Overview: Wickson 2023

Overview: Wickson 2023 "The 900 year climate cycle"

The book's subtitle "An analysis of global events in the Holocene" hints at the treasure of details in this systematic romp through the details of ~15ky of history from the perspective of a 900y [solar, climate, history] cycle. This webPage contains direct quotes from Wickson's book, which helps to avoid any "coloring, bias" from re-stating the author's words. It may serve as :

a preview for those who are considering the purchase of the book
an easy reference for those reading through the book for the first time
a review and reminder for those who a have already read the book
a reference for research that builds on the results of this book and other literature
ideas for preparing a presentation or course

These quotes are only a small portion of the text, and will miss many of the key points. A separate webPage of other quotes from the book may help fill a few more details. Much better, of course, is to have the full book to read through, along with the thousands of references to literature that it provides.

Occasional comments have been inserted in italicized text between angle brackets, eg. <Be-10>.

Finally, the quotes have been retyped from the book, and will have errors.

p001 Introduction
p002 Does a 900 year climate cycle exist?
p008 Solar cycles: causes, timing, effects
p018 Effects of the 900-year climate cycle
p027 The greenhouse effect
p031 Ice, oceans, sea level, temperature
p037 Milancovitch cycles: pacemaker of the ice ages
p044 End of the ice age
p060 Holocene climactic optimum
p072 Beginning of history
p079 Young bronze age
p089 Mature bronze age
p104 Age of iron
p121 Roman cycle
p136 Medieval cycle
p161 Last few centuries
p167 Future predictions
p182 Conclusion
p185 Table of events: [spring, summer, fall, winter]s of 900y cycles, 12,785BC to now
p254 References

p001 Introduction

Have you ever heard the words "history repeats itself"? Or how about about the phase "if we don't learn the mistakes of the past, we are doomed to repeat them in the future".

This book is not about politics where you commonly hear those sorts of phrases. The main purpose of this book is to try and explain that some aspects of history actually do sort of repeat themselves in somewhat fuzzy but regular cycles. It attempts to explain how historical events with similar features can recur over and over again in time, in a similar sequence with an approximate period of 900 years.
...
An additional solar activity cycle with a period of roughly one millenium has also been observed in radiocarbon records of solar activity and proxies of past climate including ice cores, lake sediments and cave stalagmites. {664}{968}{1453}{1795} Much less documented in scientific literature than the cycles previously mentioned, it's sometimes referred to as the Eddy cycle. {1383} Some records indicate a period of approximately 950 to 975 years, although this book suggests a slightly shorter period of close to 900 years based on a mathematical analysis of the historical record. {664}{1757} The analysis described in chapters 8 to 17, and summarized in the appendix yields an overall statistical correation of 71%. This means that according to the quantitative analysis explained in this book, more than two thirds of historical events are in line with the theoretical predictions of this 900-year climate cycle.

This book asserts that a 900-year cycle in solar activity has had an effect on climate and human societies throughout the Holocene. It aims to interpret events in human history with a mathematical lens and attempts to explain why certain historical events happened at cetain times, and in a somewhat repeating sequence. It presents a framework for describing and categorizing events in history using four phases of a 900-year climate cycle and quantifies them in a comprehensible way. It shows that major hsitorical events have occurred repeatedly at certain parts of this cycle such as the construction of monumental architecture during warm phases and the collapse of states during cool phases.

p002 Does a 900 year climate cycle exist?

The most central question in this book is whether or not a millenial-scale cycle based on solar output has affected human populations over the last 12,000 years. When thinking about these sorts of connections we often compare them to cyclical events that happen precisely when they're supposed to, like the orbit of a planet or the morion of a clock. Although many astronomical cycles are indeed incredibly precise, cycles in solar activity tend to have records that are somewhat less precise and periodicities that are a little fuzzier.
...
By taking a close look at Holocene paleoclimatic records including lake sediments and ice cores, this chapter will attempt to convince the reader that a millenial-scale climate cycle indeed exists. Such a cycle has only been identified recently and has been mostly hidden from climate records for decades due to poor resolution of records and less reliable dating. The best reconstruction for global temperature over the Holocene is arguably a combination of the Greenland and Antarctic ice core record, which you can see in figure 1. The temperature reconstructions in figure 1 are based on oxygen isotope ratios extracted from ice cores. The Greenland ice cores offer a continuous layer-by-layer record of this temperature indicator with much better resolution than the Antarctic ice cores as more snow falls in Greenland. In contrast, the Antarctic ice core record has less resolution but extents much further into the past.
...
<Note: figures [2,3,4] have been overlain in the composite figure for direct comparison.
This figure needs to be converted to semi-log, as high frequency resolution is very poor.>

Figure 2 displays the result of a spectral analysis performed on oxygen isotope data from the second Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP2) over the last 10,000 years. {440}
Figure 3 displays the results of a spectral analysis performed on a composite record of solar activity proxies from the last 9,400 years. {1222}{1795}
<Figure 4 C-14 record from tree rings 11,000-year long. {1757}>

<periodicities extracted from the chapter :>

	authors, ref	time series	periodicities (yr)
???	GISP2 {440}	δ18O Greenland last 10ky	913
???	{1222}{1795}	solar activity last 9.4ky	2,350, 944, 725, 500, 350, 220
2004	Solanki etal {1757}	C-14 tree rings 11ky	2,300, 947, 500, 350, 220
2007	??? {1143}	C-14 tree rings wavelet transform	2,400, 1,000
2004	Oppo etal {1396}	δ13C NE Atlantic Ocean	~millenial scale
???	Cleroux etal {335}	Holocene sea surface temperature	~1,000
2012	Kern etal {968}	ostracods in lake sediments	2,200, 970
2012	Darby etal {427}	Be-10, C-14, drift ice proxies, ice-bound iron grains on an Alaskan ice core	2,500, 1,000 other 1,500 drift ice
2012	Scafetta {1658}	tidal frequencies of Jupiter, Saturn	983.4 & others

δ18O = isotope ratio O-18 / O-16, (O = oxygen)
δ13C = isotope ratio C-13 / C-14, (C = carbon)
<Wickson comment about Scafetta 983.4y tree ring cycle:> This astronomical cycle is meant to reach its next peak around the year 2060, which is in phase with the cycle proposed in this book.
Periodicities at approximately 2,350 and 208 years are common in solar studies and are prominent in figure 3.

A 900 to 1,000 year cycle is a consistent signal in Holocene paleoclimate studies. It is real and shows at least minor effects on Earth's environments, such as in lake sediments and the amount of water being evaporated from the oceans. This millenial scale climate variation has a range of values but this book will use a period of 900 years as it fits best with historical and archaeological evidence. This was determined upon looking at chains of histoical events that seemed to repeat with similar patterns.

p008 Solar cycles: causes, timing, effects

p018 Effects of the 900-year climate cycle