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The time span of the past few million years has been punctuated by many rapid climate transitions, most of them on timescales of centuries to decades. The most detailed information is available for the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene stepwise change around 11 500 years ago, which seems to have occurred over a few decades. The speed of this change is probably representative of similar but less well studied climate transitions during the last few hundred thousand years. These include sudden cold events (Heinrich events/stadials), warm events (interstadials) and the beginning and ending of long warm phases, such as the Eemian interglacial. Detailed analysis of terrestrial and marine records of climate change will, however, be necessary before we can say confidently on what timescale these events occurred; they almost certainly did not take longer than a few centuries.

Various mechanisms, involving changes in …