On the coherence of natural climate cycles of the past 1ka in multiple
proxies from central Europe, the Arctic and east Asia.
Abstract
We find evidence for multi-centennial climate cycles within the ages
commonly described as the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice
Age. We compare six proxy temperature records and find evidence for
synchronicity of ~200-year cycles in the northern
hemisphere. The first two data sets are (1) a reconstruction from an ice
core in the Colle Gnifetti (CG) glacier on the Swiss-Italian border
(Bohleber et al 2018), and (2) length records of the Great Aletsch
glacier (GAG), Switzerland (Holzhauser, 2009). A third is a proxy (3) by
Cabedo-Sanz et al (2016) using the biomarker IP25 in sea sediments north
of Iceland, which serves as a proxy for drift ice and hence arguably for
Arctic ice areal coverage. Further temperature proxies for (4) all-China
(Ge et al, 2017), (5) north China and (6) central China (Wang et al,
2018) provide a distribution of coverage over the non-tropical northern
hemisphere. These six regional temperature proxy data sets are also
compared with the G7 global temperature reconstruction (Ludecke and
Weiss, 2017). Prominent minima in temperature proxy data occur circa
1350CE (all 6 proxies), 1480-1520CE (4 proxies), 1650-1700CE (all 6
proxies) and 1800-1860CE (all 6 proxies). The last three of these are
also visible in the G7 global temperature reconstruction. Over the
period 1550-1949 CE the Pearson correlation coefficients for the IP25
(Arctic ice) data with the GAG and the all-China temperature proxy are
0.69 and 0.70 respectively; these high correlations in data sets from
opposite sides of the globe suggest a global cause rather than regional
internal variability. Since 1600CE we note that IP25 (Arctic ice) and
the CG temperature proxy lag the glacier record by 17 and 10 years
respectively; that lag is counterintuitive and may reflect precipitation
variations in the Alps preceding the temperature drop, or it may be
attributable to uncertainties in age dating between the data sets. Power
spectral analysis shows the dominant centennial periods in the data sets
are centered at 180, 240 and 500 which (within dating uncertainties) may
relate to the ~160 year Jose cycle, the 208-year de
Vries cycle and possible 350 and 500 year cycles previously recognized
in solar activity via study of terrestrial cosmogenic isotopes. The
consistency between the spectral maxima of temperature proxies studied
here and spectral maxima of cosmogenic isotopes, supports the hypothesis
of some association of these cycles with an “astronomical clock”,
although the mechanism of possible forcing remains a subject for further
study.