A climate forcing mechanism which may explain the reconstructed climate changes of glacial-interglacial transitions over tens of thousands of years must exhibit variations over similar time scales. Such a mechanism, the Yugoslav mathematician Milankovitch believed, could be found in the subtle, yet significant variations in the Earth orbit around the Sun. Since Milankovitch first proposed his orbital theory of climate change in 1941, many palaeoclimatic records from ice and sea sediment cores have been used to confirm these ideas.

More recently, scientists realised that the changes in the amount of energy received by the Earth from the Sun as a result of orbital variations would not be enough to explain the significant shifts in climate between Ice Age and interglacial conditions on Earth. To account for the large global temperature change between warm and cold periods, additional feedback effects were proposed that would augment the initial climatic response to the orbital variations. Such feedback involved the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.