Shaopeng Huang, Henry N. Pollack, and Po-Yu Shen
Complete Scientific Reference
Summary:
Global temperatures have also been reconstructed
using data from boreholes drilled into the earth's surface and logged for temperature changes with depth. Huang et al. have recently updated a global temperature reconstruction using underground temperature measurements from an expanded set of over 600 boreholes located on all continents except Antarctica. Using these data, which are independent from the paleoclimatic proxies used in other temperature reconstructions, Huang et al. have found the 20th century to be the warmest of the past five centuries, thus confirming the results of earlier borehole and multi-proxy studies.
The geophysical methods used to generate borehole temperature reconstructions do not permit annual or decadal resolution, but only the century-scale trends in temperatures over the last several centuries. Nonetheless, this record, totally independent of data and methods used in other studies, shows the same thing: the Earth has warmed dramatically.
The borehole temperature reconstruction is shown with the instrumental record of global temperature change (in blue) for comparison. The instrumental record has been shifted down 0.2 K to enable an easy comparison.
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