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Climate change

The past as guide to the future

Nature volume 392, pages 758–759 (1998)Cite this article

We know that in recent years the Earth's climate has been getting warmer. But is this warming unusual relative to low-frequency variations in temperature? If it is, then how much of it has been caused by anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere?

On page 779 of this issue1, Mann et al. provide a reconstruction of past temperature back to the year ad 1400, extending previous records further into the past, and deriving annual temperature anomaly patterns over large parts of the globe. As examples, the authors have produced reconstructions of the ‘year without summer’ (1816), which was probably influenced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, and of 1791 when a strong El Niño is known to have occurred. Such reconstructions are potentially useful for interpreting the warming trend in the twentieth century. For example, the reconstructed record for the Northern Hemisphere suggests that the warming is unprecedented, at least since 1400. Also, from a multivariate correlation between the reconstructed temperature time-series for the Northern Hemisphere and external climate influences, it seems that increases in greenhouse gases have been the main forcing in the twentieth century, whereas natural climate forcing by changes in solar irradiance and volcanism dominate the early part of the record.

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  1. the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, University of Washington, Seattle, 98195-4235, Washington, USA

    Gabriele Hegerl

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  1. Gabriele Hegerl
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Hegerl, G. The past as guide to the future. Nature 392, 758–759 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/33799

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