What are the Milankovitch Cycles, and how are they connected to global climate change patterns?
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Answer:
Artifacts show that the variation in Earth's climate is much more extreme than the variation in the intensity of solar radiation calculated as the Earth's orbit evolves. If orbital forcing causes climate change, science needs to explain why the observed effect is amplified compared to the theoretical effect.
Milankovitch cycles describe the collective effects of changes in the Earth's movements on its climate over thousands of years. The term is named for Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković. In the 1920s, he hypothesized that variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession of the Earth's orbit resulted in cyclical variation in the solar radiation reaching the Earth, and that this orbital forcing strongly influenced climatic patterns on Earth.