Paulsen et al. (2003) employed high-resolution stalagmite records of ð¹³C and ð¹⁸O from Buddha Cave "to infer changes in climate in central China for the last 1270 years in terms of warmer, colder, wetter and drier conditions." Among the climatic episodes evident in their data were "those corresponding to the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and 20th-century warming, lending support to the global extent of these events." More specifically, their record begins in the depths of the Dark Ages Cold Period, which ends about AD 965 with the commencement of the Medieval Warm Period, which continues to approximately AD 1475, whereupon the Little Ice Age sets in and holds sway until about AD 1825, after which the warming responsible for the Modern Warm Period begins.

With respect to hydrologic balance, the last part of the Dark Ages Cold Period was characterized as wet. It, in turn, was followed by a dry, a wet, and another dry interval in the Medieval Warm Period, which was followed by a wet and a dry interval in the Little Ice Age, and finally a mostly wet but highly moisture-variable Modern Warm Period. Paulsen et al.'s data also reveal a number of other cycles superimposed on the major millennial-scale cycle of temperature and the centennial-scale cycle of moisture, most of which higher-frequency cycles they attribute to solar phenomena, concluding that the summer monsoon over eastern China, which brings the region much of its precipitation, may "be related to solar irradiance."

This study clearly indicates that earth's climate is determined by a conglomerate of cycles within cycles, all of which are essentially independent of the air's CO2 concentration; and it demonstrates that the multi-century warm and cold periods of the planet's millennial-scale oscillation of temperature may have both wetter and drier periods embedded within them. Consequently, it can be appreciated that warmth alone is not a sufficient condition for the concomitant occurrence of the dryness associated with drought.

Kalugin et al. (2005) worked with sediment cores from Lake Teletskoye in the Altai Mountains of Southern Siberia to produce a multi-proxy climate record spanning the past 800 years. This record revealed that the regional climate was relatively warm with high terrestrial productivity from AD 1210 to 1380. Thereafter, however, temperatures cooled and productivity dropped, reaching a broad minimum between 1660 and 1700, which interval, in their words, "corresponds to the age range of the well-known Maunder Minimum (1645-1715)" and is "in agreement with the timing of the Little Ice Age in Europe (1560-1850)."

With respect to moisture and precipitation, Kalugin et al. state that the period between 1210 an 1480 was more humid than that of today, while the period between 1480 and 1840 was more arid. In addition, they report three episodes of multi-year drought (1580-1600, 1665-1690 and 1785-1810), which findings are in agreement with other historical data and tree-ring records from the Mongolia-Altai region (Butvilovskii, 1993; Jacoby et al., 1996; Panyushkina et al., 2000). Consequently, this study proves problematic for the climate-alarmist claim that global warming will lead to more frequent and more severe droughts, as all of the major multi-year droughts detected in this study occurred during the cool phase of the 800-year record.

Touchan et al. (2003) developed two reconstructions of spring precipitation for southwestern Turkey from tree-ring width measurements, one of them (1776-1998) based on nine chronologies of Cedrus libani, Juniperus excelsa, Pinus brutia and Pinus nigra, and the other one (1339-1998) based on three chronologies of Juniperus excelsa. These records, according to them, "show clear evidence of multi-year to decadal variations in spring precipitation." Nevertheless, they report that "dry periods of 1-2 years were well distributed throughout the record" and that the same was largely true of similar wet periods. With respect to more extreme events, the period preceding the Industrial Revolution stood out. They note, for example, that "all of the wettest 5-year periods occurred prior to 1756." Likewise, the longest period of reconstructed spring drought was the four-year period 1476-79, while the single driest spring was 1746. Once again, therefore, we see that what climate alarmists describe as the most dramatic warming of the past two millennia (that associated with the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath) produced no distinctive changes in the nature of drought in yet another part of Asia.

Cluis and Laberge (2001) analyzed streamflow records stored in the databank of the Global Runoff Data Center at the Federal Institute of Hydrology in Koblenz (Germany) to see if there were any changes in Asian river runoff of the type predicted by the IPCC to lead to more frequent and more severe drought. This study was based on the streamflow histories of 78 rivers said to be "geographically distributed throughout the whole Asia-Pacific region." The mean start and end dates of these series were 1936 ± 5 years and 1988 ± 1 year, respectively, representing an approximate half-century time span. In the case of the annual minimum discharges of these rivers, which are the ones associated with drought, 53% of them were unchanged over the period of the study; and where there were trends, 62% of them were upward, indicative of a growing likelihood of both less frequent and less severe drought.

Ducic (2005) analyzed observed and reconstructed discharge rates of the Danube River near Orsova, Serbia, over the period 1731-1990, finding that the lowest 5-year discharge value in the pre-instrumental era (period of occurrence: 1831-1835) was practically equal to the lowest 5-year discharge value in the instrumental era (period of occurrence: 1946-1950), and that the driest decade of the entire 260-year period was 1831-1840. What is more, the discharge rate for the last decade of the record (1981-1990), which prior researchers had claimed was anthropogenically-influenced, was found to be "completely inside the limits of the whole series," in Ducic's words, and only slightly (0.7%) less than the 260-year mean. As a result, Ducic concluded that "modern discharge fluctuations do not point to [a] dominant anthropogenic influence." In fact, Ducic's correlative analysis suggests that the detected cyclicity in the record could "point to the domination of the influence of solar activity."

Jiang et al. (2005) analyzed historical documents to produce a time series of flood and drought occurrences in eastern China's Yangtze Delta since AD 1000. Their work revealed that alternating wet and dry episodes occurred throughout this period; and the data demonstrate that droughts and floods usually occurred in the spring and autumn seasons of the same year, with the most rapid and strongest of these fluctuations occurring during the Little Ice Age (1500-1850), as opposed to the preceding Medieval Warm Period and the following Current Warm Period.

Davi et al. (2006) employed absolutely dated tree-ring-width chronologies from five sampling sites in west-central Mongolia -- all of them "in or near the Selenge River basin, the largest river in Mongolia" -- to develop a reconstruction of streamflow that extends from 1637 to 1997. Of the ten driest five-year periods of the 360-year record, only one occurred during the 20th century (and that just barely:1901-1905, sixth driest of the ten extreme periods), while of the ten wettest five-year periods, only two occurred during the 20th century (1990-1994 and 1917-1921, the second and eighth wettest of the ten extreme periods, respectively). Consequently, as Davi et al. describe the situation, "there is much wider variation in the long-term tree-ring record than in the limited record of measured precipitation," such that over the course of the 20th century, which climate alarmists describe as having experienced a warming that was unprecedented over the past two millennia, extremes of both dryness and wetness were both less frequent and less severe.

Sinha et al. (2007) derived a nearly annually-resolved record of Indian summer monsoon (ISM) rainfall variations for the core monsoon region of India that stretches from AD 600 to 1500 based on a ²³⁰Th-dated stalagmite oxygen isotope record from Dandak Cave, which is located at 19°00'N, 82°00'E. This work revealed that "the short instrumental record of ISM underestimates the magnitude of monsoon rainfall variability," and they state that "nearly every major famine in India [over the period of their study] coincided with a period of reduced monsoon rainfall as reflected in the Dandak δ¹⁸O record," noting two particularly devastating famines that "occurred at the beginning of the Little Ice Age during the longest duration and most severe ISM weakening of [their] reconstruction." In addition, they state that "ISM reconstructions from Arabian Sea marine sediments (Agnihotri et al., 2002; Gupta et al., 2003; von Rad et al., 1999), stalagmite δ¹⁸O records from Oman and Yemen (Burns et al., 2002; Fleitmann et al., 2007) and a pollen record from the western Himalaya (Phadtare and Pant, 2006) also indicate a weaker monsoon during the Little Ice Age and a relatively stronger monsoon during the Medieval Warm Period." As a result, the eight researchers note that "since the end of the Little Ice Age, ca 1850 AD, the human population in the Indian monsoon region has increased from about 200 million to over 1 billion," and that "a recurrence of weaker intervals of ISM comparable to those inferred in our record would have serious implications to human health and economic sustainability in the region," which suggests that the Current Warm Period the earth is experiencing is something for which a sizable fraction of the planet's population should be very thankful.

Last of all, Zhang et al. (2008) developed flood and drought histories of the past thousand years in China's Yangtze Delta, based on "local chronicles, old and very comprehensive encyclopaedia, historic agricultural registers, and official weather reports," after which "continuous wavelet transform was applied to detect the periodicity and variability of the flood/drought series" -- which they describe as "a powerful way to characterize the frequency, the intensity, the time position, and the duration of variations in a climate data series" -- and, finally, the results of the entire set of operations were compared with two one-thousand-year temperature histories of the Tibetan Plateau: northeastern Tibet and southern Tibet.

As a result of this effort, Zhang et al. report that "during AD 1400-1700 [the coldest portion of their record, corresponding to much of the Little Ice Age], the proxy indicators showing the annual temperature experienced larger variability (larger standard deviation), and this time interval exactly [our italics] corresponds to the time when the higher and significant wavelet variance occurred." In contrast, they report that "during AD 1000-1400 [the warmest portion of their record, corresponding to much of the Medieval Warm Period], relatively stable changes of climatic changes reconstructed from proxy indicators in Tibet correspond to lower wavelet variance of flood/drought series in the Yangtze Delta region."

In conclusion, the preponderance of real-world evidence from Asia provides no support whatsoever for the climate-alarmist claim that global warming leads to the occurrence of either more frequent or more severe droughts.

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