Do climatic attractors exist?

Recently, it has been claimed1 that the worldwide climate over the past million years follows a low-dimensional strange attractor. Contrary to that claim, I report here that there is no sign of such an attractor. This holds both for the worldwide climate of the past 1–2 Myr (averaged over periods of ∼5,000 yr) and for a local climate of the past ∼7,000 yr with yearly averages. In this context, I shall also discuss the general problem of dimension estimates from sparse data.