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Do climatic attractors exist?

Abstract

Recently, it has been claimed1 that the worldwide climate over the past million years follows a low-dimensional strange attractor. Contrary to that claim, I report here that there is no sign of such an attractor. This holds both for the worldwide climate of the past 1–2 Myr (averaged over periods of 5,000 yr) and for a local climate of the past 7,000 yr with yearly averages. In this context, I shall also discuss the general problem of dimension estimates from sparse data.

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Grassberger, P. Do climatic attractors exist?. Nature 323, 609–612 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1038/323609a0

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