A Comparison between Medieval and Current Climate Warming Using the Przewalskii's Juniper Tree-Ring Data

N. M. Datsenko, N. N. Ivashchenko, C. Qin, J. Liu D. M. Sonechkin, and B. Yang

Comparison with the climate of the past centuries has demonstrated until recently the un¬precedented warming at the scale of the last millennium at least. This is embodied in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. However, recently the studies have appeared putting this statement into question. A new 1000-year long reconstruction based on the tree-ring variations of the long-living Chinese junipers (Sabina Przewalskii Kom.) growing in the northeastern part of the Ti-betan Plateau reveals that the climate during and immediately after the medieval maximum of solar ac¬tivity was warmer that the present-day one, all subsequent cooling coincided with the periods of low so¬lar activity, and the warming in the 1970s–1990s followed a new maximum of the solar activity which peak fell on the 1960s.