Related papers: Why could ice ages be unpredictable?
A review of the recent refereed literature fails to confirm quantitatively that carbon dioxide (CO2) radiative forcing was the prime mover in the changes in temperature, ice-sheet volume, and related climatic variables in the glacial and…
The study of Planktonic Foraminifera abundances permits to obtain climatic curves on the basis of percentage ratio between tropical and temperate/polar forms. Climatic changes were controlled by several phenomena as: (i) Milankovitch's…
In a recent article by Scafetta, 2010, the author investigates whether or not the decadal and multi-decadal climate oscillations have an astronomical origin. In particular, the author note that several global surface temperature records,…
It is shown that global climate exhibits chaotic response to solar forcing variability in a vast range of timescales: from annual to multi-millennium. Unlike linear systems, where periodic forcing leads to periodic response, nonlinear…
This paper describes some of the astronomical effects that could be important for understanding the ice ages, historic climate changes and the recent temperature increase. These include changes in the sun's luminosity, periodic changes in…
Herein we show that the historical records of mid-latitude auroras from 1700 to 1966 present oscillations with periods of about 9, 10-11, 20-21, 30 and 60 years. The same frequencies are found in proxy and instrumental global surface…
The 100,000-year problem concerns the dominant period of glacial-interglacial cycles over the past 800,000 years and their correlation with Earth's orbital eccentricity, despite eccentricity's weak influence on solar radiation. Two theories…
The dynamics of glacial cycles is studied in terms of the dynamical systems theory. We explore the dependence of the climate state on the phase of astronomical forcing by examining five conceptual models of glacial cycles proposed in the…
Long-term changes in the tilt of the Earths axis, relative to the plane of its orbit, are of great significance to long-term climate change, because they control the size of the arctic and antarctic circles. These Milankovitch cycles have…
An intriguing problem in climate science is the existence of Earth's glacial cycles. We show that it is possible to generate these periodic changes in climate by means of the Earth's carbon cycle as the main determinant factor. The carbon…
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…
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…
We present a study of a delay differential equation (DDE) model for the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT). We investigate the behavior of the model when subjected to periodic forcing. The unforced model has a bistable region consisting of a…
Although the Earth's orbit is never far from circular, terrestrial planets around other stars might experience substantial changes in eccentricity that could lead to climate changes, including possible "phase transitions" such as the…
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…
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…
The dynamical ellipticity of a planet expresses the departure of its mass distribution from spherical symmetry. It enters as a parameter in the description of a planet's precession and nutation, as well as other rotational normal modes. In…
We present a new conceptual model of the Earth's glacial-interglacial cycles, one leading to governing equations for which the vector field has a hyperplane of discontinuities. This work extends the classic Budyko- and Sellers-type…
Glaciations were attributed to variations of the Earths orbit (Milankovitch cycles). But the best ever dated paleoclimatic record (from a speleothem from Devils Hole, Nevada) demonstrated that the end of the last glacial period (termination…
Following the mid-Pleistocene transition, the dominant period of glacial cycles changed from 40 ka to ~100 ka. It is broadly accepted that the 40 ka glacial cycles were driven by cyclical changes in obliquity. However, this forcing does not…