The Oceans and Rapid Climate Change : Past, Present, and Future

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Geophysical Monograph Series, Volume 126. Until a few decades ago, scientists generally believed that significant large-scale past global and regional climate changes occurred at a gradual pace within a time scale of many centuries or millennia.

A secondary assumption followed: climate change was scarcely perceptible during a human lifetime.

Recent paleoclimatic studies, however, have proven otherwise: that global climate can change extremely rapidly.

In fact, there is good evidence that in the past at least regional mean annual temperatures changed by several degrees Celsius on a time scale of several centuries to several decades.