This morning I did a radio interview!  It was on the KPCW show 'This Green Earth' and concerned a recent Nature Geoscience paper that I worked on with a lot of colleagues, which discusses global-mean temperature changes over the past 2000 years.  You can find the radio interview here (https://www.kpcw.org/post/green-earth-july-30-2019-michael-erb) or on your favorite podcast app by looking for the 'This Green Earth' podcast.

Please give the interview a listen!  I was a little late due to a scheduling mix-up, but I show up around the three minute mark.  Apologies for any details I might have misstated (this is my first radio interview), but all of the main points should be right.  Hopefully I get listeners interested in the fascinating and important nature of this work.  As I say in the interview, proxy data are really cool!

You can read the full text of the paper we're talking about here: Nature Geoscience paper.

Also, the hosts talk a little about a companion paper that colleagues of mine (but not me) worked on, which discusses regional climate variability over this same time period, which you can find here: Nature paper.

Below are some articles about our recent Nature Geoscience paper, 'Consistent multidecadal variability in global temperature reconstructions and simulations over the Common Era' (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0400-0), as well as related new papers.

Nature Geoscience - "The great climate conundrum"
Los Angeles Times - "Earth warmed faster in the last few decades than the previous 1,900 years, study says"
CNET - "Recent climate change trends 'unprecedented' in the last 2,000 years"

Our new paper, out today in Nature Geoscience, explores global-mean temperature over the past 2000 years, reconstructed using seven different statistical methods: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0400-0.

Results show:
1) The second half of the 20th century warmed more rapidly than any previous time in the last 2000 years, putting the extraordinary rate of current climate change into a long-term context.
2) Before the industrial revolution, volcanic eruptions were the most important forcing of multi-decadal climate variations during this time period.
3) Climate models capture the magnitude of volcanic-forced cooling and natural variability well.

This study was an international collaboration which used a global collection of well-vetted proxy records (such as tree rings, corals, and ice cores) to reconstruct Common Era climate, led by Raphael Neukom at the University of Bern.  Coauthors of this study at Northern Arizona University include Darrell Kaufman, Nicholas McKay, and myself.

An NAU press release about the paper can be read here: https://news.nau.edu/pages-2k/

The two primary methods of investigating past climate are through proxy records (e.g. tree rings, ice cores, and corals) and climate models.  These two methods have different strengths and weaknesses, and paleoclimate data assimilation is a method which aims to utilize the advantages of each to reconstruct past climate.  Our new paper, published today in Climate of the Past (available here: https://www.clim-past.net/15/1251/2019/), explores this method and reconstructs multiple climate fields over the past 2000 years.  Take a look.