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MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD in OTHER ASIAN COUNTRIES (NOT Including China, Russia Or Japan)

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MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD in OTHER ASIAN COUNTRIES (NOT Including China, Russia Or Japan) M EDIEVAL WARM PERIOD IN O THER ASIAN COUNTRIES (NOT Including China, Russia or Japan) SPPI & CO2SCIENCE ORIGINAL PAPER ♦ October 9, 2013 MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD IN OTHER ASIAN COUNTRIES (NOT Including China, Russia or Japan) Citation: Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. "Medieval Warm Period in Other Asian Countries.” Last modified October 9, 2013. http://www.co2science.org/subject/a/summaries/asiamwp.php. Climate alarmists have long contended that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was not a worldwide phenomenon, primarily because that reality would challenge another of their major claims, i.e., that late 20th-century temperatures were the warmest of the past millennium or more. Thus, it is important to know what has been learned about this subject in different parts of the world; and in this summary attention is focused on Asian countries other than China, Russia and Japan, which are treated individually in other MWP Summaries. In addition to China, Russia and Japan, the MWP has been identified in several other parts of Asia. Schilman et al. (2001)1, for example, analyzed foraminiferal oxygen and carbon isotopes, together with physical and geochemical properties of sediments, contained in two Off the coast of Israel … they cores extracted from the bed of the southeastern Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Israel, where they found evidence for the found evidence for the MWP MWP centered around AD 1200. And in discussing their findings, they make particular mention of the fact that there is an abundance centered around AD 1200. of other well-documented evidence for the existence of the MWP in the Eastern Mediterranean, including, in their words, "high In discussing their findings, they Saharan lake levels (Schoell, 1978; Nicholson, 1980), high Dead Sea levels (Issar et al. , 1989, 1991; Issar, 1990, 1998; Issar and Makover- make particular mention of the Levin, 1996), and high levels of the Sea of Galilee (Frumkin et al. , 1991; Issar and Makover-Levin, 1996)," in addition to "a fact that there is an abundance of precipitation maximum at the Nile headwaters (Bell and Menzel, 1972; Hassan, 1981; Ambrose and DeNiro, 1989) and in the other well-documented evidence northeastern Arabian Sea (von Rad et al. , 1999)." for the existence of the MWP in Further to the east, Kar et al. (2002)2 explored the nature of climate change preserved in the the Eastern Mediterranean. sediment profile of an outwash plain two to 1 http://www.co2science.org/articles/V5/N12/C2.php. 2 http://www.co2science.org/articles/V5/N16/C1.php. 2 three km from the snout of the Gangotri Glacier in the Uttarkashi district of Uttranchal, Western Himalaya. Between 2000 and 1700 years ago, their data revealed the existence of a relatively cool climate. Then, from 1700 to 850 years ago, there was what they called an "amelioration of climate," during the transition from the depth of the Dark Ages Cold Period to the midst of the Medieval Warm Period. Subsequent to that time, Kar et al. 's data indicate the climate "became much cooler," indicative of its transition to Little Ice Age conditions, while during the last 200 years there has been a rather steady warming, as shown by Esper et al. (2002a)3 to have been characteristic of the entire Northern Hemisphere. At a pair of other Asian locations, Esper et al. (2002b)4 used more than 200,000 ring-width measurements obtained from 384 trees at 20 individual sites ranging from the lower to upper timberline in the Northwest Karakorum of Pakistan (35-37°N, 74-76°E) and the Southern Tien Shan of Kirghizia (40°10'N, 72°35'E) to reconstruct regional patterns of climatic variations in Western Central Asia since AD 618. According to their analysis, the Medieval Warm Period was already firmly established and growing even warmer by the early 7th century; and between AD 900 and 1000, tree growth was exceptionally rapid, at rates that they say "cannot be observed during any other period of the last millennium." Between AD 1000 and 1200, however, growing conditions deteriorated; and at about 1500, minimum tree ring-widths were reached that persisted well into the seventeenth century. Towards the end of the twentieth century, ring-widths increased once again; but Esper et al. (2002b) report that "the twentieth-century trend does not approach the AD 1000 maximum." In fact, there is almost no comparison between the two periods, with the Medieval Warm Period being far more conducive to good tree growth than the Modern Warm Period; for as the three researchers describe the situation, "growing conditions in the twentieth century exceed the long-term average, but the amplitude of this trend is not comparable to the conditions around AD 1000." One year later, Esper et al. (2003) processed several extremely long juniper ring width chronologies for the Alai Range of the western Tien Shan in Kirghizia in such a way as to preserve multi-centennial growth trends that are typically "lost during the processes of tree ring data standardization and chronology building (Cook and Kairiukstis, 1990; Fritts, 1976)." And in doing so, they used two techniques that maintained low frequency signals: long-term mean standardization (LTM) and regional curve standardization (RCS), as well as the more conventional spline standardization (SPL) technique that obscures (actually removes) long-term trends. Carried back in time a full thousand years, the SPL chronologies depict significant inter-decadal variations but no longer-term trends. The LTM and RCS chronologies, on the other hand, show long-term decreasing trends from the start of the record until about AD 1600, broad minima from 1600 to 1800, and long-term increasing trends from about 1800 to the present. And as a result, in the words of Esper et al. (2003), "the main feature of the LTM and RCS Alai Range chronologies is a multi-centennial wave with high values towards both ends." 3 http://www.co2science.org/articles/V5/N13/EDIT.php. 4 http://www.co2science.org/articles/V5/N19/C1.php. 3 This grand result has essentially the same form as the Northern Hemisphere extratropical temperature history of Esper et al. (2002a), which is vastly different from the hockeystick temperature history of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) and Mann and Jones (2003), in that it depicts the existence of both the Little Ice Age and preceding Medieval Warm Period, which are nowhere to be found in the Mann and Company reconstructions. In addition, the new result - especially the LTM chronology, which has a much smaller variance than the RCS chronology - depicts several periods in the first half of the last millennium that were warmer than any part of the last century. These periods include much of the latter half of the Medieval Warm Period and a good part of the first half of the 15th century, which has also been found to have been warmer than it is currently by McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) and by Loehle (2004). In commenting on their important findings, Esper et al. (2003) remark that "if the tree ring reconstruction had been developed using 'standard' detrending procedures only, it would have been limited to inter-decadal scale variation and would have missed some of the common low frequency signal." Furthermore, a goodly portion of that trend may well have been due to the aerial fertilization effect of the concomitantly increasing atmospheric CO2 content, which is known to greatly stimulate the growth of trees. Properly accounting for this very real effect would make the warmer-than-present temperatures of the first half of the past millennium even warmer, relative to those of the past century, than what they appear to be in Esper et al.'s LTM and RCS reconstructions. With the passage of two more years, Feng and Hu (2005)5 acquired decadal surface air temperatures for the last two millennia from ice core and tree-ring data obtained at five locations on the Tibetan Plateau. These data revealed that the late 20th century was the warmest period in the past two millennia at two of the sites (Dasuopu, ice core; Dunde, ice core); but such was not the case at the other three sites (Dulan, tree ring; South Tibetan Plateau, tree ring; Guilya, ice core). At Guilya, for example, the data indicated it was significantly warmer than it was in the final two decades of the 20th century for most of the first two centuries of the record, which comprised the latter part of the Roman Warm Period. At the South Tibetan Plateau it was also significantly warmer over another full century near the start of the record; while at Dulan it was significantly warmer for the same portion of the Roman Warm Period plus two near-century-long portions of the Medieval Warm Period, which observations do not bode well for the climate-alarmist claim that the late 20th century experienced temperatures that were unprecedented over the past two millennia, just as it also does not bode well for their refusal to recognize the existence of the millennial-scale climatic oscillation that sequentially brought the earth the Roman Warm Period, the Dark Ages Cold Period, the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the Modern Warm Period. About this same time, Cini Castagnoli et al. (2005)6 extracted a δ13C profile of Globigerinoides rubber from a shallow-water core in the Gulf of Taranto (39°45'53"N, 17°53'33"E) to produce a high-precision record of climate variability over the past two millennia, after which it was statistically analyzed, together with a second two-millennia-long tree-ring record obtained from Japanese cedars (Kitagawa and Matsumoto, 1995), for evidence of recurring cycles using 5 http://www.co2science.org/articles/V8/N9/C2.php.
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