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The PAGES-2k synthesis

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Guest commentary by Darrell Kaufman (N. Arizona U.)

In a major step forward in proxy data synthesis, the PAst Global Changes (PAGES) 2k Consortium has just published a suite of continental scale reconstructions of temperature for the past two millennia in Nature Geoscience. More information about the study and its implications are available at the FAQ on the PAGES website and the datasets themselves are available at NOAA Paleoclimate.

The main conclusion of the study is that the most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the 19th century, and which was followed by a warming trend in the 20th C. The 20th century in the reconstructions ranks as the warmest or nearly the warmest century in all regions except Antarctica. During the last 30-year period in the reconstructions (1971-2000 CE), the average reconstructed temperature among all of the regions was likely higher than anytime in at least ~1400 years. Interestingly, temperatures did not fluctuate uniformly among all regions at multi-decadal to centennial scales. For example, there were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age. Cool 30-year periods between the years 830 and 1910 CE were particularly pronounced during times of weak solar activity and strong tropical volcanic eruptions and especially if both phenomena often occurred simultaneously.
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References

  1. . , "Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia", Nature Geoscience, vol. 6, pp. 339-346, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1797

Ice hockey

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Eric Steig

It is well known that ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula have collapsed on several occasions in the last couple of decades, that ice shelves in West Antarctica are thinning rapidly, and that the large outlet glaciers that drain the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) are accelerating. The rapid drainage of the WAIS into the ocean is a major contributor to sea level rise (around 10% of the total, at the moment).

All of these observations match the response, predicted in the late 1970s by glaciologist John Mercer, of the Antarctic to anthropogenic global warming. As such, they are frequently taken as harbingers of greater future sea level rise to come. Are they?

Two papers published this week in Nature Geoscience provide new information that helps to address this question. One of the studies (led by me) says “probably”, while another (Abram et al.) gives a more definitive “yes”. [Read more…] about Ice hockey

Response by Marcott et al.

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Readers will be aware of the paper by Shaun Marcott and colleagues, that they published a couple weeks ago in the journal Science. That paper sought to extend the global temperature record back over the entire Holocene period, i.e. just over 11 kyr back time, something that had not really been attempted before. The paper got a fair amount of media coverage (see e.g. this article by Justin Gillis in the New York Times). Since then, a number of accusations from the usual suspects have been leveled against the authors and their study, and most of it is characteristically misleading. We are pleased to provide the authors’ response, below. Our view is that the results of the paper will stand the test of time, particularly regarding the small global temperature variations in the Holocene. If anything, early Holocene warmth might be overestimated in this study.

Update: Tamino has three excellent posts in which he shows why the Holocene reconstruction is very unlikely to be affected by possible discrepancies in the most recent (20th century) part of the record. The figure showing Holocene changes by latitude is particularly informative.

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The Greenland melt

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Eric Steig

Last July (2012), I heard from a colleagues working at the edge of the Greenland ice sheet, and from another colleague working up at the Summit. Both were independently writing to report the exceptional conditions they were witnessing. The first was that the bridge over the Watson river by the town of Kangerlussuaq, on the west coast of Greenland, was being breached by the high volumes of meltwater coming down from the ice sheet. The second was that there was a new melt layer forming at the highest point of the ice sheet, where it very rarely melts.


A front loader being swept off a bridge into the Watson River, Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, in July 2012. Fortunately, nobody was in it at the time. Photo: K. Choquette

I’ve been remiss in not writing about these observations until now. I’m prompted to do so by the publication in Nature today (January 23, 2013) of another new finding about Greenland melt. This paper isn’t about the modern climate, but about the climate of the last interglacial period. It has relevance to the modern situation though, a point to which I’ll return at the end of this post.

[Read more…] about The Greenland melt

On sensitivity: Part I

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Climate sensitivity is a perennial topic here, so the multiple new papers and discussions around the issue, each with different perspectives, are worth discussing. Since this can be a complicated topic, I’ll focus in this post on the credible work being published. There’ll be a second part from Karen Shell, and in a follow-on post I’ll comment on some of the recent games being played in and around the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages.

[Read more…] about On sensitivity: Part I

Responses to volcanoes in tree rings and models

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Houston, we have a problem.

Admittedly, not a huge problem and not one that most people, or even most climatologists, are particularly fascinated by, but one which threads together many topics (climate models, tree rings, paleo-climate) which have been highlighted here in the past. The problem is that we have good evidence in the ice core records for very large tropical eruptions over the last 1000 years – in particular the eruptions in 1258/1259, 1452 and 1809 to 1815 – but for which many paleo-reconstructions barely show a blip in temperature. Models, in attempting to simulate this period, show varied but generally larger (and sometimes much larger) responses. The differences are significant enough to have prompted a few people to try and look into why this mismatch is occurring.

Whenever there is a mismatch between model and observation, there are, roughly speaking, at least three (non-exclusive) possibilities: the model is wrong, the observational data are wrong or the comparison is not like-with-like. There have been many examples of resolved mismatches in each category so all possibilities need to be looked at.

As described in a previous post earlier this year, Mann et al., 2012 (pdf), postulated that for extreme volcanoes, the cooling would be sufficient to saturate the growth response, and that some trees might `skip´ a ring for that year leading to a slight slippage in tree-ring dating, a potential smearing of the composite chronologies, and a further underestimate of the cooling in tree-ring based large-scale reconstructions.

This hypothesis has now been challenged by a group of authors in a comment (Anchukaitis et al.) (pdf, SI, code), who focus on the appropriateness of the tree ring growth model and the spatial pattern the volcanic climate responses. The Mann et al. response (pdf, SI) presents some further modeling and 19th century observational data in support of the original hypothesis.

Of course, there are still two other possibilities to consider. First, the models may have an excessive response. This could be due to either models responding excessively to the correct forcing, or could be related to an excessive forcing itself. There are indeed some important uncertainties in estimating the history of volcanic forcing – which involves inferring a stratospheric aerosol load (and effective radius of the particles and their distribution) from a network of sulphate peaks in ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica. For example, the forcing for the big eruption around 1453 differs by a factor of 2 in the inferred forcing (-12 W/m2 and -5.4 W/m2) in the two estimates proposed for the recent model-intercomparison (Schmidt et al., 2012). Note too that the details of how aerosols are implemented in any specific model can also make a difference to the forcing, and there are many (as yet untested) assumptions built into the forcing reconstructions.

It is also conceivable that climate models overreact to volcanic forcing – however, excellent matches to the Pinatubo response in temperature, radiative anomalies, water vapour and dynamic responses, where we know the volcanic aerosol load well, make that tricky to support (Hansen et al, 2007) (pdf, SI). (As an aside, the suggestion in this paper that the response to Krakatoa (1883) was underpredicted by the historical SST fields was partially vindicated by the results from HadSST3 which showed substantially more cooling).

The third possibility is that some tree-ring reconstructions can’t be easily compared to simple temperature averages from the models. As both the original paper and the comment suggests, there are important effects from memory from previous years in ring widths and, potentially, increases in diffuse light post-eruption promoting growth spurts. This needs to be assessed using more sophisticated forward models for tree ring growth applied to the models’ output – a feature in both the Mann et al, and Anchukaitis et al. approaches. More work is likely needed on this, and using the wider variety of model experiments coming out of CMIP5/PMIP3.

There is clearly potential for these competing hypotheses to get sorted out. Information from newly-digitised old instrumental records in the early 19th Century such as shipping records for the East India Company (Brohan et al, 2012), doesn’t support the largest modelled responses to Tambora (1815), but does suggest a response larger and more defined than that seen in some reconstructions. However, other 19th Century temperature compilations such Berkeley Earth show larger responses to Tambora – though there are spatial sampling issues there as well. There is also the potential for non-tree ring based reconstructions to provide independent confirmation of the magnitude of the response.

So while neither of the latest comments and responses provide a definitive answer to the principal problem, there is certainly lots of scope for extended and (hopefully) productive discussions.

References

  1. M.E. Mann, J.D. Fuentes, and S. Rutherford, "Underestimation of volcanic cooling in tree-ring-based reconstructions of hemispheric temperatures", Nature Geoscience, vol. 5, pp. 202-205, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1394
  2. K.J. Anchukaitis, P. Breitenmoser, K.R. Briffa, A. Buchwal, U. Büntgen, E.R. Cook, R.D. D'Arrigo, J. Esper, M.N. Evans, D. Frank, H. Grudd, B.E. Gunnarson, M.K. Hughes, A.V. Kirdyanov, C. Körner, P.J. Krusic, B. Luckman, T.M. Melvin, M.W. Salzer, A.V. Shashkin, C. Timmreck, E.A. Vaganov, and R.J.S. Wilson, "Tree rings and volcanic cooling", Nature Geoscience, vol. 5, pp. 836-837, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1645
  3. M.E. Mann, J.D. Fuentes, and S. Rutherford, "Reply to 'Tree rings and volcanic cooling'", Nature Geoscience, vol. 5, pp. 837-838, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1646
  4. G.A. Schmidt, J.H. Jungclaus, C.M. Ammann, E. Bard, P. Braconnot, T.J. Crowley, G. Delaygue, F. Joos, N.A. Krivova, R. Muscheler, B.L. Otto-Bliesner, J. Pongratz, D.T. Shindell, S.K. Solanki, F. Steinhilber, and L.E.A. Vieira, "Climate forcing reconstructions for use in PMIP simulations of the Last Millennium (v1.1)", Geoscientific Model Development, vol. 5, pp. 185-191, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/gmd-5-185-2012
  5. J. Hansen, M. Sato, R. Ruedy, P. Kharecha, A. Lacis, R. Miller, L. Nazarenko, K. Lo, G.A. Schmidt, G. Russell, I. Aleinov, S. Bauer, E. Baum, B. Cairns, V. Canuto, M. Chandler, Y. Cheng, A. Cohen, A. Del Genio, G. Faluvegi, E. Fleming, A. Friend, T. Hall, C. Jackman, J. Jonas, M. Kelley, N.Y. Kiang, D. Koch, G. Labow, J. Lerner, S. Menon, T. Novakov, V. Oinas, J. Perlwitz, J. Perlwitz, D. Rind, A. Romanou, R. Schmunk, D. Shindell, P. Stone, S. Sun, D. Streets, N. Tausnev, D. Thresher, N. Unger, M. Yao, and S. Zhang, "Climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE", Climate Dynamics, vol. 29, pp. 661-696, 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00382-007-0255-8
  6. P. Brohan, R. Allan, E. Freeman, D. Wheeler, C. Wilkinson, and F. Williamson, "Constraining the temperature history of the past millennium using early instrumental observations", Climate of the Past, vol. 8, pp. 1551-1563, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/cp-8-1551-2012

My oh Miocene!

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Guest commentary by Sarah Feakins

Our recent study in Nature Geoscience reconstructed conditions at the Antarctic coast during a warm period of Earth’s history. Today the Ross Sea has an ice shelf and the continent is ice covered; but we found the Antarctic coast was covered with tundra vegetation for some periods between 20 million and 15.5 million years ago. These findings are based on the isotopic composition of plant leaf waxes in marine sediments.

That temperatures were warm at that time was not a huge surprise; surprising, was how much warmer things were – up to 11ºC (20ºF) warmer at the Antarctic coast! We expected to see polar amplification, i.e. greater changes towards the poles as the planet warms. This study found those coastal temperatures to be as warm as 7ºC or 45ºF during the summer months. This is a surprise because conventional wisdom has tended to think of Antarctica being getting progressively colder since ice sheets first appeared on Antarctica 34 million years ago (but see Ruddiman (2010) for a good discussion of some of the puzzles).
[Read more…] about My oh Miocene!

References

  1. S.J. Feakins, S. Warny, and J. Lee, "Hydrologic cycling over Antarctica during the middle Miocene warming", Nature Geoscience, vol. 5, pp. 557-560, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/NGEO1498
  2. W.F. Ruddiman, "A Paleoclimatic Enigma?", Science, vol. 328, pp. 838-839, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1188292

Tree Rings and Climate: Some Recent Developments

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by Michael E. Mann, Gavin Schmidt, and Eric Steig

Update 7/12/12: Media Matters comments on the latest misrepresentations of the Esper et al study discussed in our article: ‘Surprise: Fox News Fails Paleoclimatology’
Update 7/13/12: Further comment from Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute in Huffington Post UK “The World’s Most Visited Newspaper Website Continues to Regurgitate Nonsense from Climate Change ‘Sceptics'”
Update 7/14/12: Some additional context provided by this LiveScience article

It’s been a tough few months for tree-rings, perhaps unfairly. Back in April, we commented on a study [that one of us (Mike) was involved in] that focused on the possibility that there is a threshold on the cooling recorded by tree-ring composites that could limit their ability to capture the short-term cooling signal associated with larger volcanic eruptions. Mostly lost in the discussion, however, was the fact–emphasized in the paper—that the trees appeared to be doing a remarkably good job in capturing the long-term temperature signal—the aspect of greatest relevance in discussions of climate change.

This week there have been two additional studies published raising questions about the interpretation of tree-ring based climate reconstructions.
[Read more…] about Tree Rings and Climate: Some Recent Developments

Far out in North Carolina

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The extensive salt marshes on the Outer Banks of Carolina offer ideal conditions for unravelling the mysteries of sea level change during past centuries. Here is a short report from our field work there – plus some comments on strange North Carolina politics as well as two related new papers published today in Nature Climate Change.


The Outer Banks of Carolina are particularly vulnerable to coastal erosion and sea-level rise, partly because the land is subsiding and the banks are naturally moving landward. On the ocean front, land is continually being lost.
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Fresh hockey sticks from the Southern Hemisphere

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In the Northern Hemisphere, the late 20th / early 21st century has been the hottest time period in the last 400 years at very high confidence, and likely in the last 1000 – 2000 years (or more). It has been unclear whether this is also true in the Southern Hemisphere. Three studies out this week shed considerable new light on this question. This post provides just brief summaries; we’ll have more to say about these studies in the coming weeks. [Read more…] about Fresh hockey sticks from the Southern Hemisphere