Early onset of industrial-era warming across the oceans and continents

Nerilie J. Abram (), Helen V. McGregor, Jessica E. Tierney, Michael N. Evans, Nicholas P. McKay and Darrell S. Kaufman
Additional contact information
Nerilie J. Abram: Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University
Helen V. McGregor: School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong
Jessica E. Tierney: University of Arizona
Michael N. Evans: University of Maryland
Nicholas P. McKay: School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability, Northern Arizona University
Darrell S. Kaufman: School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability, Northern Arizona University

Nature, 2016, vol. 536, issue 7617, 411-418

Abstract: Abstract The evolution of industrial-era warming across the continents and oceans provides a context for future climate change and is important for determining climate sensitivity and the processes that control regional warming. Here we use post-ad 1500 palaeoclimate records to show that sustained industrial-era warming of the tropical oceans first developed during the mid-nineteenth century and was nearly synchronous with Northern Hemisphere continental warming. The early onset of sustained, significant warming in palaeoclimate records and model simulations suggests that greenhouse forcing of industrial-era warming commenced as early as the mid-nineteenth century and included an enhanced equatorial ocean response mechanism. The development of Southern Hemisphere warming is delayed in reconstructions, but this apparent delay is not reproduced in climate simulations. Our findings imply that instrumental records are too short to comprehensively assess anthropogenic climate change and that, in some regions, about 180 years of industrial-era warming has already caused surface temperatures to emerge above pre-industrial values, even when taking natural variability into account.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19082 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:536:y:2016:i:7617:d:10.1038_nature19082

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature19082

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().