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Non-trivial role of internal climate feedback on interglacial temperature evolution

Nature volume 600, pages E1–E3 (2021)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 01 December 2021

The Original Article was published on 27 January 2021

arising from S. Bova et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-03155-x (2021)

Quantifying seasonal bias in proxy reconstructions (for example, sea surface temperature (SST)) has been a long-standing challenge, hampering our understanding of past climate evolution (for example, the Holocene temperature conundrum)1,2. Recently, Bova et al.3 proposed a seasonal to mean annual transformation (SAT) method that seems to effectively remove SST signal caused by seasonal insolation change. To extract mean annual SST (MASST) change for the Holocene epoch (12–0 thousand years before present (kyr bp)), Bova et al.3 selected SST records that additionally cover the last interglacial (LIG; 128–115 kyr bp) period, for which SST is assumed to be solely attributed to variations in local solar insolation, hence allowing for reliable quantification of seasonal bias in SST records. However, this assumption is fundamentally incorrect because it overlooks the roles of internal Earth system feedback (for example, sea ice) on LIG temperature change, indicating that their findings are effectively biased by overcorrecting insolation-induced seasonal bias in SST proxies.

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Fig. 1: Evolution and drivers of Holocene and LIG SST.
Fig. 2: Tropical mean cooling induced by sea-ice expansion.

Data availability

The datasets used for this study are available in the original papers.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge instructive comments by P. Bakker to improve this study. We also thank Y. Sun and Z.  Fu for preparing the figures, and E. J. Gowan, X. Xiao and W.  Xiao for helpful discussions. This study is supported by the Basic Science Center for Tibetan Plateau Earth System (BSCTPES, NSFC project No. 41988101) and the National Science Foundation of China (no. 42075047).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alpine Paleoecology and Human Adaption Group (ALPHA), State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Plateau Earth System, Resources and Environment (TPESRE), Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Xu Zhang & Fahu Chen

  2. Key Laboratory of Western China’s Environmental Systems (Ministry of Education), College of Earth and Environmental Science, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China

    Xu Zhang & Fahu Chen

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  1. Xu Zhang
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  2. Fahu Chen
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Contributions

X.Z. initiated and developed this study by pointing out roles of sea ice change in global mean annual temperature. X.Z. and F.C. contributed equally to the writing of the Comment.

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Correspondence to Xu Zhang.

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Zhang, X., Chen, F. Non-trivial role of internal climate feedback on interglacial temperature evolution. Nature 600, E1–E3 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03930-4

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