CP Climate of the Past CP Clim. Past 1814-9332 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/cp-9-2003-2013 On the Milankovitch sensitivity of the Quaternary deep-sea record Berger W. H. 2 1 Geosciences Research Division, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, USA Invited contribution by W. H. Berger, recipient of the Milutin Milankovic Medal 2012. 21 08 2013 9 4 2003 2011 Copyright: © 2013 W. H. Berger 2013 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is available from https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/9/2003/2013/cp-9-2003-2013.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/9/2003/2013/cp-9-2003-2013.pdf

The response of the climate system to external forcing (that is, global warming) has become an item of prime interest, especially with respect to the rate of melting of land-based ice masses. The deep-sea record of ice-age climate change has been useful in assessing the sensitivity of the climate system to a different type of forcing; that is, to orbital forcing, which is well known for the last several million years. The expectation is that the response to one type of forcing will yield information about the likely response to other types of forcing. When comparing response and orbital forcing, one finds that sensitivity to this type of forcing varies greatly through time, evidently in dependence on the state of the system and the associated readiness of the system for change. The changing stability of ice masses is here presumed to be the chief underlying cause for the changing state of the system. A buildup of vulnerable ice masses within the latest Tertiary, when going into the ice ages, is thus here conjectured to cause a stepwise increase of climate variability since the early Pliocene.

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