[MCN] Physics Today 56 (8), 30–36 -- The Discovery of Rapid Climate Change - Only within the past decade have researchers warmed to the possibility of abrupt shifts in Earth’s climate. Sometimes, it takes a while to see what one is not prepared to look for.

[Lance Olsen]

The Discovery of Rapid Climate Change 

Only within the past decade have researchers warmed to the possibility of abrupt shifts in Earth’s climate. Sometimes, it takes a while to see what one is not prepared to look for.
Spencer Weart <>
Physics Today 56 (8), 30–36 (2003);
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1611350 <https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1611350>
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Opening paragraphs

How fast can our planet’s climate change? Too slowly for humans to notice, according to the firm belief of most scientists through much of the 20th century. Any shift of weather patterns, even the Dust Bowl droughts that devastated the Great Plains in the 1930s, was seen as a temporary local excursion. To be sure, the entire world climate could change radically: The ice ages proved that. But common sense held that such transformations could only creep in over tens of thousands of years.
In the 1950s, a few scientists found evidence that some of the great climate shifts in the past had taken only a few thousand years. During the 1960s and 1970s, other lines of research made it plausible that the global climate could shift radically within a few hundred years. In the 1980s and 1990s, further studies reduced the scale to the span of a single century. Today, there is evidence that severe change can take less than a decade. A committee of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has called this reorientation in the thinking of scientists a veritable “paradigm shift.” The new paradigm of abrupt global climate change, the committee reported in 2002, “has been well established by research over the last decade, but this new thinking is little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of natural and social scientists and policymakers.” 1  <> 
Much earlier in the 20th century, some specialists had evidence of abrupt climate change in front of their eyes. The evidence was meaningless to them. To appreciate change occurring within 10 years as significant, scientists first had to accept the possibility of change within 100 years. That, in turn, had to wait until they accepted the 1000-year time scale. The history of this evolution gives a good example of the stepwise fashion in which science commonly proceeds, contrary to the familiar heroic myths of discoveries springing forth in an instant. The history also suggests why, as the NAS committee worried, most people still fail to realize just how badly the world’s climate might misbehave.
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1611350 <https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1611350>


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“Things are happening right now with the ice sheets that were not predicted to happen until 2100,” Schlesinger says. 

“My worry is that we may have passed the window of opportunity where learning is still useful.” 

John Bohannan, ”Trying to Lasso Climate Uncertainty.” 
SCIENCE, 13 OCTOBER 2006

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“Personally, this is very disturbing to me,” McCarty said, because the fire indicates significant permafrost degradation “sooner than [scientists] thought it would happen.” 

Researchers project significant permafrost loss in Greenland by the end of the century. Not 2017, she said.

https://eos.org/articles/greenland-fires-ignite-climate-change-fears

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"In order to control climate change, a range of radical policies will have to be adopted by the world’s authorities – towns, cities, states, national governments and their agencies, and international organisations.”

Paul Fisher, University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership
http://www.ethicalcorp.com/how-g20-can-supercharge-green-finance

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