. Note the following points:
1. The proxy data in the accompanying Excel file show no dramatic increase in the 20th century. This can easily be checked simply by plotting the supplied data.
2. Figures S5 and S6 show no recent upturn at all.
3. The Phd thesis of the first author uses the same data sets and plots similar graphs, but with no trace of any sharp increase. This earlier contradictory work is not cited in the paper.
4. The supplementary material provides no explanation for how the graphs were constructed. Carrying out an averaging of the proxy data yields a graph similar to that in the thesis, quite different from that in the paper. Why was no detailed explanation of the procedure reported? Will the authors supply the code that was used?
Any one of these issues would raise serious questions about the validity of this work. Taken together they leave no doubt that the results presented are spurious and misleading. The paper should be withdrawn immediately. The fact that such an obviously flawed paper was published raises serious questions about the authors, the quality of the refereeing process and the handling of the paper by the editors of Science.