Related papers: How can a glacial inception be predicted?
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…
Freshwater forcing from a retreating Antarctic Ice Sheet could have a wide range of impacts on future global climate. Here, we report on multi-century (present-2250) climate simulations performed using a fully coupled numerical model…
The model accepted is one where during the Archean Eon the Earths climate was clement despite the weaker Sun. The observational evidence that supports this concept is: the emergence of life, the existence of evaporitic sediments and the…
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…
It is shown that the Earth System (ES) can, due to the impact of human activities, exhibit chaotic behaviour. Our arguments are based on the assumption that the ES can be described by a Landau-Ginzburg model, which, in itself, predicts that…
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…
Global Climate Models (GCMs) provide forecasts of future climate warming using a wide variety of highly sophisticated anthropogenic CO2 emissions models as input, each based on the evolution of four emissions "drivers": population p,…
Current techniques for predicting climate change are mainly based on "massive" deterministic numerical modeling. However, the ocean-atmosphere system is a so-called "complex system", made up of a large number of interacting elements. We…
For decades, scientists have tried to explain the evidence for fluvial activity on early Mars, but a consensus has yet to emerge regarding the mechanism for producing it. One hypothesis suggests early Mars was warmed by a thick greenhouse…
It is often known, from modelling studies, that a certain mode of climate tipping (of the oceanic thermohaline circulation, for example) is governed by an underlying fold bifurcation. For such a case we present a scheme of analysis that…
Natural climate variability, captured through multiple initial condition ensembles, may be comparable to the variability caused by knowledge gaps in future emissions trajectories and in the physical science basis, especially at…
A set of idealized experiments are performed to analyze the competing effects of declining atmospheric CO2 concentrations, the opening of an ocean gateway, and varying orbital parameters. These forcing mechanisms, which influence the global…
We analyze the stability of a low-order coupled sea ice and climate model and extract the essential physics governing the time scales of response as a function of greenhouse gas forcing. Under present climate conditions the stability is…
Based on a dynamic systems approach to the Landau-Ginzburg model, a phase space description of the Earth System (ES) in the transition to the Anthropocene is presented. It is shown that, for a finite amount of human-driven change, there is…
Increases in atmospheric CO2 and CH4 result from a combination of forcing from anthropogenic emissions and Earth System feedbacks that reduce or amplify the effects of those emissions on atmospheric concentrations. Despite decades of…
A prevailing viewpoint in palaeoclimate science is that a single palaeoclimate record contains insufficient information to discriminate between most competing explanatory models. Results we present here suggest the contrary. Using SMC^2…
Paleoclimate records provide a critical long-term perspective on natural climate variability, essential for understanding contemporary climate change. However, existing paleoclimate proxies lack the spatial-temporal coverage for studying…
A "toy" model, simple and elementary enough for an undergraduate class, of the temperature dependence of the greenhouse (mid-IR) absorption by atmospheric water vapor implies a bistable climate system. The stable states are glaciation and…
The state of earth's climate is constrained by well-known physical principles such as energy balance and the conservation of energy. Increased greenhouse gas concentrations affect the atmospheric optical depth, and physical consistency…
Holocene (the last 12,000 years) temperature variation, including the transition out of the last Ice Age to a warmer climate, is reconstructed at multiple locations in southern Finland, Sweden and Estonia based on pollen fossil data from…