Paper Reviewed
Abu-Zied, R.H. and Bantan, R.A. 2015. Palaeoenvironment, palaeoclimate and sea-level changes in the Shuaiba Lagoon during the late Holocene (last 3.6 ka), eastern Red Sea coast, Saudi Arabia. The Holocene 25: 1301-1312.

Introducing their most interesting paper, Abu-Zied and Bantan (2015) describe how they had conducted multi-proxy investigations of sediment lithology, geochemistry, benthic foraminifera and δ¹⁸O and δ¹³C of Elphidium striatopunctatum that were carried out on a sediment core they had recovered from Shuaiba Lagoon on the eastern Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia that spanned the last 3.6 thousand years, where the substrate of the lagoon was dominated by mangrove trees, seagrasses, macroalgae, small molluscs and many benthic foraminiferal assemblages sensitive to sea-level changes. And what was the result of their many analyses?

The two Saudi researchers report that their several studies of the above-enumerated climatic proxies of their sediment core "inferred warming during the deposition of the AD 1000-1550 interval [that] corresponds to the 'Medieval Warm Period' (MWP) (AD 800-1300)," while "the period (AD 1550-1850) of lower evaporation is very well correlated with the 'Little Ice Age' (LIA) that dominated the northern hemisphere and lasted between AD 1300 and 1900," citing the studies of Cronin et al. (2003), Driese et al. (2004), Kaniewski et al. (2011), Lamb (1977), Ljungqvist (2010), Ljungqvist et al. (2012), Moberg et al. (2005), Quamar and Chauhan (2013), Wanner et al. (2008, 2011) and Wassenburg et al. (2013).

Based on these observations, and noting that "the LIA lasted for about 300 years and immediately followed the prolonged MWP (~550 years)," Abu-Zied and Bantan concluded that their findings were "indicative of "a quasi-cyclical natural climate variability," which would thus suggest the Earth's current period of warmth to be merely a continuation of the natural climatic oscillation that had brought about the MWP and LIA, as well as the prior Roman Warm Period and subsequent Dark Ages Cold Period. And this impressive back-and-forth oscillation of the Earth's thermal climate suggests that there is nothing unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about the Current Warm Period in which we find ourselves imbedded.

References
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