Slicing into and studying ancient, Greenlandic ice, an international science team has now dissected the year-by-year anatomy of abrupt climate change events — the kind where typical Minnesotan weather can become Texan in merely four to five years.
“We, in modern society, have never seen abrupt climate change,” says James White, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and one of the team members. “We would be dumbstruck if we went through it. We would be like, ‘Damn that was climate change’.”
According to ice core evidence, abrupt changes did occur thousands of years ago. Weather patterns changed in one to three years, and the amount of dust in the atmosphere decreased five-fold in less than four decades. That means, within 30 years, the climate change was complete, reports a new study published in ScienceXpress, the online supplement to the June 19 Science.