The Internet is truly a most wondrous thing

Via Statcounter, I re-traced a Google search for the phrase in six months times, and was pleased to note that one of my posts was number five out of 279,000,000. The number one result was an article in The Times headed Climate change catastrophe took just months, which I couldn't resist reading. Assuming the reported findings to be correct, or at least sincerely held, they do put the whole thing into perspective:

Six months is all it took to flip Europe’s climate from warm and sunny into the last ice age, researchers have found...

Other research has shown that rapid climate flips are normal. In its 4.5-billion-year history, the earth has experienced at least four main ice ages, of which the last, the Quaternary, is still continuing. Within each ice age, however, there are periods when ice advances or retreats, and in the past 60,000 years alone the earth is thought to have warmed or cooled by up to 7C at least 20 times. The current interglacial period has lasted about 10,000 years.

My thesis being, before we believe anybody's predictions about what the weather will be like in the future, we should expect them to be able to explain these sudden swings in the past. And before they can explain the past, we need to know what actually happened, to which said research has hopefully contributed.