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The aberrant global synchrony of present-day warming

Were extended warm or cold periods in the past worldwide, or only regional? Efforts to reconstruct Earth’s climate history suggest that the near-global extent of ongoing warming is unparalleled over the past 2,000 years.
  1. Scott St. George

    1. Scott St. George is in the Department of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA.

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The history of Earth’s climate is punctuated by a succession of named intervals associated with prolonged shifts to warmer, colder, wetter or drier conditions. During the Common Era (the past 2,000 years), the two best-known such climate epochs are the Little Ice Age1 and the Medieval Climate Anomaly2 (also called the Medieval Warm Period; Fig. 1). The former was a cool period that extended from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries; the latter was a warm, dry period between ad 950 and 1250. Many assume that these intervals had a global impact. But in a paper in Nature3 and in a companion paper in Nature Geoscience4, Neukom et al. demonstrate that these and earlier climate epochs in the Common Era were much smaller in scope than the near-global reach of current human-induced warming.

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Nature 571, 483-484 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02179-2

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