A North Atlantic Climate Pacemaker For the Centuries

摘要

Old trees and supercomputers are revealing a slow, multidecadal climate pulse that beats in the Atlantic Ocean and reaches around the globe. Wiggles are the bane of climate researchers, confusing records of every sort. They're jumbled one atop another on time scales ranging from year-to-year to eon-to-eon. But they can also be a salvation, providing clues to how a single, repeating climate oscillation may be linked to an equally rhythmic cause. Now researchers are picking through the climatic records of recent centuries to track down and explain a squiggle—the first of its kind to emerge—that they hope may clarify variations in the past century's climate and sharpen our ability to recognize greenhouse warming.