Reproducible climate reconstructions of the Common Era (1 CE to present) are key to placing industrial-era warming into the context of natural climatic variability. Here we present a community-sourced database of temperature-sensitive proxy records from the PAGES2k initiative. The database gathers 692 records from 648 locations, including all continental regions and major ocean basins. The records are from trees, ice, sediment, corals, speleothems, documentary evidence, and other archives. They range in length from 50 to 2000 years, with a median of 547 years, while temporal resolution ranges from biweekly to centennial. Nearly half of the proxy time series are significantly correlated with HadCRUT4.2 surface temperature over the period 1850–2014. Global temperature composites show a remarkable degree of coherence between high- and low-resolution archives, with broadly similar patterns across archive types, terrestrial versus marine locations, and screening criteria. The database is suited to investigations of global and regional temperature variability over the Common Era, and is shared in the Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format, including serializations in Matlab, R and Python.
Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and vaccination are two fundamental approaches for mitigating the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. However, the real-world impact of NPIs versus vaccination, or a combination of both, on COVID-19 remains uncertain. To address this, we built a Bayesian inference model to assess the changing effect of NPIs and vaccination on reducing COVID-19 transmission, based on a large-scale dataset including epidemiological parameters, virus variants, vaccines, and climate factors in Europe from August 2020 to October 2021. We found that (1) the combined effect of NPIs and vaccination resulted in a 53% (95% confidence interval: 42–62%) reduction in reproduction number by October 2021, whereas NPIs and vaccination reduced the transmission by 35% and 38%, respectively; (2) compared with vaccination, the change of NPI effect was less sensitive to emerging variants; (3) the relative effect of NPIs declined 12% from May 2021 due to a lower stringency and the introduction of vaccination strategies. Our results demonstrate that NPIs were complementary to vaccination in an effort to reduce COVID-19 transmission, and the relaxation of NPIs might depend on vaccination rates, control targets, and vaccine effectiveness concerning extant and emerging variants.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.