The Holocene Temperature Conundrum

Overview

Journal Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

Specialty Science

Date 2014 Aug 13

PMID 25114253

Citations 36

Authors

Zhengyu Liu

Jiang Zhu

Yair Rosenthal

Xu Zhang

Bette L Otto-Bliesner

Axel Timmermann

Robin S Smith

Gerrit Lohmann

Weipeng Zheng

Oliver Elison Timm

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

A recent temperature reconstruction of global annual temperature shows Early Holocene warmth followed by a cooling trend through the Middle to Late Holocene [Marcott SA, et al., 2013, Science 339(6124):1198-1201]. This global cooling is puzzling because it is opposite from the expected and simulated global warming trend due to the retreating ice sheets and rising atmospheric greenhouse gases. Our critical reexamination of this contradiction between the reconstructed cooling and the simulated warming points to potentially significant biases in both the seasonality of the proxy reconstruction and the climate sensitivity of current climate models.

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