I remember reading about a scientist who had been looking at ice cores and he thought they showed that a climate could flip in as little as a year.
Can't find the reference now, but Dr. Jeffrey M. Masters, Chief Meteorologist, The Weather Underground says the following:
"In the debate on climate change, we are used to hearing about climate changes on the scale of hundreds or even thousands of years. But since the early 1990s, a radical shift in the scientific understanding of Earth's climate history has occurred. We now know that that major regional and global climate shifts as recently as 8200 years ago have occurred in just a few decades or even a single year. If an abrupt climate change of similar magnitude happened today, it would have severe consequences for humans and natural ecosystems. Although scientists consider an abrupt climate change unlikely in the next 100 years, they concede that their understanding of the phenomena is so incomplete that such a change could be triggered at any time by natural processes or by human-caused global warming."
Blacknad.
