Orbital insolation variations, intrinsic climate variability, and Quaternary glaciations

Abstract. The relative role of external forcing and intrinsic variability is a key question climate in general our planet's paleoclimatic past particular. Over the last 100 years since Milankovic's contributions, importance orbital has been established for period covering 2.6 Myr Quaternary glaciation cycles that took place during time. A convincing case also made several internal mechanisms are active on timescales both shorter longer than ones. Such clearly have causal Dansgaard–Oeschger Heinrich events, as well mid-Pleistocene transition. We introduce herein unified framework understanding forcing's effects system's from thousands to millions years. This relies fairly recent theory non-autonomous random dynamical systems, it so far successfully applied sciences problems like El Niño–Southern Oscillation, oceans' wind-driven circulation, other interannual interdecadal timescales. Finally, we provide further examples applications present preliminary results interest transition