{"id":8036,"date":"2012-07-14T14:17:50","date_gmt":"2012-07-14T21:17:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=8036"},"modified":"2012-07-19T14:23:46","modified_gmt":"2012-07-19T21:23:46","slug":"tree-rings-prove-that-world-has-been-cooling-for-2000-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2012\/07\/tree-rings-prove-that-world-has-been-cooling-for-2000-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Tree-rings Prove That World Has Been Cooling for 2,000 Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Tree-rings by Science Reporter –
\nHow did the Romans grow grapes in northern England? Perhaps because it was warmer than we thought.<\/p>\n

A study suggests the Britain of 2,000 years ago experienced a lengthy period of hotter summers than today.<\/p>\n

German researchers used data from tree rings \u2013 a key indicator of past climate \u2013 to claim the world has been on a \u2018long-term cooling trend\u2019 for two millennia until the global warming of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

This cooling was punctuated by a couple of warm spells. These are the Medieval Warm Period, which is well known, but also a period during the toga-wearing Roman times when temperatures were apparently 1 deg C warmer than now. <\/p>\n

They say the very warm period during the years 21 to 50AD has been underestimated by climate scientists.<\/p>\n

Lead author Professor Dr Jan Esper of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz said: \u2018We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low.<\/p>\n

\u2018This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant, however it is not negligible when compared to global warming, which up to now has been less than 1 deg C.\u2019<\/p>\n

In general the scientists found a slow cooling of 0.6C over 2,000 years, which they attributed to changes in the Earth\u2019s orbit which took it further away from the Sun.<\/p>\n

The study is published in Nature Climate Change.<\/p>\n

It is based on measurements stretching back to 138BC.<\/p>\n

The finding may force scientists to rethink current theories of the impact of global warming<\/p>\n

Professor Esper’s group at the Institute of Geography at JGU used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC.<\/p>\n

In so doing, the researchers have been able for the first time to precisely demonstrate that the long-term trend over the past two millennia has been towards climatic cooling.<\/p>\n

\"Global<\/p>\n

Professor Esper said: ‘Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today’s climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods.\u2019<\/p>\n

The annual growth rings in trees are the most important witnesses over the past 1,000 to 2,000 years as they indicate how warm and cool past climate conditions were.<\/p>\n

Researchers from Germany, Finland, Scotland, and Switzerland examined tree-ring density profiles.<\/p>\n

In the cold environment of Finnish Lapland, trees often collapse into one of the numerous lakes, where they remain well preserved for thousands of years.<\/p>\n

The density measurements correlate closely with the summer temperatures in this area on the edge of the Nordic taiga; the researchers were thus able to create a temperature reconstruction of unprecedented quality.<\/p>\n

The reconstruction provides a high-resolution representation of temperature patterns in the Roman and Medieval Warm periods, but also shows the cold phases that occurred during the Migration Period and the later Little Ice Age.<\/p>\n

In addition to the cold and warm phases, the new climate curve also exhibits a phenomenon that was not expected in this form.<\/p>\n

HT: Mail Online<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Science Reporter – How did the Romans grow grapes in northern England? Perhaps because it was warmer than we thought. A study suggests the Britain of 2,000 years ago experienced a lengthy period of hotter summers than today. German researchers used data from tree rings \u2013 a key indicator of past climate \u2013 to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[111,75,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-global-cooling","category-global-warming","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}