Environmental Science and Engineering Seminar

Proxy reconstructions, interpreted to reflect mean annual temperatures, indicate peak temperatures in the first half of the last and current interglacials (a.k.a. the Holocene and last interglacial thermal maxima), arguably exceeding modern temperatures. In this seminar we will show that previous global reconstructions of the Holocene and last interglacial (LIG) periods reflect the evolution of seasonal temperatures and offer a method for transforming them to mean annual temperatures. The results suggests that that the modern global temperature exceeds the annual levels in the past 12,000 years and likely approaches the warmth of the last interglacial.