Unusual twentieth-century summer warmth in a 1,000-year temperature record from Siberia

IN the current debate on the magnitude of modern-day climate change, there is a growing appreciation of the importance of long, high-resolution proxies of past climate 1–3 . Such records provide an indication of natural (pre-anthropogenic) climate variability, either singly at specific geographical...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature (London) 1995-07, Vol.376 (6536), p.156-159
Main Authors: Briffa, Keith R, Jones, Philip D, Schweingruber, Fritz H, Shiyatov, Stepan G, Cook, Edward R
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Climate
Earth sciences
Earth, ocean, space
Exact sciences and technology
Geochronology
Humanities and Social Sciences
Isotope geochemistry. Geochronology
letter
Marine and continental quaternary
multidisciplinary
Paleobotany
Paleontology
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Summer
Surficial geology
Temperature
Trees
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:IN the current debate on the magnitude of modern-day climate change, there is a growing appreciation of the importance of long, high-resolution proxies of past climate 1–3 . Such records provide an indication of natural (pre-anthropogenic) climate variability, either singly at specific geographical locations or in combination on continental and perhaps even hemispheric scales 4 . There are, however, relatively few records that are well dated, of high resolution and of verifiable fidelity in terms of climate response, and conspicuously few that extend over a thousand years or more 5 . Here we report a tree-ring-based reconstruction of mean summer temperatures over the northern Urals since AD 914. This record shows that the mean temperature of the twentieth century (1901–90) is higher than during any similar period since AD 914.
ISSN:0028-0836
1476-4687
DOI:10.1038/376156a0