| 10 Jul 2026
Holocene stability: climate attractor, or lucky break?
Abstract. Palaeorecords indicate that the average global temperature been relatively stable for the past ~10,000 years of the Holocene epoch, in contrast to cooling trends during previous interglacials and abrupt shifts during past Glacials. Hypotheses for this stability range from early anthropogenic emissions to orbital factors or the timing of carbon cycle feedbacks. An alternative suggestion grounded in dynamical systems theory is that Holocene stability reflects the Earth system residing near a climate “attractor”, with strong negative feedbacks acting to stabilise the climate’s state, and Glacial/Interglacial cycling representing either a limit cycle or tipping between Interglacial and Glacial basins of attraction. This in turn has led to the more recent hypothesis that human actions are eroding the resilience of the Earth system’s current state, and at some level could be sufficient to tip the whole Earth system towards a much warmer “Hothouse Earth” attractor. However, despite multiple hypotheses for Holocene stability, that the Earth system is close to the edge of a dynamical basin of attraction is often assumed rather than demonstrated. Here, I assess the basis for this hypothesis in the literature, finding that there is currently insufficient evidence to support this hypothesis over the alternatives of pseudo-stability from stable orbital forcing, lagged feedbacks, or more complex nonlinear dynamics. As such, more evidence is required to test these hypotheses, and in the meantime the presence of Holocene or Hothouse attractors should not be taken as a given. Given this, I outline some alternative frameworks for climate states and Earth system resilience that may be appropriate without strong attractors, centring adaptive capacity and stability through change.
This is a difficult paper for a climate scientist from the physical sciences realm to discuss because it is written from a completely different perspective, in an unfamiliar conceptual style, and with a different audience in mind. To the extent that it is discussing resilience and the likelihood that the Earth system will break completely free from its recent states it has some interest. However, the title, abstract and main hypothesis it discusses are amenable to statistical investigation, and these suggest that the whole concept is simply an incorrect strawman. On this basis I do not believe this paper is appropriate for ESD.
Basically, as can be seen from the title, the concept is that the Holocene is unusually stable compared to the 800 kyr of climate that the paper considers (eg Fig 1), and that this might be because there is some kind of unusual attractor that stabilises it (which anthropogenic action might breach). The problem, as indeed acknowledged in principle by the author around line 380, but never statistically tested, is that there is nothing very unusual about the Holocene, at least in the terms the author uses to describe it. If one takes the Antarctic temperature record (which I believe is what is plotted in Fig 1 despite it being labelled global temperature), or a genuine global mean surface temperature synthesis such as that of Clark et al 2024, one finds that there are numerous 10 kyr long periods in the last 800 kyr that have a similarly low variability. I used Clark et al’s GMST data, and the SD of the period 0-9 kyr is 0.14 degrees; the same low value occurs many other times in the last 800 kyr, including during periods generally considered interglacial, such as MIS 7c, 13 and 15. I found a similar result if I used Antarctic temperature from Jouzel et al 2008, or even if I used the concentration of CO2.
The Holocene is neither the coldest interglacial, the warmest interglacial (that would be MIS5e) or the longest lasting interglacial, though it is more than possible, because of the weak orbital forcing, that it would, excluding anthropogenic influence, have become that. It simply wasn’t that special until the last 200 years, so any paper that starts either by assuming it was, or by trying to prove that it wasn’t, is simply either incorrect, or proving what we already know.
I can see scope for a different paper that discusses why there have been lower and upper limits on climate and indeed CO2 over the past 800 kyr, and the consequences of breaching those limits, but that is not what this paper is. And for sure there is interesting work on the different states for glacials and interglacials that has been addressed in the literature by authors such as Crucifix and Paillard who are cited here. But again this paper is not about that. It specifically assumes some uniqueness about the Holocene, and without that, the rest of the arguments are too hypothetical for a journal such as ESD.