Quantitative implications of the secondary role of carbon dioxide climate forcing in the past glacial-interglacial cycles for the likely future climatic impacts of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcings

TL;DR

This paper reviews paleoclimate data and suggests that CO2 played a secondary role in past glacial cycles, emphasizing natural variability and feedbacks over CO2 forcing, which challenges its perceived primacy in climate change.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative reassessment of CO2's role in past climate changes, highlighting natural variability and feedback mechanisms over CO2 forcing.

Findings

CO2 variations generally follow temperature changes

Methane forcing is too small to account for major climate shifts

Natural insolation and feedbacks likely explain glacial-interglacial transitions

Abstract

A review of the recent refereed literature fails to confirm quantitatively that carbon dioxide (CO2) radiative forcing was the prime mover in the changes in temperature, ice-sheet volume, and related climatic variables in the glacial and interglacial periods of the past 650,000 years, even under the "fast response" framework where the convenient if artificial distinction between forcing and feedback is assumed. Atmospheric CO2 variations generally follow changes in temperature and other climatic variables rather than preceding them. Likewise, there is no confirmation of the often-posited significant supporting role of methane (CH4) forcing, which despite its faster atmospheric response time is simply too small, amounting to less than 0.2 W/m2 from a change of 400 ppb. We cannot quantitatively validate the numerous qualitative suggestions that the CO2 and CH4 forcings that occurred in response to the Milankovich orbital cycles accounted for more than half of the amplitude of the changes in the glacial/interglacial cycles of global temperature, sea level, and ice volume. Consequently, we infer that natural climatic variability notably the persistence of insolation forcing at key seasons and geographical locations, taken with closely-related thermal, hydrological, and cryospheric changes (such as the water vapor, cloud, and ice-albedo feedbacks) suffices in se to explain the proxy-derived, global and regional, climatic and environmental phase-transitions in the paleoclimate. If so, it may be appropriate to place anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions in context by separating their medium-term climatic impacts from those of a host of natural forcings and feedbacks that may, as in paleoclimatological times, prove just as significant.