Tree rings suggest Roman world was warmer than thought

How did the Romans manage to grow grapes in northern England when most climate studies suggest the weather was much cooler then? We may now have an answer: it wasn’t that cold at all.

Long-term temperature reconstructions often rely on the width of tree rings: they assume that warmer summers make for wider rings. Using this measure, it seems that global temperatures changed very little over the past two millennia. Such studies are behind the famous “hockey stick” graph, created by Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, which shows stable temperatures for a millennium before the 20th century.

Jan Esper of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, thinks that at least some of those tree rings actually show something else: a long-term cooling trend that lasted right up until the Industrial Revolution. The trend came about because of reduced solar heating caused by changes to the Earth’s orbit known as Milankovitch wobbles, says Esper. His results suggest the Roman world was 0.6 °C warmer than previously thought – enough to make grape vines in northern England a possibility.

Esper and his colleagues say that warmer summers do not necessarily make tree rings wider – but they often make them denser. He studied the density of tree rings in hundreds of northern Scandinavian trees and found that they showed evidence of a gradual cooling trend that began around 2000 years ago.

The finding fits with other proxies for temperature – such as the chemical make-up of air trapped in glaciers and the organic remains in ancient lake sediments – which have also suggested a cooling trend.

Esper’s study is the latest to indicate that temperatures were less stable than originally thought. In 2009, Darrell Kaufman of Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff published evidence, using a range of proxies, that indicated a cooling in the Arctic for most of the past 2000 years (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1173983). Esper’s findings suggest that the cooling trend was even stronger than Kaufman concluded.

The finding does not change our understanding of the warming power of carbon dioxide. In fact, it shows that human CO2 emissions have interrupted a long cooling period that would ultimately have delivered the next ice age.

Esper says temperature reconstructions will have to be redone because past studies probably underestimated temperatures during the medieval warm period and other warm periods going back to Roman times. The further back in time, the greater the underestimate would be.

But others have doubts. Mann argues that Esper’s tree-ring measurements come from high latitudes and reflect only summer temperatures. “The implications of this study are vastly overstated by the authors,” he says.

Journal reference: Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1589


Issue 2873 of New Scientist magazine


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Warmer?

Tue Jul 10 19:06:47 BST 2012 by bill

http://www.weylmann.com

Tree rings suggest …

The data suggest …

The evidence suggests …

The facts suggest …

This is an interesting article that appears to cast more doubt on the global climate change issue. As a lay person, I no longer know what to think.

Noted petrogeologist Kenneth Deffeyes (“The End of Oil”) once said that for every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD. It seems that when faced with disturbing issues such as global warming and the end of everything as we know it, people will resort to whatever thinking gets them through the day, including denial, religion and hiring experts on the opposite side. Let’s face it — people just don’t like to think about scary things, whether they’re part of the problem or not.

Too bad there isn’t an agreed-upon set of criteria that people can use to put these issues to rest so that we can get off the dime and actually do something other than grouse. Graduating more PhDs and generating more research papers doesn’t seem to be the solution

Warmer?

Wed Jul 11 14:18:30 BST 2012 by Duncan

The article doesn’t cast doubt on global warming, where does it say it does?

Esper et al are saying their method of determining temperature from tree rings is better than the usual one. That has no bearing on “global warming theory”.

For instance there are temperature proxy records which do not use tree ring at all. Unfortunately for Esper they suggest that his claim that past tree ring proxies did not show the warmest periods accurately is false

Warmer?

Wed Jul 18 07:42:52 BST 2012 by John m

It seems clear there is something going on that cannot be explained by the models so whatever u think of the theories are falsified. The models are wrong by many measures therefore their predictions are null and void. Therefore nobody can say we are denialists Because the theory itself denies itself

Ask A Jobbing Gardener Or Forester Without A Phd

Wed Jul 11 00:08:43 BST 2012 by Ian W

The wrong people are looking at these trees. As has been said in other places – often at great and detailed length – there is more to the growth of trees than just warmth. There will be an ideal temperature for each set of different factors affecting the tree’s growth, water, competition for light, insect infestations, nutrients perhaps from mammals ‘marking’ that tree, variable length of the growing season due to mixes of cold and wet followed by hot and dry etc etc etc.

Along comes a PhD in (name a subject other than botany) and just tries to use the width of the rings as a treemometer. Any jobbing gardener without an exam pass to their name could tell you that the way a tree grows depends on far more than just a peak temperature in the year. But _they_ don’t have a PhD so should be disregarded. As was the botanist who emailed Phil Jones (see the climategate emails). The treemometers did just what was wanted they helped create a hockey-stick and showed the ‘present day warming is exceptional’. Well actually they didn’t they showed that the temperatures were _cooling_toward the end of the 20th century which is why the decline in the treemometer temperatures had to be hidden (“Hide the decline with Mike’s (Mann’s) Nature Trick”).

The only scientific approach appears to be the researchers who assess the ratio of O16 to O18 and from that work out a potential temperature. Even that only shows what _that_ tree experienced. Of course you will be told by climate ‘scientists’ that the trees are ‘teleconnected’ (sic) so that a tree in a remote peninsula in Siberia will tell you what the temperature was in Solihul. Really? So what are we paying all these weather men for – all we need is a weather observation station in Siberia and the entire world can be forecast?

This unscientific unvalidated onanism was possibly excusable when it was restricted to a curiosity ‘science’ carried out by those academics who couldn’t manage elsewhere. But now we see entire swathes of pristine countryside and seas being threatened by rare-bird and bat killing Windfarms; African villagers are driven from their homes which are torched (sometimes with occupants still inside) a throw back to the Scottish Clearances and for the same financial gain reasons too – so that companies can make huge profits by planting alien Eucalyptus as ‘carbon credits’ to credulous Europeans. Virgin rain forest is destroyed for Palm Oil plantations killing off wildlife such as Orangutans so that ‘green biofuels’ can be sold by the Greens who spend their time wailing about sustainability and species extinction. Yet in many countries including Britain (Cold homes will kill up to 200 older people a day – Guradian) and Germany (600,000 household disconnected annually) people are now in energy poverty and dying of the cold due to the coal plants being shut down to be replaced by uncertain hugely expensive subsidised ‘green power’. And these climate ‘scientists’ are basing many of their justification for this deindustrialisation on TREE RINGS?? Tree rings which have NEVER been validated against actual temperatures. On the basis of this the climate scientists and green energy companies are being paid trillions of dollars……

Meanwhile, every 5 seconds a child dies from hunger similar numbers for the want of clean water and just one dollar is said to be enough to save a life. The cost of one wasted research grant into treemometers could probably save a several hundred thousand children from death.

If the world warms as much as it did in the 1980s – 1990s by the end of this century it MIGHT be as warm as when the Romans grew grapes in northern England and the Vikings had dairy farms on Greenland. You may have noticed that the world did not end with floods then either.

Have climate ‘scientists’ got the right priorities here?

Ask A Jobbing Gardener Or Forester Without A Phd

Wed Jul 11 11:28:32 BST 2012 by Mike

“Of course you will be told by climate ‘scientists’ that the trees are ‘teleconnected’ (sic) so that a tree in a remote peninsula in Siberia will tell you what the temperature was in Solihul.”

No, you won’t. You’re making up utter nonsense as far as I can see, and attributing it to others. That’s worse than making up your own ‘facts’!

Ask A Jobbing Gardener Or Forester Without A Phd

Wed Jul 11 13:23:34 BST 2012 by Chad Singer

You mean completely unrelated and unsubstantiated claims like “The finding does not change our understanding of the warming power of carbon dioxide. In fact, it shows that human CO2 emissions have interrupted a long cooling period that would ultimately have delivered the next ice age.” Leaping to conclusions anyone?

Ask A Jobbing Gardener Or Forester Without A Phd

Wed Jul 11 14:10:49 BST 2012 by Duncan

So tell me the part of the Esper paper that says that is false?

Pretty much every single temperature record shows that the Earth has been slowly cooling since 8000 years ago till about 200 years ago.

This neatly fits in with the idea that until very recently the biggest driver of climate was Milankovitch cycles. For instance J Imbrie, J Z Imbrie (1980). “Modeling the Climatic Response to Orbital Variations” say,

“Ignoring anthropogenic and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the long-term cooling trend that began some 6,000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years.”

True the next glaciation would probably be more than a cycle away (ignoring human factors) but in geological time scales we were on a slow decline in temperatures which would have resulted in a new glaciation.

Ask A Jobbing Gardener Or Forester Without A Phd

Fri Jul 13 02:06:21 BST 2012 by Ian W

You should check before you write things.

See

http://thesciencebulletin.wordpress.com/tag/yamal-peninsula/

Google Yamal teleconnection

Ask A Jobbing Gardener Or Forester Without A Phd

Wed Jul 11 13:43:46 BST 2012 by Martin Owens

http://doctormo.org

Look, foaming at the mouth won’t get your ideas anywhere. Science isn’t an omnipotent mechanism and humans don’t become perfect or even particularly scrupulous from performing research.

Methods are debunked, research improved and generally, clumsily, the progress of understanding grinds forwards with as much gnashing of ideas as we can bare.

But I know if I was talking about the _only_ planet we inhabit, and messing about with the major leavers that control temperature… I’d be inclined to be _very_ careful indeed. And it doesn’t really matter if CO2 increases do nothing at all or even help, we have to act, just in case we’re right.

Ask A Jobbing Gardener Or Forester Without A Phd

Thu Jul 12 06:59:48 BST 2012 by Sandy Henderson

Hi Martin – when the subject matter of your enquiries have serious, if not life threatening consequences, reliability in both the measurements and the interpretation into possible causes and effects matter. What is not seriously disputed is the limited nature of the resources we are still treating as so large as to be effectively limitless. Whether you believe in human induced ( or aggravated ) global warming, or not, one does not require a PhD in any “ology” to realise that these resources will become increasingly more expensive to procure, unless more and more of the uses they are presently fulfilling are covered by other means, such as nuclear and a mix of the “renewables”. The main arena for the squabbles is then how should governments assist this inevitable process and what winners and losers are they liable to create.

Milanković Cycles

Thu Jul 12 20:25:22 BST 2012 by Eric Kvaalen

“The trend came about because of reduced solar heating caused by changes to the Earth’s orbit known as Milankovitch wobbles, says Esper.”

That’s not true. The total heating due to the sun depends on our average distance from the sun, and the Milanković cycles do not affect that. What they do affect is the amount of radiation falling on the northern and southern hemispheres during their respective winters.

“The further back in time, the greater the underestimate [of temperature] would be.”

Why? I see no reason for that.

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