Related papers: Climate Stability and Policy: A Synthesis
Climate variability over the past million years shows a strong glacial-interglacial cycle of ~100,000 years as a combined result of Milankovitch orbital forcing and climatic resonance. It has been suggested that anthropogenic contributions…
The Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis considers that greenhouse gas concentrations should have declined during the Holocene in absence of humankind activity, leading to glacial inception around the present. It partly relies on the fact that…
In our modeling of the long-term carbon cycle we find potential multiple steady-states in Phanerozoic climates. We include the effects of biotic enhancement of weathering on land, organic carbon burial, oxidation of reduced organic carbon…
Paleoclimate data help us assess climate sensitivity and potential human-made climate effects. We conclude that Earth in the warmest interglacial periods of the past million years was less than 1{\deg}C warmer than in the Holocene. Polar…
The cause of the glacial cycles remains a mystery. The origin is widely accepted to be astronomical since paleoclimatic archives contain strong spectral components that match the frequencies of Earth's orbital modulation. Milankovitch…
The existing understanding of interglacial periods is that they are initiated by Milankovitch cycles enhanced by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. During interglacials, global temperature is also believed to be primarily…
Improved knowledge of glacial-to-interglacial global temperature change implies that fast-feedback equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) is 1.2 +/- 0.3{\deg}C (2$\sigma$) per W/m$^2$. Consistent analysis of temperature over the full…
Ice sheets appeared in the northern hemisphere around 3 million years ago and glacial-interglacial cycles have paced Earth's climate since then. Superimposed on these long glacial cycles comes an intricate pattern of millennial and…
We do several simple calculations and measurements in an effort to gain understanding of global warming and the carbon cycle. Some conclusions are interesting: (i) There has been global warming since the end of the "little ice age" around…
It is commonly accepted that the variations of Earth's orbit and obliquity control the timing of Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles. Evidence comes from power spectrum analysis of palaeoclimate records and from inspection of the timing…
Earth's climate can be understood as a dynamical system that changes due to external forcing and internal couplings. Essential climate variables, such as surface air temperature, describe this dynamics. Our current interglacial, the…
This chapter is dedicated to the slow dynamics of the climate system, at time scales of one~thousand to one million years. We focus specifically on the phenomenon of ice ages that has characterised the slow evolution of climate over the…
Cenozoic temperature, sea level and CO2 co-variations provide insights into climate sensitivity to external forcings and sea level sensitivity to climate change. Climate sensitivity depends on the initial climate state, but potentially can…
Quasi-periodic changes of the paleointensity and geomagnetic polarity in the intervals of 170 Ma to the present time and of 550 Ma to the present time were studied, respectively. It is revealed that the spectrum of the basic variations in…
This article discusses the limits of the Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory advocated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A phenomenological theory of climate change based on the physical properties of the data themselves is…
The Little Ice Age in Europe (between about 1350 and 1850) marked the largest glacier extent over the entire Holocene period. Although several authors have investigated the causes of the substantial glacier advances in the mid-19th century…
The astronomical theory of Milankovitch relates the changes of Earth' past climate to variations in insolation caused by oscillations of the orbital parameters. However, this theory has problems to account for some major observed phenomena…
The glaciological record of atmospheric composition suggests O2 has declined over the last 800000 years at an average rate of 0.3 x 1012 mol (Tmol) O2 yr-1. Because the geological carbon cycle regulates long term atmospheric oxygen…
The glacial cycles are attributed to the climatic response of the orbital changes in the irradiance to the Earth. These changes in the forcing are to small to explain the observed climate variations as simple linear responses. Non-linear…
Over its multibillion-year history, Earth has exhibited a wide range of climates. Its history ranges from snowball episodes where the surface was mostly or entirely covered by ice to periods much warmer than today, where the cryosphere was…