Chinese stalagmite suggest anthropogenic forcing

Stalagmites are powerful paleoclimatic archives because they can be sampled at very high resolution and can be dated very precisely.

In the newest issue of Science, Chinese and American researchers show that the strength of the Asian monsoon correlates closely to solar activity for most of the last 1800 years, but the correlation breaks down in the last few decades. The authors write:

"The sign of the correlation between the AM and temperature switches around 1960, suggesting that anthropogenic forcing superseded
natural forcing as the major driver of AM changes in the late 20th century."

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;322/5903/940

If you have a subscription, I highly recommend this article.

A friend of mine works for a publishing company that has a subscription. I'll read it if I can get it.

Andreas

I just realized that I posted a dead link. Here it is if others are interested:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;322/5903/940

Andreas, if you can't get a copy, you can PM me.

Quite an interesting article Jason. I like how it showed such a strong relationship between climate events in such different parts of the globe. I got the sense that when the asian monsoon variability changed from being forced by natural to anthropogenic it was not so much from CO2 but more from particulate pollution and aerosols since they speak of black carbon and sulfates. It will be interesting to see how the asian monsoons respond to the even greater level of pollution China currently has.

Andreas