Surprising admissions from the BBC: Wild and sharp climatic oscillations happen

BBC News - Climate and humans: the long view

The 40-odd thousand years leading up to the last Ice Age included countless wild and sharp climatic oscillations that would have provided the most sensational of world headlines had our Neanderthal cousins had satellite television, mobile phones or internet.

The regularity of drastic climate change would soon have offered little by way of breaking news.

So, in terms of the well-being of our planet, little of what is coming will scare it. It has seen extreme global warming, as when tropical forests covered the poles, and extreme deep freezes, as when icebergs reached the latitude of Lisbon, Portugal - with strays drifting into the Mediterranean.
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The Neanderthals, who had been so successful in Europe for much longer than we have been around, vanished because of too much global cooling. [Via Steven Goddard]