Journal article
Early onset of industrial-era warming across the oceans and continents
NJ Abram, HV McGregor, JE Tierney, MN Evans, NP McKay, DS Kaufman, K Thirumalai, B Martrat, H Goosse, SJ Phipps, EJ Steig, KH Kilbourne, CP Saenger, J Zinke, G Leduc, JA Addison, PG Mortyn, MS Seidenkrantz, MA Sicre, K Selvaraj Show all
Nature | NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP | Published : 2016
DOI: 10.1038/nature19082
Abstract
The evolution of industrial-era warming across the continents and oceans provides a context for future climate change and is important for determining climate sensitivity and the processes that control regional warming. Here we use post-ad 1500 palaeoclimate records to show that sustained industrial-era warming of the tropical oceans first developed during the mid-nineteenth century and was nearly synchronous with Northern Hemisphere continental warming. The early onset of sustained, significant warming in palaeoclimate records and model simulations suggests that greenhouse forcing of industrial-era warming commenced as early as the mid-nineteenth century and included an enhanced equatorial ..
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Awarded by Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the many scientists who made their published palaeoclimate datasets available via public data repositories. This work developed out of the PAGES (Past Global Changes) Ocean2k working group; we are grateful to K. Anchukaitis, H. Wu, C. Giry, D. Oppo and V. Ersek for their contributions to the Ocean2k syntheses, to the more than 75 volunteers who constructed the Ocean2k phase 1 metadatabase<SUP>14,15</SUP>, and to K. Anchukaitis and V. Trouet for discussions. We thank P. Petrelli, F. Klein and A. Schurer for assistance in obtaining model datasets, and K. McGregor for editorial assistance. We acknowledge support from PAGES funded by the US and Swiss National Science Foundations (NSF) and NOAA, and thank T. Kiefer, M.-F. Loutre and the PAGES 2k Network Coordinators for organizational support. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modelling groups for producing and making available their model output. The US Department of Energy's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support for CMIP and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. N.J.A. is supported by an Australian Research Council (ARC) QEII fellowship awarded under DP110101161 and this work contributes to ARC Discovery Project DP140102059 (N.J.A., M.A.J.C.) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (N.J.A., S.J.P.,J.G.). H.V.M. is supported by ARC Future Fellowship FT140100286 and acknowledges funding from ARC Discovery Project DP1092945 (H.M.V., S.J.P.). We acknowledge fellowship support from a CSIC-Ramon y Cajal post-doctoral programme RYC-2013-14073 (B.M.), a Clare Hall College Cambridge Shackleton Fellowship (B.M.), and an ARC DECRA fellowship DE130100668 (J.G.). We acknowledge research support from US NSF grant OCE1536249 (M.N.E.), the ARC Special Research Initiative for the Antarctic Gateway Partnership (Project ID SR140300001; S.J.P.), Red CONSOLIDER GRACCIE CTM2014-59111-REDC (B.M.), Swiss NSF grant PZ00P2_154802 (R.N.), the Danish Council for Independent Research, Natural Science OCEANHEAT project 12-126709/FNU (M.-S.S.), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41273083; K.S.) and Shanghai Fund (2013SH012; K.S.). This is University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science contribution 5206.