. . . "Over those timescales and temperature changes of 10??C or more, stalagmites are pretty convincing at recording the 1st order climate changes (e.g. glacial-interglacial changes, Dansgaard-Oeschger events, etc..) as the climate signal is much greater than the noise induced in the soil/vegetation-groundwater-cave system, and several papers a year can be read in journals such as Science and Nature (in" .