The slow cooliong of our interglacial

Matt Ridley
"..Still, it's striking that most interglacials begin with an abrupt warming, peak sharply, then begin a gradual descent into cooler conditions before plunging rather more rapidly toward the freezer. The last interglacial—which occurred 135,000 to 115,000 years ago (named the Eemian period after a Dutch river near which the fossils of warmth-loving shell creatures of that age were found)—saw temperatures slide erratically downward by about two degrees Celsius between 127,000 and 120,000 years ago, before a sharper fall began. See charts here and here.

Cyclical changes in the earth's orbit probably weakened sunlight in the northern hemisphere summer and thus caused this slow cooling. Since the northern hemisphere is mostly land, this change in the sun's strength meant gradually increased snow and ice cover, which in turn reflected light back into space. This would have further cooled the air and, gradually, the ocean too. Carbon-dioxide levels did not begin to fall much until about 112,000 years ago, as the cooling sea absorbed more of the gas.

Our current interglacial shows a similar pattern. Greenland ice cores and other proxy records show that temperatures peaked around 7,000 years ago, when the Arctic Ocean was several degrees warmer than today, trees grew farther north in Siberia and the Sahara was wet enough for hippos (Africa generally gets wetter in warm times). Data from the southern hemisphere reveal that this "Holocene Optimum" was global in extent."