Earth's climate history is often understood by breaking it down into constituent climatic
epochs 1. Over the Common Era (the past 2,000 years) these epochs, such as the Little Ice …

THE recognition of natural modes of climate variability is essential for a better understanding
of the factors that govern climate change. Recent models suggest that interdecadal (roughly …

Cooling during most of the past two millennia has been widely recognized, and has been
inferred to be the dominant global temperature trend of the past 11,700 years (the Holocene …

A number of reconstructions of millennial-scale climate variability have been carried out in
order to understand patterns of natural climate variability, on decade to century timescales …

Evidence from Greenland ice cores shows that year-to-year temperature variability was
probably higher in some past cold periods, but there is considerable interest in determining …

THE ability to distinguish a warming trend from natural variability is critical for an
understanding of the climatic response to increasing greenhouse-gas concentrations. Here …

HIGH-FREQUENCY climate variability is a fundamental aspect of climate. Understanding
climate change demands attention to changes in climate variability and extremes1, but …

Spatially resolved global reconstructions of annual surface temperature patterns over the
past six centuries are based on the multivariate calibration of widely distributed high …

Abstract Between 1.5 and 0.6 Myr ago, the period of the Earth's glacial cycles changed from
41 kyr, the period of the Earth's obliquity cycles, to 100 kyr, the period of the Earth's orbital …

SINCE the late nineteenth century, the global mean surface air temperature has been
increasing at the rate of about 0.5° C per century1–3, but our poor understanding of low …