Solar Variability and Climate Cycles

Cycles and trends in solar irradiance and climate

How—indeed whether—the Sun’s variable energy outputs influence Earth’s climate has engaged scientific curiosity for more than a century. Early evidence accrued from correlations of assorted solar and climate indices, and from recognition that cycles near 11, 88 and 205 years are common in both the Sun and climate.1,2 But until recently, an influence of solar variability on climate, whether thro...

Corrigendum: Solar cycles or random processes? Evaluating solar variability in Holocene climate records

Many studies have reported evidence for solar-forcing of Holocene climate change across a range of archives. These studies have compared proxy-climate data with records of solar variability (e.g. (14)C or (10)Be), or have used time series analysis to test for the presence of solar-type cycles. This has led to some climate sceptics misrepresenting this literature to argue strongly that solar var...

Solar and tidal reverberations of deglaciation records from the tropical western Pacific: a clean spectral approach

The search for the role of solar and tidal cycles in terrestrial climate records is an interesting curiosity. Powerful clean spectroscopy of high resolution carbon and oxygen isotope records from the tropical western Pacific Sulu Sea, over the past 9000–22000 years reveals statistically significant (at >90% confidence interval) spectral lines corresponding to periods of 2980, 690, 322, 250, 174...

Solar Variability and Climate Cycles

The origin of the 1500-year climate cycles in Holocene North-Atlantic records

Since the first suggestion of 1500-year cycles in the advance and retreat of glaciers (Denton and Karlen, 1973), many studies have uncovered evidence of repeated climate oscillations of 2500, 1500, and 1000 years. During last glacial period, natural climate cycles of 1500 years appear to be persistent (Bond and Lotti, 1995) and remarkably regular (Mayewski et al., 1997; Rahmstorf, 2003), yet th...