Climate: past ranges and future changes

Comparison of large-scale temperature reconstructions over the past millennium reveals agreement on major climatic episodes, but substantial divergence in reconstructed (absolute) temperature amplitude. We here detail several research priorities to overcome this ‘amplitude desideratum’, and discuss the relevance of this effort for the prediction of future temperature changes and the meaningof the Kyoto protocol. r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

[1]  T. P. Barnett,et al.  High-resolution palaeoclimatic records for the last millennium: interpretation, integration and comparison with General Circulation Model control-run temperatures , 1998 .

[2]  Mark New,et al.  Surface air temperature and its changes over the past 150 years , 1999 .

[3]  Scott Rutherford,et al.  Climate reconstruction using ‘Pseudoproxies’ , 2001 .

[4]  Edward R. Cook,et al.  SPATIAL REGRESSION METHODS IN DENDROCLIMATOLOGY: A REVIEW AND COMPARISON OF TWO TECHNIQUES , 1994 .

[5]  Eduardo Zorita,et al.  Reconstructing Past Climate from Noisy Data , 2004, Science.

[6]  J. Smerdon,et al.  Borehole climate reconstructions: Spatial structure and hemispheric averages , 2003 .

[7]  D. Frank,et al.  Climate reconstructions: Low-frequency ambition and high-frequency ratification , 2004 .

[8]  H. Wanner,et al.  European Seasonal and Annual Temperature Variability, Trends, and Extremes Since 1500 , 2004, Science.

[9]  David Frank,et al.  Effect of scaling and regression on reconstructed temperature amplitude for the past millennium , 2005 .

[10]  Edward R. Cook,et al.  The 'segment length curse' in long tree-ring chronology development for palaeoclimatic studies , 1995 .

[11]  Keith R. Briffa,et al.  The Real Color of Climate Change? , 2004, Science.

[12]  M. Hughes,et al.  Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: Inferences, uncertainties, and limitations , 1999 .

[13]  David Frank,et al.  A 1052-year tree-ring proxy for Alpine summer temperatures , 2005 .

[14]  W. Schöner,et al.  Regional temperature variability in the European Alps: 1760–1998 from homogenized instrumental time series , 2001 .

[15]  E. Cook,et al.  Extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere land temperature variability over the past 1000 years , 2004 .

[16]  D. Frank,et al.  Temperature reconstructions and comparisons with instrumental data from a tree‐ring network for the European Alps , 2005 .

[17]  Heiko Paeth,et al.  European spring and autumn temperature variability and change of extremes over the last half millennium , 2005, Geophysical Research Letters.

[18]  Thomas M. Melvin,et al.  Historical growth rates and changingclimatic sensitivity of boreal conifers , 2004 .

[19]  K. Briffa.  Erratum to “Annual climate variability in the Holocene: interpreting the message of ancient trees” [Quaternary Science Reviews, 19 (2000) 87–105] ☆ , 2000 .

[20]  K. Holmgren,et al.  Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data , 2005, Nature.

[21]  Reto Knutti,et al.  Constraints on radiative forcing and future climate change from observations and climate model ensembles , 2002, Nature.

[22]  Edward R. Cook,et al.  Low-Frequency Signals in Long Tree-Ring Chronologies for Reconstructing Past Temperature Variability , 2002, Science.

[23]  K. Briffa,et al.  Revisiting timescale-dependent reconstruction of climate from tree-ring chronologies , 2000 .

[24]  K. Briffa.  Annual climate variability in the Holocene: interpreting the message of ancient trees , 2000 .

[25]  P. Jones,et al.  Were southern Swedish summer temperatures before 1860 as warm as measured? , 2003 .

[26]  W. Godwin.  Article in Press , 2000 .

[27]  Leonard A. Smith,et al.  Uncertainty in predictions of the climate response to rising levels of greenhouse gases , 2005, Nature.

[28]  B. Luckman,et al.  A 500 year dendroclimatic reconstruction of spring–summer precipitation from the lower Bavarian Forest region, Germany , 2005 .