Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-k7rjm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-12T08:00:08.222Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Climate Change

from Part II - Global Physical Climatology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2015

Gordon Bonan
Gordon Bonan
Affiliation:
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
Get access

Summary

Chapter Summary

Climate has changed over the course of Earth's history and will change in the future. Just 18,000 years before present (18 kyr BP), Earth was in the grips of a prolonged cold period in which ice covered vast tracts of the Northern Hemisphere. Over the past few million years there have been numerous such ice ages separated by shorter, warm interglacial periods. The geologic record also reveals numerous rapid climate changes over periods as short as decades or centuries. This climate change is the result of changes in the external forcing of the Earth system by the Sun and internal physical, chemical, and biological feedbacks among the atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial components of the Earth system. Plate tectonics and changes in the geometry of Earth's orbit around the Sun influence climate at timescales of millennia or longer. Changes in the concentration of greenhouse gases or in the runoff of freshwater to oceans affect climate at timescales of centuries to millennia. Changes in solar irradiance or volcanic eruptions that emit aerosols into the atmosphere influence climate at timescales of years to decades. Climate change over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is reviewed in the context of greenhouse gases and anthropogenic influences on climate.

Glacial Cycles

Over the past several hundred thousand years, glaciers have cyclically advanced and retreated in the Northern Hemisphere with a period of about 100 kyr. Glaciation typically takes 90 kyr to complete while deglaciation occurs over 10 kyr. Ice cores extracted deep below the surface in Greenland and Antarctica record Earth's climate history and reveal these ice ages. Atmospheric gases trapped in ice as glaciers grow provide a record of the temperature and chemical composition of the atmosphere at the time the ice formed. A 2,755-m deep record of the Vostok ice core extracted from Antarctica illustrates climate change over the past 250 kyr BP. The record shows two distinct cold periods beginning about 190 kyr BP and lasting until 140 kyr BP and again beginning about 115 kyr BP until 18 kyr BP (Figure 8.1). During these glacial periods, temperature was several degrees colder than present. The record also shows two warm periods following these ice ages from about 140 kyr to 125 kyr BP and presently beginning about 15 kyr BP.

Information

Type
Chapter
Information
Ecological Climatology
Concepts and Applications
 , pp. 117 - 140
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Allen, M. R., Frame, D. J., Huntingford, C., et al. (2009). Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions towards the trillionth tone. Nature, 458, 1163–1166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alley, R. B., and Ágústsdóttir, A. M. (2005). The 8k event: Cause and consequences of a major Holocene abrupt climate change. Quaternary Science Reviews, 24, 1123–1149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alley, R. B., Marotzke, J., Nordhaus, W., et al. (2002). Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.Google Scholar
Alley, R. B., Marotzke, J., Nordhaus, W. D., et al. (2003). Abrupt climate change. Science, 299, 2005–2010.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ammann, C. M., Joos, F., Schimel, D. S., Otto-Bliesner, B. L., and Tomas, R. A. (2007). Solar influence on climate during the past millennium: results from transient simulations with the NCAR Climate System Model. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 104, 3713–3718.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berger, A. L. (1978). Long-term variations of daily insolation and Quaternary climatic changes. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 35, 2362–2367.2.0.CO;2>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berger, A. (1988). Milankovitch theory and climate. Reviews of Geophysics, 26, 624–657.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berger, A., and Loutre, M. F. (1991). Insolation values for the climate of the last 10 million years. Quaternary Science Reviews, 10, 297–317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berger, A., Loutre, M. F., and Tricot, C. (1993). Insolation and Earth's orbital periods. Journal of Geophysical Research, 98D, 10341–10362.Google Scholar
Berner, R. A. (1991). A model for atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic time. American Journal of Science, 291, 339–376.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berner, R. A. (1998). The carbon cycle and CO2 over Phanerozoic time: the role of land plants. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 353, 75–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berner, R. A. (2003). The long-term carbon cycle, fossil fuels and atmospheric composition. Nature, 426, 323–326.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berner, R. A., and Lasaga, A. C. (1989). Modeling the geochemical carbon cycle. Scientific American, 260(3), 74–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bindoff, N. L., Stott, P. A., Achuta Rao, K. M., et al. (2013). Detection and attribution of climate change: from global to regional. In Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. Stocker, T. F., Qin, D., Plattner, G.-K., et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 867–952.Google Scholar
Broecker, W. S. (1997). Thermohaline circulation, the Achilles heel of our climate system: Will man-made CO2 upset the current balance?Science, 278, 1582–1588.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Broecker, W. S. (2003). Does the trigger for abrupt climate change reside in the ocean or in the atmosphere?Science, 300, 1519–1522.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Broecker, W. S. (2006). Abrupt climate change revisited. Global and Planetary Change, 54, 211–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broecker, W. S., Peteet, D. M., and Rind, D. (1985). Does the ocean–atmosphere system have more than one stable mode of operation?Nature, 315, 21–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broecker, W. S., Kennett, J. P., Flower, B. P., et al. (1989). Routing of meltwater from the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the Younger Dryas cold episode. Nature, 341, 318–321.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlson, A. E., and Clark, P. U. (2012). Ice sheet sources of sea level rise and freshwater discharge during the last deglaciation. Reviews of Geophysics, 50, RG4007, doi:10.1029/2011RG000371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, P. U., Marshall, S. J., Clarke, G. K. C., et al. (2001). Freshwater forcing of abrupt climate change during the last glaciation. Science, 293, 283–287.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
COHMAP (1988). Climatic changes of the last 18,000 years: Observations and model simulations. Science, 241, 1043–1052.
Collins, M., Knutti, R., Arblaster, J., et al. (2013). Long-term climate change: Projections, commitments and irreversibility. In Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. Stocker, T. F., Qin, D., Plattner, G.-K., et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1029–1136.Google Scholar
Crowley, T. J., and North, G. R. (1991). Paleoclimatology. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Deser, C., Knutti, R., Solomon, S., and Phillips, A. S. (2012). Communication of the role of natural variability in future North American climate. Nature Climate Change, 2, 775–779.Google Scholar
Eddy, J. A. (1976). The Maunder Minimum. Science, 192, 1189–1202.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Free, M., and Robock, A. (1999). Global warming in the context of the Little Ice Age. Journal of Geophysical Research, 104D, 19057–19070.Google Scholar
Gao, C., Robock, A., and Ammann, C. (2008). Volcanic forcing of climate over the past 1500 years: An improved ice corebased index for climate models. Journal of Geophysical Research, 113, D23111, doi:10.1029/2008JD010239.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartmann, D. L., Klein Tank, A. M. G., Rusticucci, M., et al. (2013). Observations: atmosphere and surface. In Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. Stocker, T. F., Qin, D., Plattner, G.-K., et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 159–254.Google Scholar
Hawkins, E., and Sutton, R. (2009). The potential to narrow uncertainty in regional climate predictions. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 90, 1095–1107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, E., and Sutton, R. (2012). Time of emergence of climate signals. Geophysical Research Letters, 39, L01702, doi:10.1029/2011GL050087.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hay, W. W., DeConto, R. M., Wold, C. N., et al. (1999). Alternative global Cretaceous paleogeography. In Evolution of the Cretaceous Ocean–Climate System, ed. Barrera, E. and Johnson, C. C.. Boulder, Colorado: Geological Society of America, pp. 1–47.Google Scholar
Hays, J. D., Imbrie, J., and Shackleton, N. J. (1976). Variations in the Earth's orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages. Science, 194, 1121–1132.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huntley, B. J., and Webb, T., III (1988). Vegetation History. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
IPCC (2013). Summary for policymakers. In Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. Stocker, T. F., Qin, D., Plattner, G.-K., et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–29.
Jones, P. D., Lister, D. H., Osborn, T. J., et al. (2012). Hemispheric and large-scale land-surface air temperature variations: An extensive revision and an update to 2010. Journal of Geophysical Research, 117, D05127, doi:10.1029/2011JD017139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jouzel, J., Waelbroeck, C., Malaize, B., et al. (1996). Climatic interpretation of the recently extended Vostok ice records. Climate Dynamics, 12, 513–521.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jouzel, J., Masson-Delmotte, V., Cattani, O., et al. (2007). Orbital and millennial Antarctic climate variability over the past 800,000 years. Science, 317, 793–796.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kirtman, B., Power, S. B., Adedoyin, J. A., et al. (2013). Near-term climate change: projections and predictability. In Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. Stocker, T. F., Qin, D., Plattner, G.-K., et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 953–1028.Google Scholar
Kutzbach, J. E., and Guetter, P. J. (1986). The influence of changing orbital parameters and surface boundary conditions on climate simulations for the past 18 000 years. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 43, 1726–1759.2.0.CO;2>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kutzbach, J. E., and Webb, T., III (1993). Conceptual basis for understanding late-Quaternary climates. In Global Climates since the Last Glacial Maximum, ed. Wright, H. E., Jr., Kutzbach, J. E., Webb, T., III, et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 5–11.Google Scholar
Kutzbach, J. E., Guetter, P. J., Ruddiman, W. F., and Prell, W. L. (1989). Sensitivity of climate to late Cenozoic uplift in southern Asia and the American west: numerical experiments. Journal of Geophysical Research, 94D, 18393–18407.Google Scholar
Lambert, F., Delmonte, B., Petit, J. R., et al. (2008). Dust–climate couplings over the past 800,000 years from the EPICA Dome C ice core. Nature, 452, 616–619.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Landrum, L., Otto-Bliesner, B. L., Wahl, E. R., et al. (2013). Last millennium climate and its variability in CCSM4. Journal of Climate, 26, 1085–1111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loulergue, L., Schilt, A., Spahni, R., et al. (2008). Orbital and millennial-scale features of atmospheric CH4 over the past 800,000 years. Nature, 453, 383–386.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lüthi, D., Le Floch, M., Bereiter, B., et al. (2008). High-resolution carbon dioxide concentration record 650,000–800,000 years before present. Nature, 453, 379–382.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mahlstein, I., Hegerl, G., and Solomon, S. (2012). Emerging local warming signals in observational data. Geophysical Research Letters, 39, L21711, doi:10.1029/2012GL053952.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manabe, S., and Stouffer, R. J. (1999). The role of thermohaline circulation in climate. Tellus B, 51, 91–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, M. E., Zhang, Z., Rutherford, S., et al. (2009). Global signatures and dynamical origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly. Science, 326, 1256–1260.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Masson-Delmotte, V., Schulz, M., Abe-Ouchi, A., et al. (2013). Information from paleoclimate archives. In Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. Stocker, T. F., Qin, D., Plattner, G.-K., et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 383–464.Google Scholar
Matthews, H. D., Gillett, N. P., Stott, P. A., and Zickfeld, K. (2009). The proportionality of global warming to cumulative carbon emissions. Nature, 459, 829–832.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Matthews, H. D., Solomon, S., and Pierrehumbert, R. (2012). Cumulative carbon as a policy framework for achieving climate stabilization. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 370, 4365–4379.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Meehl, G. A., Washington, W. M., Ammann, C. M., et al. (2004). Combinations of natural and anthropogenic forcings in twentieth-century climate. Journal of Climate, 17, 3721–3727.2.0.CO;2>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meehl, G. A., Goddard, L., Murphy, J., et al. (2009). Decadal prediction: Can it be skillful?Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 90, 1467–1485.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meissner, K. J., and Clark, P. U. (2006). Impact of floods versus routing events on the thermohaline circulation. Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L15704, doi:10.1029/2006GL026705.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morice, C. P., Kennedy, J. J., Rayner, N. A., and Jones, P. D. (2012). Quantifying uncertainties in global and regional temperature change using an ensemble of observational estimates: The HadCRUT4 data set. Journal of Geophysical Research, 117, D08101, doi:10.1029/2011JD017187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myhre, G., Shindell, D., Bréon, F.-M., et al. (2013). Anthropogenic and natural radiative forcing. In Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. Stocker, T. F., Qin, D., Plattner, G.-K., et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 659–740.Google Scholar
Peltier, W. R. (1994). Ice age paleotopography. Science, 265, 195–201.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Prell, W. L., and Kutzbach, J. E. (1992). Sensitivity of the Indian monsoon to forcing parameters and implications for its evolution. Nature, 360, 647–652.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rhein, M., Rintoul, S. R., Aoki, S., et al. (2013). Observations: Ocean. In Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. Stocker, T. F., Qin, D., Plattner, G.-K., et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 255–315.Google Scholar
Ruddiman, W. F., and Kutzbach, J. E. (1989). Forcing of late Cenozoic Northern Hemisphere climate by plateau uplift in southern Asia and the American west. Journal of Geophysical Research, 94D, 18409–18427.Google Scholar
Ruddiman, W. F., Prell, W. L., and Raymo, M. E. (1989). Late Cenozoic uplift in southern Asia and the American west: Rationale for general circulation modeling experiments. Journal of Geophysical Research, 94D, 18379–18391.Google Scholar
Ruddiman, W. F., Kutzbach, J. E., and Prentice, I. C. (1997). Testing the climatic effects of orography and CO2 with general circulation and biome models. In Tectonic Uplift and Climate Change, ed. Ruddiman, W. F.. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 203–235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schilt, A., Baumgartner, M., Blunier, T., et al. (2010). Glacial–interglacial and millennial-scale variations in the atmospheric nitrous oxide concentration during the last 800,000 years. Quaternary Science Reviews, 29, 182–192.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmidt, G. A., Jungclaus, J. H., Ammann, C. M., et al. (2012). Climate forcing reconstructions for use in PMIP simulations of the Last Millennium (v1.1). Geoscientific Model Development, 5, 185–191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shackleton, N. J. (2000). The 100,000-year ice-age cycle identified and found to lag temperature, carbon dioxide, and orbital eccentricity. Science, 289, 1897–1902.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stocker, T. F. (2013). The closing door of climate targets. Science, 339, 280–282.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vaughan, D. G., Comiso, J. C., Allison, I., et al. (2013). Observations: Cryosphere. In Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. Stocker, T. F., Qin, D., Plattner, G.-K., et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 317–382.Google Scholar
Wright, H. E., Jr., Kutzbach, J. E., Webb, T., III, et al. (1993). Global Climates since the Last Glacial Maximum. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Zhisheng, A., Kutzbach, J. E., Prell, W. L., and Porter, S. C. (2001). Evolution of Asian monsoons and phased uplift of the Himalaya–Tibetan plateau since Late Miocene times. Nature, 411, 62–66.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Climate Change
  • Gordon Bonan, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
  • Book: Ecological Climatology
  • Online publication: 05 November 2015
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107339200.009
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Climate Change
  • Gordon Bonan, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
  • Book: Ecological Climatology
  • Online publication: 05 November 2015
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107339200.009
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Climate Change
  • Gordon Bonan, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
  • Book: Ecological Climatology
  • Online publication: 05 November 2015
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107339200.009
Available formats
×