1. The search for cycles -- Social and economic preamble -- History of cycle-searching -- 2. Statistical background -- Time series -- Sampling -- Length of record -- Quality of data -- Smoothing: running means and filters -- Harmonic analysis and power spectra -- Red, white and pink noise -- Wavelet and singular spectrum analysis -- 3. Instrumental records -- Central England temperature record -- Other temperature series -- Rainfall records -- Chinese rainfall -- US rainfall and temperature patterns -- Nile floods -- Pressure patterns -- The Southern Oscillation -- Stratospheric winds -- Sunspots and the QBO -- Shorter-term cycles -- 4. Proxy data -- Dendroclimatology -- Varves -- Pollen records -- Corals -- A cautionary tale -- Ice cores -- Glaciers -- Ice ages and ocean sediments -- Other proxy measurements -- Predators and prey -- Economic series -- 5. The global climate -- Circulation patterns -- Radiation balance -- Prolonged abnormal weather patterns -- El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) -- Modelling El Nino and La Nina -- Forecasting ENSO behaviour -- Other interannual oscillations -- Intraseasonal oscillations -- The Great Ocean Conveyor -- 6. Extraterrestrial influences -- Solar variability: sunspots, faculae and coronal holes -- Tidal forces -- Physical links between solar and tidal variations and the weather -- Orbital variations.

7. Autovariance and other explanations -- Non-linearity -- Natural atmospheric variability -- Climatic feedback mechanisms -- Extraterrestrial explanations -- Modelling the ice ages -- Devils Hole: a contrary view -- Stochastic resonance: chaos illuminated by flashes of lightning -- 8. Nothing more than chaos? -- Chaos theory -- Future changes -- Measures of variability -- Sherman's statistic -- Fourier series and Fourier analysis -- Calculation of the coefficients of harmonic analyses -- Maximum entropy spectral analysis (MESA) -- Smoothing and filtering -- Wavelet analysis -- Singular spectrum analysis -- Noise -- Detrending and prewhitening.