Temperature trends over the past five centuries reconstructed from borehole temperatures

Shaopeng Huang, Henry N. Pollack () and Po-Yu Shen
Additional contact information
Shaopeng Huang: The University of Michigan
Henry N. Pollack: The University of Michigan
Po-Yu Shen: The University of Western Ontario

Nature, 2000, vol. 403, issue 6771, 756-758

Abstract: Abstract For an accurate assessment of the relative roles of natural variability and anthropogenic influence in the Earth's climate, reconstructions of past temperatures from the pre-industrial as well as the industrial period are essential. But instrumental records are typically available for no more than the past 150 years. Therefore reconstructions of pre-industrial climate rely principally on traditional climate proxy records1,2,3,4,5, each with particular strengths and limitations in representing climatic variability. Subsurface temperatures comprise an independent archive of past surface temperature changes that is complementary to both the instrumental record and the climate proxies. Here we use present-day temperatures in 616 boreholes from all continents except Antarctica to reconstruct century-long trends in temperatures over the past 500 years at global, hemispheric and continental scales. The results confirm the unusual warming of the twentieth century revealed by the instrumental record6, but suggest that the cumulative change over the past five centuries amounts to about 1 K, exceeding recent estimates from conventional climate proxies2,3,4,5. The strength of temperature reconstructions from boreholes lies in the detection of long-term trends, complementary to conventional climate proxies, but to obtain a complete picture of past warming, the differences between the approaches need to be investigated in detail.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35001556 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:403:y:2000:i:6771:d:10.1038_35001556

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

DOI: 10.1038/35001556

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 ().