A Possible Role of Dust in Resolving the Holocene Temperature Conundrum

Climate models generally fail to produce a warmer (by as much as 0.5 °C) early to mid-Holocene than the pre-industrial in the global annual temperature, which has been termed the Holocene temperature conundrum. Here we use a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model to test whether the conundrum can be partially resolved by considering the fact that atmospheric dust loading was much reduced during the early to mid-Holocene. Our experiments show that the global annual mean surface temperature increases by 0.30 °C and 0.23 °C for the mid-Holocene (6 ka) and early Holocene (9 ka), respectively, if the dust is completely removed. The temperature increase scales almost linearly with the fraction of dust being removed, with the 50% dust reduction experiment for the 6 ka being the only one deviating from the linear trend. The indirect effect of dust, which is highly uncertain and is not included in the model, may further enhance the warming. Therefore, the neglect of dust reduction in the Holocene in climate models could contribute significantly to the model-data discrepancy, especially in the Northern Hemisphere.