How does rising atmospheric CO2 affect marine organisms?

Click to locate material archived on our website by topic


Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2), Central Greenland
Reference
Dawson, A.G., Elliott, L., Mayewski, P., Lockett, P., Noone, S., Hickey, K., Holt, T., Wadhams, P. and Foster, I. 2003. Late-Holocene North Atlantic climate 'seesaws', storminess changes and Greenland ice sheet (GISP2) palaeoclimates. The Holocene 13: 381-392.

Description
The authors present palaeotemperature data derived from oxygen isotope stratigraphy of the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2) ice core, central Greenland (72.6°N, 38.5°W). Although they indicate that the "temperature warming of the 'Mediaeval Warm Period' (MWP) [is] not registered at GISP2," we believe that data presented in Figure 5 of their paper demonstrate otherwise. Reproduced below, this figure shows a period of above-average temperatures between approximately AD 1070 and 1140, during the time frame traditionally associated with the MWP. What is more, during what climate alarmists call the "unprecedented" warmth of the latter part of the 20th century, temperatures at GISP2 approach neither the magnitude nor the duration of warmth experienced during the MWP as we have identified it in the graph below. In fact, about the only thing unprecedented about central Greenland temperatures in the latter part of the 20th century is the presence of the coldest couple of years in the entire millennial record!