File:1000 Year Temperature Comparison.png

Summary

Expansion of the Instrumental Record

2nd millennium

This image is a comparison of 10 different published reconstructions of mean temperature changes during the 2nd millennium. More recent reconstructions are plotted towards the front and in redder colors, older reconstructions appear towards the back and in bluer colors. An instrumental history of temperature is also shown in black. The medieval warm period and little ice age are labeled at roughly the times when they are historically believed to occur, though it is still disputed whether these were truly global or only regional events. The single, unsmoothed annual value for 2004 is also shown for comparison. ( Image:Instrumental Temperature Record.png shows how 2004 relates to other recent years).

It is unknown which, if any, of these reconstructions is an accurate representation of climate history; however, these curves are a fair representation of the range of results appearing in the published scientific literature. Hence, it is likely that such reconstructions, accurate or not, will play a significant role in the ongoing discussions of global climate change and global warming.

For each reconstruction, the raw data has been decadally smoothed with a σ = 5 yr Gaussian weighted moving average. Also, each reconstruction was adjusted so that its mean matched the mean of the instrumental record during the period of overlap. The variance (i.e. the scale of fluctuations) was not adjusted (except in one case noted below).

Except as noted below, all original data for this comparison comes from and links therein. It should also be noted that many reconstructions of past climate report substantial error bars, which are not represented on this figure.

This graph image could be recreated using vector graphics as an SVG file. This has several advantages; see Commons:Media for cleanup for more information. If an SVG form of this image is already available, please upload it. After uploading an SVG, replace this template with {{ vector version available|new image name.svg}}.

This information is accurate, however if you are looking for a time before 1000 A.D. it does not depict a length of time before 1000 years when the earth used to be all tropical. It fails to convey the whole story.

Reconstructions

The reconstructions used, in order from oldest to most recent publication are:

1. (dark blue 1000-1991): The Holocene.
2. (blue 1000-1980): Geophysical Research Letters.
3. (light blue 1000-1965): Ambio. Modified as published in Science.
4. (lightest blue 1402-1960): J. Geophys. Res..
5. (light green 831-1992): Science.
6. (yellow 200-1980): Geophysical Research Letters. doi: 10.1029/2003GL017814.
7. (orange 200-1995): Reviews of Geophysics. doi: 10.1029/2003RG000143
8. (red-orange 1500-1980): Geophys. Res Lett.. doi: 10.1029/2004GL019781
9. (red 1-1979): Nature. doi: 10.1038/nature03265
10. (dark red 1600-1990): Science. doi: 10.1126/science.1107046

(black 1856-2004): Instrumental data was jointly compiled by the Climatic Research Unit and the UK Meteorological Office Hadley Centre. Global Annual Average data set TaveGL2v was used.

Documentation for the most recent update of the CRU/Hadley instrumental data set appears in: Journal of Climate.

Copyright

The original version of this figure was prepared by Robert A. Rohde from publicly available data and is incorporated into the Global Warming Art project.

Image from Global Warming Art

This image is an original work created for Global Warming Art. Please refer to the image description page for more information.

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Notes

1. Data from Moberg et al. was taken directly from the supplemental information accompanying the Nature article.
2. Data for Oerlemans was provided by William M. Connolley.
3. Esper et al. reported only fluctuations in "arbitrary" units, so the variance in this record was rescaled to match the variance during the period of overlap with the instrumental record.
4. When a paper included multiple reconstructions, the global annually average temperature data was used. If this was not reported, then Northern Hemisphere annually averaged data was used.
5. Four records appearing at were not used in preparing this graph for the following reasons:
   1. Mann et al. 98 was not included because Mann et al. 99 extended and updated that record.
   2. Briffa et al. 98 was not included because Briffa et al. 2001 extended and updated that record.
   3. Pollack et al. 98 was not included because the reported data was not found to be in a form that allowed for easy replotting.
   4. Mann et al. 2000 was not used because it did not include an original reconstruction covering at least the Northern Hemisphere.