Diaz, H. F., and R. S. Bradley, 1995: Documenting natural climatic variations: How different is the climate of the 20th century from that of previous centuries? In Natural Climate Variability on Decade-to-Century Time Scales, D. G. Martinson, K. Bryan, M. Ghil, M. M. Hall, T. R. Karl, E. S. Sarachik, S. Sorooshian, and L. D. Talley (Eds.), National Research Council, National Academy Press, 17-31.


ABSTRACT

Changes in decadal-mean surface temperature and its variance for different land areas of the Northern Hemisphere are examined. In the last 100 years, changes in surface air temperature have been greatest and most positive in the period since about 1970. Interannual variability, particularly at the largest spatial scales has also increased, although it differs according to regions. The most unusual decade of the last 100 years in the contiguous United States may have been the 1930s, although that of the 1980s is probably a close second, and in some regions perhaps the most anomalous. Both the 1930s and the 1980s experienced significant warming together with enhanced climatic variability.

To incorporate a longer-term perspective than is obtainable from the modern instrumental record, we used summer-temperature reconstructions based on tree-ring records, and on δ18O ratios extracted from different ice-core records. Although none of these recoreds is a simple or even direct temperature proxy, we present them as general indicators of prevailing environmental temperatures. The data were averaged by decades in order to focus on decadal-scale variability. With the exception of the data from tropical ice cores, the proxies indicate that the recent decades were not very unusual, either in regard to the mean or in terms of increased variability. While seasonal and annual temperature changes in the last two decades have been rather large in most areas of the Northern Hemisphere, the available paleoclimate evidence suggests that in many areas there have been decadal periods during the past several centuries in which reconstructed temperatures were comparable to those of the 1970s and 1980s, with climatic variability as large as any recorded in recent decades. Natural variability on decadal time scales is comparatively large - typically about half as large as the interannual variance.