"By the 20th century, scientists (DS: some, but not all) had rejected old tales of world catastrophe, and were convinced that global climate could change only gradually over many tens of thousands of years. But in the 1950s, a few scientists found evidence that some changes in the past had taken only a few thousand years. During the 1960s and 1970s other data, supported by new theories and new attitudes about human influences, reduced the time a change might require to hundreds of years. Many doubted that such a rapid shift could have befallen the planet as a whole. The 1980s and 1990s brought proof (chiefly from studies of ancient ice) that the global climate could indeed shift, radically and catastrophically, within a century — perhaps even within a decade."
See: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/rapid.htm for the rest of where that quote was lifted from, plus such things as:
"Swings of temperature that scientists in the 1950s believed to take tens of thousands of years, in the 1970s to take thousands of years, and in the 1980s to take hundreds of years, were now found to take only decades. Ice core analysis by Dansgaard's group, confirmed by the Americans' parallel hole, showed rapid oscillations of temperature repeatedly at irregular intervals throughout the last glacial period. Greenland had sometimes warmed a shocking 7°C within a span of less than 50 years. For one group of American scientists on the ice in Greenland, the "moment of truth” struck on a single day in midsummer 1992 as they analyzed a cylinder of ice, recently emerged from the drill hole, that came from the last years of the Younger Dryas. They saw an obvious change in the ice, visible within three snow layers, that is, scarcely three years!"
and
"The first strong consensus statement had come in 1995 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, representing the considered views of nearly all the world's climate scientists. The report included a notice that climate "surprises" were possible — "Future unexpected, large, and rapid climate system changes (as have occurred in the past)." The report’s authors did not emphasize the point, however, and the press seldom mentioned it."
and
"Asked about the discovery of abrupt climate change, many climate experts today would put their finger on one moment: the day they read the 1993 report of the analysis of Greenland ice cores. Before that, nobody confidently believed that the climate could change massively within a decade or two; after the report, nobody felt sure that it could not."
Then turn to page 4 of Friday December 14th "The West Australian" and read about how much the Arctic ice has melted in less than 30 years and how little of the sun's radiation is being reflected away because of the melt, which in turn causes even faster melting.
Tis all Good News AFAIC. Just ask folk in Greenland.
regarDS
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