Fifteen Millennia of Climate Change in the Middle Reaches of China's Yangtze River
Gu, Y., Wang, H., Huang, X., Peng, H. and Huang, J. 2012. Phytolith records of the climate change since the past 15000 years in the middle reach of the Yangtze River in China. Frontiers of Earth Science 6: 10-17.
In discussing their findings the five Chinese scientists say they identified eight climatic phases over the course of their temperature reconstruction: the Last Glacial Maximum (20-14.8 cal ka BP), the Last Deglaciation (14.8-11.9 cal ka BP), a low temperature phase in the Early Holocene (11.9-8 cal ka BP), the Holocene Optimum (8-4.9 cal ka BP), the Holocene Katathermal (4.9-1.1 cal ka BP), the Medieval Warm Period (1.1-0.7 cal ka BP), the Little Ice Age (0.7-0.15 cal ka BP) and Modern Warming (0.15 cal ka BP-present). In addition, they discovered that the climate history of their research area had strong links with the contemporary histories of the Indian Summer Monsoon, the Asian Summer Monsoon, and the Holocene drift-ice events of the North Atlantic Ocean, which were discovered and described by Bond et al. (1997, 2001), who attributed them to solar variability. Such findings led Gu et al. to state, in no uncertain terms, in the concluding sentence of their paper, that the good correlation that exists between their climate history of the middle reaches of China's Yangtze River and the Bond events of the North Atlantic Ocean "reveals that solar activity controls the Earth surface climate system at the centennial and millennial scales."
Bond, G., Kromer, B., Beer, J., Muscheler, R., Evans, M.N., Showers, W., Hoffmann, S., Lotti-Bond, R., Hajdas, I. and Bonani, G. 2001. Persistent solar influence on North Atlantic climate during the Holocene. Science 294: 2130-2136.
Bond, G., Showers, W., Chezebiet, M., Lotti, R., Almasi, P., deMenocal, P., Priore, P., Cullen, H., Hajdas, I. and Bonani, G. 1997. A pervasive millennial scale cycle in North-Atlantic Holocene and glacial climates. Science 278: 1257-1266.