It is well acknowledged that the sequence of glacial-interglacial cycles is
paced by the astronomical forcing. However, how much is the sequence robust
against natural fluctuations associated, for example, with the chaotic motions
of atmosphere and oceans? In this article, the stability of the
glacial-interglacial cycles is investigated on the basis of simple conceptual
models. Specifically, we study the influence of additive white Gaussian noise
on the sequence of the glacial cycles generated by stochastic versions of
several low-order dynamical system models proposed in the literature. In the
original deterministic case, the models exhibit different types of attractors:
a quasiperiodic attractor, a piecewise continuous attractor, strange nonchaotic
attractors, and a chaotic attractor. We show that the combination of the
quasiperiodic astronomical forcing and additive fluctuations induce a form of
temporarily quantised instability. More precisely, climate trajectories
corresponding to different noise realizations generally cluster around a small
number of stable or transiently stable trajectories present in the
deterministic system. Furthermore, these stochastic trajectories may show
sensitive dependence on very small amounts of perturbations at key times.
Consistently with the complexity of each attractor, the number of trajectories
leaking from the clusters may range from almost zero (the model with a
quasiperiodic attractor) to a significant fraction of the total (the model with
a chaotic attractor), the models with strange nonchaotic attractors being
intermediate. Finally, we discuss the implications of this investigation for
research programmes based on numerical simulators. }Comment: Parlty based on a lecture given by M. Crucifix at workshop held in
Rome in 2013 as a part of Mathematics of Planet Earth 201
