Publication Abstracts

Peteet 2018

Peteet, D.M., 2018: The importance of understanding the Last Glacial Maximum for climate change. In Our Warming Planet: Topics in Climate Dynamics. C. Rosenzweig, D. Rind, A. Lacis, and D. Manley, Eds., Lectures in Climate Change, vol. 1, World Scientific, pp. 331-348, doi:10.1142/9789813148796_0016.

The last glacial maximum (LGM) at approximately 23-18k (k—thousand calendar years) provides an important contrast to our present and pre-industrial climate in a warming world. Global observational datasets of LGM land and sea surface conditions have been synthesized and present some interesting challenges both for providing another scenario for understanding climate change and for climate sensitivity. These challenges are ongoing, as data increase and modeling improves. By definition, the LGM is defined as the time during the last glacial interval in which maximum ice was sequestered in ice sheets as visible in the marine isotopic records. Maximum cooling is visible from pollen and macrofossil records 14C dated to this interval, and ice sheets and alpine glaciers are roughly at their maximumextent throughout the globe. The ice cores extracted from Greenland and Antarctica have given us high-resolution records of greenhouse gases, dust, and isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen which reveal the progression out of the LGM at 18k as climate warmed.

One of the first challenges addressed by D. Rind and D. Peteet (1985) was the disparity in temperature estimates they noted for the glacial using terrestrial vs. marine data. The disparity was very large, for while the marine sea surface temperature (SST) dataset produced by the Climate Long-range Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction group (CLIMAP, l981) showed large areas of the subtropical ocean to be warmer than today at the LGM, both pollen data and glacial moraines indicated cold temperatures in the tropics and subtropics. The Rind and Peteet (l985) primary contribution was to show that modeling with the CLIMAP SST dataset did not produce enough surface air cooling to match the terrestrial data.

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BibTeX Citation

@inbook{pe08600q,
  author={Peteet, D. M.},
  editor={Rosenzweig, C. and Rind, D. and Lacis, A. and Manley, D.},
  title={The importance of understanding the Last Glacial Maximum for climate change},
  booktitle={Our Warming Planet: Topics in Climate Dynamics},
  year={2018},
  volume={1},
  pages={331--348},
  publisher={World Scientific},
  series={Lectures in Climate Change},
  doi={10.1142/9789813148796_0016},
}

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RIS Citation

TY  - CHAP
ID  - pe08600q
AU  - Peteet, D. M.
ED  - Rosenzweig, C.
ED  - Rind, D.
ED  - Lacis, A.
ED  - Manley, D.
PY  - 2018
TI  - The importance of understanding the Last Glacial Maximum for climate change
BT  - Our Warming Planet: Topics in Climate Dynamics
T3  - Lectures in Climate Change
VL  - 1
SP  - 331
EP  - 348
DO  - 10.1142/9789813148796_0016
PB  - World Scientific
ER  -

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