Two Levels of Self-Organization in the Earth Climate System

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the Earth's climate system by decomposing Pleistocene Antarctic temperature data into cyclic and stochastic parts, revealing two interconnected levels of self-organization driven by different processes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decomposition of climate variations into cyclic and stochastic components, modeling the cyclic part with ODEs and analyzing the stochastic part's multifractal spectrum.

Findings

Climate exhibits two levels of self-organization: cyclic and stochastic.

The cyclic component behaves as a nonlinear auto-oscillation.

The stochastic component shows multifractal properties.

Abstract

The Late Pleistocene Antarctic temperature variation curve is decomposed into two parts: cyclic and stochastic. These two parts represent different but tightly interconnected processes and also represent two different types of self-organization of the Earth's climate system. The self-organization in the cyclic component is the non-linear auto-oscillation reaction of the Earth's climate system, as a whole, to the input of solar radiation. The self-organization in the stochastic component is a nonlinear critical process, taking energy from and fluctuating around, the cyclic component of the temperature variations. The system of ODEs is written to model the cyclic part of the temperature variation, and the multifractal spectrum of the stochastic part of the temperature variation is calculated. It is shown that the Earth's climate can be characterized as a dynamic system with two levels of self-organization.