Reference
Nazarova, L., de Hoog, V., Hoff, U., Dirksen, O. and Diekmann, B. 2013. Late Holocene climate and environmental changes in Kamchatka inferred from the subfossil chironomid record. Quaternary Science Reviews 67: 81-92.
Background
The Kamchatka Peninsula, in the words of the authors, "shapes the eastern edge of Siberia and separates the Sea of Okhotsk from the Pacific Ocean." The climatic history of its last 400 years, as they describe it, "is well documented in tree-ring and ice-core records and suggests short-term climate oscillations at centennial to decadal time scales (Solomina et al., 2007; Sano et al., 2009, 2010)," but they say that much less is known about the longer-term environmental dynamics of the region, which deficiency they thus set about to repair.
What was done
Working with sediments extracted from Dvuyurtochnoe Lake (Two-Yurts Lake, TYL), which is situated in Central Kamchatka, Nazarova et al. reconstructed a Holocene history of mean July air temperature (TJuly), using a chironomid-inferred temperature model for north-eastern Russia that had been developed by Nazarova et al. (2011).
What was learned
Between 4500 and 4000 cal years BP, the five researchers' data indicated "a high lake level, well-oxygenated lake water conditions, and close to modern temperatures (~13°C)." Then, from 4000 to 1000 cal years BP, they report that "two consecutive warm intervals were recorded, with the highest reconstructed temperature reaching 16.8°C between 3700 and 2800 cal years BP." After 1000 cal years BP, however, they say "the chironomid record suggests temperatures lower than present day," which, of course, were associated with the Little Ice Age.
What it means
Clearly, on the Kamchatka Peninsula, the two warm periods that preceded the Medieval Warm Period were both vastly warmer than the Current Warm Period has been to date, signifying in duplicate that there is absolutely nothing unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about the Peninsula's current level of warmth, which fact stands in vivid contradiction of what climate alarmists would have one believe, as they vigorously promote their CO2-induced global warming scenario.
References
Nazarova, L., Herzschuh, U., Wetterich, S. and Pestryakova, L. 2011. Chironomid-based inference models for estimating mean July air temperature and water depth from lakes in Yakutia, northeastern Russia. Journal of Paleolimnology 45: 57-71.
Sano, M., Furuta, F. and Sweda, T. 2009. Tree-ring-width chronology of Larix gmelinii as an indicator of changes in early summer temperature in east-central Kamchatka. Journal of Forest Research 14: 147-154.
Sano, M., Furuta, F. and Sweda, T. 2010. Summer temperature variations in southern Kamchatka as reconstructed from a 247-year tree-ring chronology of Betula ermanii. Journal of Forest Research 15: 234-240.
Solomina, O., Wiles, G. and Arrigo, R. 2007. Multiproxy records of climate variability for Kamchatka for the past 400 years. Climate of the Past 3: 119-128.
Reviewed 30 October 2013