Related papers: Why could ice ages be unpredictable?
We compare the performance of a recently proposed empirical climate model based on astronomical harmonics against all available general circulation climate models (GCM) used by the IPCC (2007) to interpret the 20th century global surface…
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…
Glacial cycles redistribute water between oceans and continents causing pressure changes in the upper mantle, with consequences for melting of Earth's interior. Using Plio-Pleistocene sea-level variations as a forcing function, theoretical…
Since the beginning of satellite observations, the Arctic sea ice extent has shown a downward trend. The decline has been weaker in the March maximum than in the September minimum and masked by inter-annual fluctuations. One of the less…
The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…
The last glacial period was punctuated by a series of abrupt climate shifts, the so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events. The frequency of DO events varied in time, supposedly because of changes in background climate conditions. Here, the…
Polar vortices are common planetary flows that encircle the pole in the middle or high latitudes, and are observed on most of the solar systems' planetary atmospheres. The polar vortices on Earth, Mars, and Titan are dynamically related to…
The stochastic Arctic sea ice model described as a single periodic non-autonomous stochastic ordinary differential equation (ODE) is useful in explaining the seasonal variability of Arctic sea ice. However, to be nearer to realistic…
During most of the Phanerozoic eon, which began about a half-billion years ago, there were few glacial intervals until the late Pliocene 2.75 million years ago. Beginning at that time, the Earth's climate entered a period of instability…
Using an energy balance model with ice sheets, we examine the climate response of an Earth-like planet orbiting a G dwarf star and experiencing large orbital and obliquity variations. We find that ice caps couple strongly to the orbital…
"With five parameters one can fit an elephant". This provocative statement expresses the fact that when a theory has several adjustable parameters, an agreement with empirical data can be of modest value. What about a theory which contains…
Astronomical solutions provide calculated orbital and rotational parameters of solar system bodies based on the dynamics and physics of the solar system. Application of astronomical solutions in the Earth sciences has revolutionized our…
Severity of warming predicted by climate models depends on their Transient Climate Response (TCR). Inter-model spread of TCR has persisted at ~100% of its mean for decades. Existing observational constraints of TCR are based on observed…
Magmatism and volcanism transfer carbon from the solid Earth into the climate system. This transfer may be modulated by the glacial/interglacial cycling of water between oceans and continental ice sheets, which alters the surface loading of…
A deterministic excitation (DE) paradigm is formulated, according to which the late Pleistocene glacial terminations correspond to the excitation, by the orbital forcing, of nonlinear relaxation oscillations (ROs) internal to the climate…
Using observational data and an elementary rigorous statistical fact it is easily shown that the distribution of Earth's climate is non-stationary. Examination of records of hundreds of local Industrial Era temperature histories in 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…
The climate record preserved in polar glaciers, mountain glaciers, and widespread cave deposits shows repeated occurrence of abrupt global transitions between cold/dry stadial and warm/wet interstadial states during glacial periods. These…
The detection of cause-effect relationships from the analysis of paleoclimatic records is a crucial step to disentangle the main mechanisms at work in the climate system. Here, we show that the approach based on the generalized…
Many physical systems are forced by external inputs, which can sometimes take the form of chaotic variation. A particular example is found in applications related to weather and climate, where chaotic variation is prevalent across various…