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Global warming during the Roman era?

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Abstract

The high rate of increase in global temperature we are experiencing since the last century is commonly ascribed to industrial activities. However, the mean sea level variations inferred from the remnants of the Roman era suggest that a similar high rate of increase may have occurred more than 2,000 years ago. This issue is essentially based on two data points and is admittedly weak, but dismissing these as outliers seems unjustified since neither local geology nor the Italian seismic catalogs support a tectonic origin for such a high rate of vertical motion. On the contrary, independent data on both ocean sediments in the Sargasso Sea and dendrology favor repeated strong temperature oscillations with comparably large gradients in historic times.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita’ di Roma La Sapienza, P.le A. Moro 5, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Michele Caputo

  2. Department of Geology and Geophysics, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Michele Caputo

  3. Dipartimento di Fisica, Settore di Geofisica, Universita di Bologna, viale Berti Pichat 8, 40127, Bologna, Italy

    Francesco Mulargia

Authors
  1. Michele Caputo
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  2. Francesco Mulargia
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Correspondence to Francesco Mulargia.

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Caputo, M., Mulargia, F. Global warming during the Roman era?. Rend. Fis. Acc. Lincei 22, 403–408 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12210-011-0139-z

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