International media attention

Co-author of the Nature paper, Nathan Steiger, from Columbia University, USA, said in the Euronews article, "The main takeaway is that climate variability in the contemporary period is very different than what’s happened in the past 2,000 years. This is definitely further evidence that fossil fuels and anthropogenic activity actually has fundamentally changed the climate."

Mark Maslin, from University College London, UK, who wasn't part of the studies, said in the BBC article, "This paper should finally stop climate change deniers claiming that the recent observed coherent global warming is part of a natural climate cycle."

Kim Cobb, from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, who was not involved in the studies, said in the Smithsonian Magazine article, "This vastly enriched dataset of new paleoclimate records, combined with state-of-the-art modeling, tends to confirm earlier efforts of climate scientists going back 20 years or more. … So the idea that 20th century climate change is very unusual, and outside the range of natural variability, is certainly being reinforced with an exclamation point now with these new efforts."

Access the list of selected media coverage at the bottom of this page for the Nature paper "No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the pre-industrial Common Era" and the bottom of this page for the Nature Geoscience paper "Consistent multidecadal variability in global temperature reconstructions and simulations over the Common Era".