http://www.bosci.net/papers/Holocenetemperaturefrompollenrecords.pdf

The temperature of Europe during the Holocene reconstructed from pollen data

The 8k event: cause and consequences of a major Holocene abrupt climate change

H. H. Lamb's latest book on the earth's changing climate is a carefully crafted work covering four areas: the physical basis of climate and climate change, the methods of climate reconstruction, the history of climate since the height of the last glaciation, and the impact of climate on human affairs. The book will be of particular interest to three groups. Atmospheric scientists interested in the long history of climate behavior (but perhaps overwhelmed by Lamb's all-encompassing work on the topic, Climate: Past, Present and Future, vol. II, Methuen, New York), will find Climate History and the Modern World to be a good titration of the fuller work. Scientists in other fields, including social scientists grappling with issues of climate-society interaction, will find the book a good entree into the field. Finally, Lamb himself suggests that the book will be useful to resource managers and other decision makers trying to avoid negative climate impacts. With this last audience in mind, no doubt, Lamb has chosen a style that eschews extensive footnoting and references (though sufficient citations are included to lead to further information). This works quite well and seems reasonable in view of his carefully documented previous writings.

Climate History and the Modern World

A new temperature reconstruction with decadal resolution, covering the last two millennia, is presented for the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere (90–30°N), utilizing many palaeotemperature proxy ...

/pdf/a-new-reconstruction-of-temperature-variability-in-the-extra-cyjvzfow6o.pdf

A new reconstruction of temperature variability in the extra‐tropical northern hemisphere during the last two millennia

Evaluating the significance of Holocene submillennial δ 18 O variability in the Greenland ice cores is crucial for understanding how natural climate oscillations may modulate future anthropogenic warming. A high-resolution oxygen isotope record from a speleothem in southwestern Ireland provides evidence for centennial-scale δ 18 O variations that correlate with subtle δ 18 O changes in the Greenland ice cores, indicating regionally coherent variability in the early Holocene. Evidence for previously undetected early Holocene cooling events is presented, but mid- to late-Holocene ice rafting in the North Atlantic appears to have had little impact on δ 18 O at this ocean margin site.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/294/5545/1328.full.pdf

Centennial-Scale Holocene Climate Variability Revealed by a High-Resolution Speleothem δ18O Record from SW Ireland

A Quantitative Holocene Climatic Record from Diatoms in Northern Fennoscandia

Temperature patterns over the past eight centuries in Northern Fennoscandia inferred from sedimentary diatoms

A rather common problem of data analysis is to find interesting features, such as local minima, maxima, and trends in a scatterplot. Variance in the data can then be a problem and inferences about features must be made at some selected level of significance. The recently introduced SiZer technique uses a family of nonparametric smooths of the data to uncover features in a whole range of scales. To aid the analysis, a color map is generated that visualizes the inferences made about the significance of the features. The purpose of this article is to present Bayesian versions of SiZer methodology. Both an analytically solvable regression model and a fully Bayesian approach that uses Gibbs sampling are presented. The prior distributions of the smooths are based on a roughness penalty. Simulation based algorithms are proposed for making simultaneous inferences about the features in the data.

Bayesian Multiscale Smoothing for Making Inferences About Features in Scatterplots

Day care centre (DCC) attendees play a central role in maintaining the circulation of Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumococcus) in the population. Exposure within families and within DCCs are the main risk factors for colonisation with pneumococcal serotypes in DCC attendees. Transmission of serotype specific carriage was analysed with a continuous time event history model, based on longitudinal data from day care attendees and their family members. Rates of acquisition, conditional on exposure, were estimated in a Bayesian framework utilising latent processes of carriage. To ensure a correct level of exposure, non-participating day care attendees and their family members were included in the analysis. Posterior predictive simulations were used to quantify transmission patterns within day care cohorts, to estimate the basic reproduction number for pneumococcal carriage in a population of day care cohorts, and to assess the critical vaccine efficacy against carriage to eliminate pneumococcal transmission. The model, validated by posterior predictive sampling, was successful in capturing the strong temporal clustering of pneumococcal serotypes in the day care cohorts. In average 2.7 new outbreaks of pneumococcal carriage initiate in a day care cohort each month. While 39% of outbreaks were of size one, the mean outbreak size was 7.6 individuals and the mean length of an outbreak was 2.8 months. The role of families in creating and maintaining transmission was minimal, as only 10% of acquisitions in day care attendees were from family members. Considering a population of day care cohorts, a child-to-child basic reproduction number was estimated as 1.4 and the critical vaccine efficacy against acquisition of carriage as 0.3. Pneumococcal transmission occurs in serotype specific outbreaks of carriage, driven by within-day-care transmission and between-serotype competition. An amplifying effect of the day care cohorts enhances the spread of pneumococcal serotypes within the population. The effect of vaccination, in addition to reducing susceptibility to pneumococcal carriage in the vaccinated, induces a herd effect, thus creating a counter-effect to the amplifying effect of the cohort. Consequently, the critical vaccine efficacy against carriage, required for elimination of transmission, is relatively low. Use of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines is expected to induce a notable herd protection against pneumococcal disease.

/pdf/outbreaks-of-streptococcus-pneumoniae-carriage-in-day-care-jst09wbrsg.pdf

Outbreaks of Streptococcus pneumoniae carriage in day care cohorts in Finland - implications for elimination of transmission.

This article is concerned with finding trends, maxima, and minima in a curve underlying a scatter plot of observations. When the data exhibit large variation, the detection of such features can be difficult because it is not easy to say which of the seeming features are statistically significant. Additional difficulties emerge when the values of the predictor variable may contain errors and when errors in the response variable cause dependence in their observed values. We propose a Bayesian approach for finding statistically significant features in a scatter plot under such challenging conditions. The method extends in several ways the BSiZer approach earlier introduced by the authors.

Panu Erästö

Papers

A Quantitative Holocene Climatic Record from Diatoms in Northern Fennoscandia

Temperature patterns over the past eight centuries in Northern Fennoscandia inferred from sedimentary diatoms

Bayesian Multiscale Smoothing for Making Inferences About Features in Scatterplots

Outbreaks of Streptococcus pneumoniae carriage in day care cohorts in Finland - implications for elimination of transmission.

Bayesian analysis of features in a scatter plot with dependent observations and errors in predictors