A brief history of the astronomical theories of paleoclimates

Abstract

Paleoclimatic reconstructions help us to discover the natural variability of the climate system over time scales ranging from years to hundreds of thousands of years. They are fundamental in climate research, especially now, because they provide a unique set of data to validate models over climatic regimes largely different from those of the last 150 years. The climatic variations of the last century are indeed available in great detail, but with a very poor diversity. Among the different modes of climatic variations, the glacial–interglacial cycles have the advantage that they provide examples of extreme climates with known astronomical forcing.