Antarctic Winds: Pacemaker of Global Warming, Global Cooling, and the Collapse of Civilizations

W Davis

doi:10.3390/cli8110130

Abstract

We report a natural wind cycle, the Antarctic Centennial Wind Oscillation (ACWO), whose properties explain milestones of climate and human civilization, including contemporary global warming. We explored the wind/temperature relationship in Antarctica over the past 226 millennia using dust flux in ice cores from the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) Dome C (EDC) drill site as a wind proxy and stable isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen in ice cores from EDC and ten additional Antarctic drill sites as temperature proxies. The ACWO wind cycle is coupled 1:1 with the temperature cycle of the Antarctic Centennial Oscillation (ACO), the paleoclimate precursor of the contemporary Antarctic Oscillation (AAO), at all eleven drill sites over all time periods evaluated. Such tight coupling suggests that ACWO wind cycles force ACO/AAO temperature cycles. The ACWO is modulated in phase with the millennial-scale Antarctic Isotope Maximum (AIM) temperature cycle. Each AIM cycle encompasses several ACWOs that increase in frequency and amplitude to a Wind Terminus, the last and largest ACWO of every AIM cycle. This historic wind pattern, and the heat and gas exchange it forces with the Southern Ocean (SO), explains climate milestones including the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Contemporary global warming is explained by venting of heat and carbon dioxide from the SO forced by the maximal winds of the current positive phase of the ACO/AAO cycle. The largest 20 human civilizations of the past four millennia collapsed during or near the Little Ice Age or its earlier recurrent homologs. The Eddy Cycle of sunspot activity oscillates in phase with the AIM temperature cycle and therefore may force the internal climate cycles documented here. Climate forecasts based on the historic ACWO wind pattern project imminent global cooling and in ~4 centuries a recurrent homolog of the Little Ice Age. Our study provides a theoretically-unified explanation of contemporary global warming and other climate milestones based on natural climate cycles driven by the Sun, confirms a dominant role for climate in shaping human history, invites reconsideration of climate policy, and offers a method to project future climate.

Highlights

Global temperature measured instrumentally has increased by ~0.8 ◦ C since 1880 [1,2], showing that the Earth has warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA) in 1860
We find that the Antarctic Centennial Wind Oscillation (ACWO) wind-proxy cycle documented here hindcasts accurately the recurrent Medieval Warm Period (MWP)/LIA cycle, severe droughts associated with the LIA and its homologs, and the corresponding collapse of the 20 largest human civilizations of the last four millennia
Centennial-scale wind cycles grow larger over millennial timescales and drop precipitously at 3.3, 1.8, and 0.7 Kyb2013 (Figure 1a, brown curve)

Summary

Introduction

Global temperature measured instrumentally has increased by ~0.8 ◦ C since 1880 [1,2], showing that the Earth has warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA) in 1860. The cause of this global warming signal, is under debate. The AGW hypothesis holds that global temperature will continue to increase through an enhanced “greenhouse”. That on multimillennial timescales over most of known climate history atmospheric CO2 concentration was not correlated with, and did not cause, global temperature change [7]. Atmospheric CO2 concentration is correlated with temperature on the millennial timescale of recent glacial cycling, but multiple studies [8,9,10,11] suggest that during deglaciation, temperature change leads CO2 change, i.e., CO2 does not initiate glacial termination

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