Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Review finds 'peak warmth of global Medieval Warm Period clearly exceeded that of Current Warm Period'

An updated review of the scientific literature by CO2 Science finds, "the peak warmth of the global Medieval Warm Period clearly exceeded that of the global Current Warm Period."
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[Illustrations, footnotes and references available in PDF version]
Between the 10th and 14th centuries AD, earth's average global temperature may have been warmer than it is today, according to the analyses of Lamb (1977, 1984, 1988) and Grove (1988). The existence of this Medieval Warm Period was initially deduced from historical weather records and proxy climate data from England and Northern Europe. Interestingly, the warmer conditions associated with this interval of time are also known to have had a largely beneficial impact on earth's plant and animal life. In fact, the environmental conditions of this time period have been determined to have been so favorable that it was often referred to as the Little Climatic Optimum (Imbrie and Imbrie, 1979; Dean, 1994; Petersen, 1994; Serre-Bachet, 1994; Villalba, 1994)
At the end of the day, then, it would indeed appear that the peak warmth of the global Medieval Warm Period clearly exceeded that of the global Current Warm Period. 
Additional support for this conclusion can be found in the other reviews and summaries we have written on this topic, found under the many subheadings of the Medieval Warm Period in our website's Subject Index.

7 comments:

  1. Works for me. Are you clicking in the green bar?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yup. Right Click & Save As on Chrome gives "Failed - no file" and left click returns a 404.

    Not Found

    "The requested URL /images/stories/papers/originals/global_medieval_warm_period.pdf was not found on this server.

    Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Here is the direct link:

      http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/global_medieval_warm_period.pdf

      works for me

      Delete
  3. Does this account for Super El Nino around the turn of the last century?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Does warming increase El Nino frequency/intensity?

      A highly controversial topic, many paleoclimate papers show the opposite

      http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=el+nino+warmer

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    2. Actually my question pertained to the peak temperature of this Modern Warm Period that we reached with the Super El Nino in 1998 (these studies seem focused around the late 1980s-early 1990s). If you include that, then we actually just about matched the peak warmth of the Medieval Warm Period, if not surpassed it.

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    3. Paleoclimate reconstructions don't have annual resolution and thus can miss short term spikes

      Delete