Asymmetry of extreme Cenozoic climate–carbon cycle events

The history of Earth’s climate and carbon cycle is preserved in deep-sea foraminiferal carbon and oxygen isotope records. Here, we show that the sub-million-year fluctuations in both records have exhibited negatively skewed non-Gaussian tails throughout much of the Cenozoic era (66 Ma to present), suggesting an intrinsic asymmetry that favors “hyperthermal-like” extreme events of abrupt global warming and oxidation of organic carbon. We show that this asymmetry is quantitatively consistent with a general mechanism of self-amplification that can be modeled using stochastic multiplicative noise. A numerical climate–carbon cycle model in which the amplitude of random biogeochemical fluctuations increases at higher temperatures reproduces the data well and can further explain the apparent pacing of past extreme warming events by changes in orbital parameters. Our results also suggest that, as anthropogenic warming continues, Earth’s climate may become more susceptible to extreme warming events on time scales of tens of thousands of years.