Unexpected cold season warming during the Little Ice Age on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

Abstract There is a general agreement that Northern Hemisphere temperatures have cooled over the past two millennia, culminating in the Little Ice Age. However, this understanding partly relies on the compilation of existing proxy records, the majority of which carry a warm season bias such that there is an underrepresentation of cold-season temperatures. Here we report a unique cold-season temperature record based on the alkenone paleothermometer from the northeastern Tibetan Plateau that spans the last two millennia. In contrast to the regional- and hemisphere-scale summer cooling, our reconstruction shows a long-term warming through the Medieval Climate Anomaly into Little Ice Age. We attribute these opposing temperature trends to combined effects of seasonally divergent insolation and North Atlantic subpolar gyre circulation. Our study indicates that the cold season during the Little Ice Age was not the coldest period of the last two millennia at least on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau.