Reconstruction and attribution of Late-Pleistocene changes in the Earth’s energy imbalance

The Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI) that develops at the top of the atmosphere is accommodated by gains or losses of energy in Earth’s heat reservoirs, leading to temperature and sea level change. The global ocean has stored about 90% of the EEI from anthropogenic forcing, but the attribution of past changes of EEI remains largely unknown, thus obscuring our understanding of past climate change. Here, we reconstruct changes in mean ocean temperature over the past 150,000 years that, with a reconstruction of ice sheet–volume changes, allow us to isolate the contributions of the dominant ocean and ice sheet heat reservoirs to the global energy inventory as well as to derive their associated contributions to EEI. We attribute orbital-scale EEI variability to joint precessional and CO ₂ forcing that caused changes in rates of ice sheet energy storage. In contrast, millennial-scale EEI variability can be attributed to radiative responses to decreases in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation and increasing CO ₂ during Heinrich stadials that caused changes in rates of ocean energy storage.