title: The Holocene temperature conundrum.
abstract: A recent temperature reconstruction of global annual temperature shows Early Holocene warmth followed by a cooling trend through the Middle to Late Holocene [Marcott SA, et al., 2013, Science 339(6124):1198-1201]. This global cooling is puzzling because it is opposite from the expected and simulated global warming trend due to the retreating ice sheets and rising atmospheric greenhouse gases. Our critical reexamination of this contradiction between the reconstructed cooling and the simulated warming points to potentially significant biases in both the seasonality of the proxy reconstruction and the climate sensitivity of current climate models.
authors.affiliation: Nelson Center for Climatic Research and Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706; Laboratory of Climate, Ocean, and Atmosphere Studies, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China; zliu3@wisc.edu.
authors.forename: Zhengyu
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Nelson Center for Climatic Research and Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706;
authors.forename: Jiang
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0908-5130
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences and Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8521;
authors.forename: Yair
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Rosenthal
authors.affiliation: Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, D-27570 Bremerhaven, Germany;
authors.forename: Xu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO 80307-3000;
authors.forename: Bette L
authors.initials: BL
authors.lastname: Otto-Bliesner
authors.affiliation: International Pacific Research Center, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, University of Hawaii, HI 96822;
authors.forename: Axel
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Timmermann
authors.affiliation: National Centre for Atmospheric Science-Climate, Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6BB, United Kingdom;
authors.forename: Robin S
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.affiliation: Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, D-27570 Bremerhaven, Germany;
authors.forename: Gerrit
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Lohmann
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China; and.
authors.forename: Weipeng
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.affiliation: Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY 12222.
authors.forename: Oliver
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Elison Timm
keywords: Holocene temperature; global temperature; model-data inconsistency
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