As climate studies saturate scientific journals and
mainstream media, with opposing viewpoints quickly squaring off in reaction and
debate, new findings can easily be lost in the noise.
But in the case of Northern Arizona University Regents’
professor Darrell Kaufman and a study appearing in Nature Geoscience, obscurity
is an unlikely fate.
What Kaufman—the lead co-author of “Continental-scale
temperature variability during the last two millennia”—and 78 experts from 24
countries have done is to assemble the most comprehensive study to date of
temperature change of Earth’s continents over the past 1,000 to 2,000 years.