Drafting Authors: Neil Adger, Pramod Aggarwal, Shardul Agrawala, Joseph Alcamo, Abdelkader Allali, Oleg Anisimov, Nigel Arnell, Michel Boko, Osvaldo Canziani, Timothy Carter, Gino Casassa, Ulisses Confalonieri, Rex Victor Cruz, Edmundo de Alba Alcaraz, William Easterling, Christopher Field, Andreas Fischlin, Blair Fitzharris, Carlos Gay García, Clair Hanson, Hideo Harasawa, Kevin Hennessy, Saleemul Huq, Roger Jones, Lucka Kajfež Bogataj, David Karoly, Richard Klein, Zbigniew Kundzewicz, Murari Lal, Rodel Lasco, Geoff Love, Xianfu Lu, Graciela Magrín, Luis José Mata, Roger McLean, Bettina Menne, Guy Midgley, Nobuo Mimura, Monirul Qader Mirza, José Moreno, Linda Mortsch, Isabelle Niang-Diop, Robert Nicholls, Béla Nováky, Leonard Nurse, Anthony Nyong, Michael Oppenheimer, Jean Palutikof, Martin Parry, Anand Patwardhan, Patricia Romero Lankao, Cynthia Rosenzweig, Stephen Schneider, Serguei Semenov, Joel Smith, John Stone, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, David Vaughan, Coleen Vogel, Thomas Wilbanks, Poh Poh Wong, Shaohong Wu, Gary Yohe

Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/envirophilo/wanner.pdf

Mid- to Late Holocene climate change: an overview

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.

/pdf/a-reconstruction-of-regional-and-global-temperature-for-the-v46ufkdlme.pdf

A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years

Following the suggestions of a recent National Research Council report [NRC (National Research Council) (2006) Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years (Natl Acad Press, Washington, DC).], we reconstruct surface temperature at hemispheric and global scale for much of the last 2,000 years using a greatly expanded set of proxy data for decadal-to-centennial climate changes, recently updated instrumental data, and complementary methods that have been thoroughly tested and validated with model simulation experiments. Our results extend previous conclusions that recent Northern Hemisphere surface temperature increases are likely anomalous in a long-term context. Recent warmth appears anomalous for at least the past 1,300 years whether or not tree-ring data are used. If tree-ring data are used, the conclusion can be extended to at least the past 1,700 years, but with additional strong caveats. The reconstructed amplitude of change over past centuries is greater than hitherto reported, with somewhat greater Medieval warmth in the Northern Hemisphere, albeit still not reaching recent levels.

/pdf/proxy-based-reconstructions-of-hemispheric-and-global-g9rva7k5kn.pdf

Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia

Rainfall on Earth is most intense in the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), a narrow belt of clouds centred on average around six degrees north of the Equator. The mean position of the ITCZ north of the Equator arises primarily because the Atlantic Ocean transports energy northward across the Equator, rendering the Northern Hemisphere warmer than the Southern Hemisphere. On seasonal and longer timescales, the ITCZ migrates, typically towards a warming hemisphere but with exceptions, such as during El Nino events. An emerging framework links the ITCZ to the atmospheric energy balance and may account for ITCZ variations on timescales from years to geological epochs.

Migrations and dynamics of the intertropical convergence zone

A number of reconstructions of millennial-scale climate variability have been carried out in order to understand patterns of natural climate variability, on decade to century timescales, and the role of anthropogenic forcing These reconstructions have mainly used tree-ring data and other data sets of annual to decadal resolution Lake and ocean sediments have a lower time resolution, but provide climate information at multicentennial timescales that may not be captured by tree-ring data Here we reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the past 2,000 years by combining low-resolution proxies with tree-ring data, using a wavelet transform technique to achieve timescale-dependent processing of the data Our reconstruction shows larger multicentennial variability than most previous multi-proxy reconstructions, but agrees well with temperatures reconstructed from borehole measurements and with temperatures obtained with a general circulation model According to our reconstruction, high temperatures--similar to those observed in the twentieth century before 1990--occurred around ad 1000 to 1100, and minimum temperatures that are about 07 K below the average of 1961-90 occurred around ad 1600 This large natural variability in the past suggests an important role of natural multicentennial variability that is likely to continue

Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data

Nature 433, 613–617 (2005) The authorship of this Letter is amended to include Stein-Erik Lauritzen Details of the Soylegrotta Cave record (series 8), which should have been accredited to S-EL, were not supplied in the paper but are available from the corresponding author (AM, andersmoberg@natgeo

/pdf/corrigendum-highly-variable-northern-hemisphere-temperatures-5cvngs0xrf.pdf

Corrigendum: Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data

Based on a set of very long-living (2,000 years) Qilian junipers (Sabina przewalskii Kom.) from the north-eastern part of the Tibetan Plateau (the region of Dulan), we carefully consider the regional curve standardization (RCS) technique. For this goal, we correlate deviations of individual tree-ring width records from their regional mean age-dependent curve (RC). It turns out that these correlations keep their positivity for almost all shifts between ages compared (up to 500 years and even more) evidencing each Dulan juniper to be a unique “thermometer”. Just the unification of these “thermometers” in the form RC creates a spurious positive trend in the Dulan chronology. We modify the RCS technique to closer attach RC to these “thermometers” in order to construct a new chronology in which the trend is absent.

Eigen analysis of tree-ring records: Part 1, a limited representativeness of regional curve

The technique of expanding meteorological fields on eigenvectors of the field covariation matrix is popular. In this paper, we propose for the first time to use a mathematically similar technique to solve the main problem of dendrochronology: classifying variations in tree-ring records as either age- and microenvironment-dependent or climate-induced. Applying this technique to a sample of very long-lived Qilian junipers (Sabina przewalskii Kom.) from the Dulan region in western China, we demonstrate that the ring-width variations projected on the first eigenvector are age-dependent, but those projected on several of the first subsequent vectors are mainly climate-induced. In particular, the second and third projections capture multi-centennial climatic variations, and the variations projected on the fourth through seventh eigenvectors show periodic variations that are probably induced by the 178-year solar cycle. The projections on the smallest eigenvectors seem to be negligible.

Eigen analysis of tree-ring records: part 2, posing the eigen problem

This paper reports on the further development of a new technique for standardization of tree-ring records called the eigen analysis of tree-ring records. The data are from the same sample set of 56 long-lived Qilian junipers (Sabina przewalskii Kom.) from the Dulan region in western China as was used in our previous paper (Yang et al. 2011b). To assess the heteroscedasticity of individual record deviations from the sample set regional curve (RC), we tested five different definitions of those deviations. Direct computations of eigenvectors of all relevant intrarecord covariation matrices turned out to be greatly affected by observational and computational noise; an analytic approximation of these vectors was therefore desirable. The Bessel function of the first kind and the zero order proved suitable for such an approximation, especially because the deviations were defined via subtraction of the RC from raw ring width records. Exclusion of the contributions of the first segment of the Bessel approximation, corresponding to the extremely large first eigenvalue, rendered individual record deviations from RC homoscedastic. Therefore, the routine Fourier basis became applicable to extract climate-dependent components of the residual deviations. A Fourier expansion of the Dulan chronology revealed the quasi-200-year-long solar activity cycle to be the main factor affecting Dulan tree growth.

Nina M. Datsenko

Papers

Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data

Corrigendum: Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data

Eigen analysis of tree-ring records: Part 1, a limited representativeness of regional curve

Eigen analysis of tree-ring records: part 2, posing the eigen problem

Eigen analysis of tree-ring records: part 3, taking heteroscedasticity and sampling effects into consideration