1.4.2 Past Climate Observations, Astronomical Theory and Abrupt Climate Changes
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, a wide range of geomorphology and palaeontology studies has provided new insight into the Earth’s past climates, covering periods of hundreds of millions of years. The Palaeozoic Era, beginning 600 Ma, displayed evidence of both warmer and colder climatic conditions than the present; the Tertiary Period (65 to 2.6 Ma) was generally warmer; and the Quaternary Period (2.6 Ma to the present – the ice ages) showed oscillations between glacial and interglacial conditions. Louis Agassiz (1837) developed the hypothesis that Europe had experienced past glacial ages, and there has since been a growing awareness that long-term climate observations can advance the understanding of the physical mechanisms affecting climate change. The scientific study of one such mechanism – modifications in the geographical and temporal patterns of solar energy reaching the Earth’s surface due to changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters – has a long history. The pioneering contributions of Milankovitch (1941) to this astronomical theory of climate change are widely known, and the historical review of Imbrie and Imbrie (1979) calls attention to much earlier contributions, such as those of James Croll, originating in 1864.
The pace of palaeoclimatic research has accelerated over recent decades. Quantitative and well-dated records of climate fluctuations over the last 100 kyr have brought a more comprehensive view of how climate changes occur, as well as the means to test elements of the astronomical theory. By the 1950s, studies of deep-sea cores suggested that the ocean temperatures may have been different during glacial times (Emiliani, 1955). Ewing and Donn (1956) proposed that changes in ocean circulation actually could initiate an ice age. In the 1960s, the works of Emiliani (1969) and Shackleton (1967) showed the potential of isotopic measurements in deep-sea sediments to help explain Quaternary changes. In the 1970s, it became possible to analyse a deep-sea core time series of more than 700 kyr, thereby using the last reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field to establish a dated chronology. This deep-sea observational record clearly showed the same periodicities found in the astronomical forcing, immediately providing strong support to Milankovitch’s theory (Hays et al., 1976).
Ice cores provide key information about past climates, including surface temperatures and atmospheric chemical composition. The bubbles sealed in the ice are the only available samples of these past atmospheres. The first deep ice cores from Vostok in Antarctica (Barnola et al., 1987; Jouzel et al., 1987, 1993) provided additional evidence of the role of astronomical forcing. They also revealed a highly correlated evolution of temperature changes and atmospheric composition, which was subsequently confirmed over the past 400 kyr (Petit et al., 1999) and now extends to almost 1 Myr. This discovery drove research to understand the causal links between greenhouse gases and climate change. The same data that confirmed the astronomical theory also revealed its limits: a linear response of the climate system to astronomical forcing could not explain entirely the observed fluctuations of rapid ice-age terminations preceded by longer cycles of glaciations.
The importance of other sources of climate variability was heightened by the discovery of abrupt climate changes. In this context, ‘abrupt’ designates regional events of large amplitude, typically a few degrees celsius, which occurred within several decades – much shorter than the thousand-year time scales that characterise changes in astronomical forcing. Abrupt temperature changes were first revealed by the analysis of deep ice cores from Greenland (Dansgaard et al., 1984). Oeschger et al. (1984) recognised that the abrupt changes during the termination of the last ice age correlated with cooling in Gerzensee (Switzerland) and suggested that regime shifts in the Atlantic Ocean circulation were causing these widespread changes. The synthesis of palaeoclimatic observations by Broecker and Denton (1989) invigorated the community over the next decade. By the end of the 1990s, it became clear that the abrupt climate changes during the last ice age, particularly in the North Atlantic regions as found in the Greenland ice cores, were numerous (Dansgaard et al., 1993), indeed abrupt (Alley et al., 1993) and of large amplitude (Severinghaus and Brook, 1999). They are now referred to as Dansgaard-Oeschger events. A similar variability is seen in the North Atlantic Ocean, with north-south oscillations of the polar front (Bond et al., 1992) and associated changes in ocean temperature and salinity (Cortijo et al., 1999). With no obvious external forcing, these changes are thought to be manifestations of the internal variability of the climate system.
The importance of internal variability and processes was reinforced in the early 1990s with analysis of records with high temporal resolution. New ice cores (Greenland Ice Core Project, Johnsen et al., 1992; Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2, Grootes et al., 1993), new ocean cores from regions with high sedimentation rates, as well as lacustrine sediments and cave stalagmites produced additional evidence for unforced climate changes, and revealed a large number of abrupt changes in many regions throughout the last glacial cycle. Long sediment cores from the deep ocean were used to reconstruct the thermohaline circulation connecting deep and surface waters (Bond et al., 1992; Broecker, 1997) and to demonstrate the participation of the ocean in these abrupt climate changes during glacial periods.
By the end of the 1990s, palaeoclimate proxies for a range of climate observations had expanded greatly. The analysis of deep corals provided indicators for nutrient content and mass exchange from the surface to deep water (Adkins et al., 1998), showing abrupt variations characterised by synchronous changes in surface and deep-water properties (Shackleton et al., 2000). Precise measurements of the CH4 abundances (a global quantity) in polar ice cores showed that they changed in concert with the Dansgaard-Oeschger events and thus allowed for synchronisation of the dating across ice cores (Blunier et al., 1998). The characteristics of the antarctic temperature variations and their relation to the Dansgaard-Oeschger events in Greenland were consistent with the simple concept of a bipolar seesaw caused by changes in the thermohaline circulation of the Atlantic Ocean (Stocker, 1998). This work underlined the role of the ocean in transmitting the signals of abrupt climate change.
Abrupt changes are often regional, for example, severe droughts lasting for many years have changed civilizations, and have occurred during the last 10 kyr of stable warm climate (deMenocal, 2001). This result has altered the notion of a stable climate during warm epochs, as previously suggested by the polar ice cores. The emerging picture of an unstable ocean-atmosphere system has opened the debate of whether human interference through greenhouse gases and aerosols could trigger such events (Broecker, 1997).
Palaeoclimate reconstructions cited in the FAR were based on various data, including pollen records, insect and animal remains, oxygen isotopes and other geological data from lake varves, loess, ocean sediments, ice cores and glacier termini. These records provided estimates of climate variability on time scales up to millions of years. A climate proxy is a local quantitative record (e.g., thickness and chemical properties of tree rings, pollen of different species) that is interpreted as a climate variable (e.g., temperature or rainfall) using a transfer function that is based on physical principles and recently observed correlations between the two records. The combination of instrumental and proxy data began in the 1960s with the investigation of the influence of climate on the proxy data, including tree rings (Fritts, 1962), corals (Weber and Woodhead, 1972; Dunbar and Wellington, 1981) and ice cores (Dansgaard et al., 1984; Jouzel et al., 1987). Phenological and historical data (e.g., blossoming dates, harvest dates, grain prices, ships’ logs, newspapers, weather diaries, ancient manuscripts) are also a valuable source of climatic reconstruction for the period before instrumental records became available. Such documentary data also need calibration against instrumental data to extend and reconstruct the instrumental record (Lamb, 1969; Zhu, 1973; van den Dool, 1978; Brazdil, 1992; Pfister, 1992). With the development of multi-proxy reconstructions, the climate data were extended not only from local to global, but also from instrumental data to patterns of climate variability (Wanner et al., 1995; Mann et al., 1998; Luterbacher et al., 1999). Most of these reconstructions were at single sites and only loose efforts had been made to consolidate records. Mann et al. (1998) made a notable advance in the use of proxy data by ensuring that the dating of different records lined up. Thus, the true spatial patterns of temperature variability and change could be derived, and estimates of NH average surface temperatures were obtained.
The Working Group I (WGI) WGI FAR noted that past climates could provide analogues. Fifteen years of research since that assessment has identified a range of variations and instabilities in the climate system that occurred during the last 2 Myr of glacial-interglacial cycles and in the super-warm period of 50 Ma. These past climates do not appear to be analogues of the immediate future, yet they do reveal a wide range of climate processes that need to be understood when projecting 21st-century climate change (see Chapter 6).