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Published August 1996 | public
Journal Article

Climatic trends from isotopic records of tree rings: The past 100-200 years

Abstract

There has been a great deal of discussion about global warming from accumulation of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (Houghton et al., 1990). Relatively less attention has been paid to spatial and/or temporal climatic variations that may be associated with a warmer climate (Rind et al., 1989) or with anthropogenic activities (Schneider, 1994). In this article, we show that an increase in climatic variability may have started. Fourteen isotopic time series of tree rings are presented. These trees were randomly collected from world-wide locations and cover time periods of 120 to over 200 years. The isotopic records show increasing δD values that suggest a consistent and progressive warming occurred in the 19th century in all locations where the trees were sampled. The rate of warming is greater at relatively cold locations than at warm locations with two exceptions. The records also suggest greater climatic variations both temporally and spatially in the 20th century than in the 19th century.

Additional Information

© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Received 21 August 1995; in revised form 8 April 1996. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation ATM9219891, and the Department of Energy under Cooperative Agreement Award No. DE-FC03-90ER61010. We thank M. Hughes, J. Stewart, R. M. Rumball-Petre, R. Sauvajot, R. Switsur, and S. McKinnon for their assistance to the sample collections. The availability of Crayton Yapp's data in his dissertation is gratefully appreciated. We also thank E. Dent, X. Xu and S. McKinnon for their technical support. The manuscript was improved by the comments of three anonymous reviewers.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 25, 2023