Image:1000 Year Temperature Comparison.png
From Global Warming Art
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Contents |
Description
This image is a comparison of 10 different published reconstructions of mean temperature changes during the last 1000 years. 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 [1] 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.
| Temperature Record Series |
| This figure is part of series of plots showing changes in Earth's temperature over time. |
| Time Period: 25 yrs | 150 yrs | 1 kyr | 2 kyr | 12 kyr | 450 kyr | 5 Myr | 65 Myr | 500 Myr |
| See also: Future predicted changes | Map of recent warming | Temperature change category |
Reconstructions
The reconstructions used, in order from oldest to most recent publication are:
- (dark blue 1000-1991):
- (blue 1000-1980):
- (light blue 1000-1965):
- (lightest blue 1402-1960):
- (light green 831-1992):
- (yellow 200-1980):
- (orange 200-1995):
- (red-orange 1500-1980):
- (red 1-1979):
- (dark red 1600-1990):
(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:
- [abstract] Jones, P.D. and A. Moberg (2003). "Hemispheric and large-scale surface air temperature variations: An extensive revision and an update to 2001". Journal of Climate 16: 206-223.
Licensing
This is image is an original work by Robert A. Rohde created from publicly available data.
This image is an original work created for Global Warming Art.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this image under either:
- The GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.2; with no Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts, or Back-Cover Texts.
- The Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License Version 2.5
It is expected that reusers of this image will:
- Acknowledge Global Warming Art and/or the specific author of this image, as the source of the image.
- Provide a link or reference back to this specific page:
- Allow any modifications made to the image to also be reused under the terms of one or both of the licenses noted above.
Those interested in commercial and/or higher quality reproduction should also refer to information for professional republishers.
Notes
- Data from Moberg et al. was taken directly from the supplemental information accompanying the Nature article.
- Data for Oerlemans was provided by William M. Connolley.
- 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.
- 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.
- Four records appearing at [2] were not used
in preparing this graph for the following reasons:
- Mann et al. 98 was not included because Mann et al. 99 extended and updated that record.
- Briffa et al. 98 was not included because Briffa et al. 2001 extended and updated that record.
- Pollack et al. 98 was not included because the reported data was not found to be in a form that allowed for easy replotting.
- Mann et al. 2000 was not used because it did not included an original reconstruction covering at least the Northern Hemisphere.
Images and pages linking to this file
- Image:2000 Year Temperature Comparison.png
- Image:Instrumental Temperature Record.png
- Image:Short Instrumental Temperature Record.png
- Temperature Gallery
- Image:Holocene Temperature Variations Rev.png
- Image:Ice Age Temperature Rev.png
- Image:Five Myr Climate Change Rev.png
- Image:65 Myr Climate Change Rev.png
- Image:Phanerozoic Climate Change Rev.png
- List of all images
- Thumbnail gallery of all images
- Template:Temperature series
- Image:Solar Variation to Temperature Comparison.png
- List of temperature related images
- Wikipedia:Temperature record of the past 1000 years
File upload and version history
Click on date to see the file uploaded on that date.
- 00:00, 18 November 2005 . . 599×442 (40,783 bytes)
