Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Reconstructing Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 Years: A Reappraisal

Reconstructing Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 Years: A Reappraisal The 1000-year climatic and environmental history of the Earth contained in various proxyrecords is examined. As indicators, the proxies duly represent or record aspects of localclimate. Questions on the relevance and validity of the locality paradigm forclimatological research become sharper as studies of climatic changes on timescales of50–100 years or longer are pursued. This is because thermal and dynamical constraintsimposed by local geography become increasingly important as the air-sea-land interactionand coupling timescales increase. Because the nature of the various proxy climateindicators are so different, the results cannot be combined into a simple hemispheric orglobal quantitative composite. However, considered as an ensemble of individualobservations, an assemblage of the local representations of climate establishes thereality of both the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period as climatic anomalies withworld-wide imprints, extending earlier results by Bryson et al. (1963), Lamb (1965), andnumerous other research efforts. Furthermore, these individual proxies are used todetermine whether the 20th century is the warmest century of the 2nd Millennium at avariety of globally dispersed locations. Many records reveal that the 20th century islikely not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the lastmillennium, although it is clear that human activity has significantly impacted some localenvironments. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Energy & Environment SAGE

Reconstructing Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 Years: A Reappraisal

Download PDF
64 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/sage/reconstructing-climatic-and-environmental-changes-of-the-past-1000-ty2VSag8yP
Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© 2003 SAGE Publications
ISSN
0958-305X
eISSN
2048-4070
DOI
10.1260/095830503765184619
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The 1000-year climatic and environmental history of the Earth contained in various proxyrecords is examined. As indicators, the proxies duly represent or record aspects of localclimate. Questions on the relevance and validity of the locality paradigm forclimatological research become sharper as studies of climatic changes on timescales of50–100 years or longer are pursued. This is because thermal and dynamical constraintsimposed by local geography become increasingly important as the air-sea-land interactionand coupling timescales increase. Because the nature of the various proxy climateindicators are so different, the results cannot be combined into a simple hemispheric orglobal quantitative composite. However, considered as an ensemble of individualobservations, an assemblage of the local representations of climate establishes thereality of both the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period as climatic anomalies withworld-wide imprints, extending earlier results by Bryson et al. (1963), Lamb (1965), andnumerous other research efforts. Furthermore, these individual proxies are used todetermine whether the 20th century is the warmest century of the 2nd Millennium at avariety of globally dispersed locations. Many records reveal that the 20th century islikely not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the lastmillennium, although it is clear that human activity has significantly impacted some localenvironments.

Journal

Energy & Environment – SAGE

Published: May 1, 2003

There are no references for this article.